A Life Undivided: On Agamben's Use of Heidegger and Benjamin
Jonathan Short
A Dissertation Submitted To The Faculty Of Graduate Studies
In Partial Fulfillment Of The Requirements
For The Degree Of
Doctor Of Philosophy
Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought
York University,
Toronto, Ontario
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Although the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's political writing has drawn increasing critical attention in North America over the last several years (and in particular since the beginning of the so-called War on Terror), such coverage tends to look at only a few works in isolation. This dissertation is one of the first full-length studies seeking to correct this deficit in the scholarly literature by providing a synthetic exposition and analysis of Agamben's growing body of work. Not only does this study address the relative lack of attention paid to Agamben's early work on language and aesthetics, it also advances an original assessment of the relative influence on Agamben's work as a whole by two key figures, namely, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. In proceeding in this way, the dissertation has the major objective of establishing that Agamben's more recent and explicitly political work does not constitute a shift or break with his earlier writing, but is an extension and elaboration of it. This demonstration is designed to shield Agamben from the influential charge made both by liberals, and from the political left, that his work relies too heavily on the political theory of Carl Schmitt to provide an alternative to a politics of decisionism. In turn, correcting for the lack of attention paid to the influence of Walter Benjamin on Agamben's work allows his apparently recent move toward the messianic dimension of politics to be fully appreciated, showing that such a "turn" was a key aspect of his work all along. In arguing for the centrality of Benjamin's influence on Agamben's thought, it becomes possible to show that his thought is not simply a continuation of Heidegger's late work, an assumption that generally informs Agamben's reception to date. Benjamin's idea of the dialectical image is shown to provide Agamben with the resources to move beyond a politics of decisionism by enacting a rescue of bare life from sovereign power. It is this emphasis on rescuing that brings to light Agamben's ethical gesture: an orientation to the political that seeks to recover a relation to life that was in fact "never written" in the history of Western culture. As much retrieval as invention, the Benjaminian ethical rescue of the victims of Western biopolitics cannot be clearly appreciated as long as Agamben's project is read on par with Heidegger's, and in turn, such a reading obscures the difference of Agamben's vision of politics from that of the sovereign decision as framed by Schmitt.
IV This Dissertation is dedicated to the Memory of Elizabeth May Short
(1932-2004)
v Acknowledgements
While it would be impossible to list everyone who has played a role in the genesis and execution of this project, a few people deserve specific mention. Special thanks to Asher Horowitz for his unstinting provision of feedback and encouragement, both in the long dissertation writing process and throughout the course of my doctoral study. Also deserving of thanks are Lorna Weir and Robert Albritton for generously devoting considerable time and energy to this project as committee members and readers. I would also like to recognize several fellow students whose friendship and intellectual companionship on this journey has proven inspirational. They are: Neil Braganza, Michael Palamarek, Chris Bradd, Sonya Scott, and Baolinh Dang.
vi Table Of Contents Abstract iv Introduction 1 1. Language and the Biopolitics of Life 32 1.1 Presupposing Tradition 35. 1.2 Enunciation: Voice and Shifters as Intention- to-Signify 43 1.3 Infancy and "Original" Dwelling 55 1.4 The Violence of Foundation 69 2. On the Threshold Between Heidegger and Benjamin 85 2.1 Later Heidegger, Dasein, and the Revealing-Concealing (of) Origin .89 2.2 Heidegger's Negativity of Origin Ill 2.3 Benjamin and the Historical Fulfillment of Tradition 124 3. Sovereign Exceptions in Agamben's Readings of Schmitt and Benjamin 153 3.1 Carl Schmitt's Sovereignty as the State of Exception 158 3.2 The Sacredness of Life, Bare Life and Zoe 175 3.3 The Gigantomachia over the Exception 182 4. The Camp as Dialectical Image of Biopolitcs 202 4.IBeyond the Sacred: Politics and its Prehistory in Homo Sacer 204 4.2 Biopolitics and the Modern Sovereign 215
5. Indivisible Life: Testimony and the Remnant 252
5.1 The Human and the Muselmann 258
5.2 The Human and the Inhuman 273
5.3 Testimony, Biopolitics, and the Potentiality of the Remnant 286
VII Contents - Continued
5.4 The Messianicity of the Remnant 304
5.5 The Decision on the Exception Revisited 314
Conclusion , 328
Bibliography 342
VIM Introduction
Setting the Stage I: Agamben's Reception in North America
This dissertation began with a vague sense of irritation about the reception of Giorgio
Agamben's work in North America. Happening on Homo Sacer by chance at a local bookstore sometime in 2002 while working on Frankfurt critical theory, I found
Agamben's work immensely stimulating. Despite the complexity of Agamben's work and the way it drew on a philosophical lexicon quite different than (say) Adorno's, I immediately saw parallels between the former and the latter (and to other members of the
Frankfurt School as well, most notably Herbert Marcuse). Reading beyond my initial encounter with Homo Sacer, I found in Agamben's work a promising attempt to address many of the issues that Frankfurt critical theory also grapples with, but from a different angle of vision, one more indebted to Heideggerian phenomenology and falling in line with more contemporary "post-structural" philosophical discourses, while appearing to overcome many of the latter's political deficiencies. This is because, despite his immersion in a style of theoretical discourse known for its daunting abstraction,
Agamben's work maintains a reference to historical circumstances and events of an overtly political kind and significance: the concentration camp in its relation to Nazism, the problem of refugees, the crisis of the European interstate system, the use of the state of exception or emergency powers as a paradigm of government. Such fields of investigation are directly relevant to contemporary times, and this has accounted in no small way for Agamben's meteoric rise in popularity within the North American
1 academy over the last several years. And yet, despite this veritable explosion of interest in the theoretical undertakings of Giorgio Agamben, the very fact of this interest threatens to make his work a victim of its own success. This is at least partly because
Agamben's reference to political phenomena has resulted, in my view, in a fairly glaring neglect of the complexity of his theoretical work on the part of his some of critics, and in particular to the way such work draws upon and relates two figures of key importance to understanding this thought, namely, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.
This last claim needs some elaboration. When one reviews Agamben's critical reception in North America over the last several years, a fairly typical division amongst those critical of his work can be discerned. As I suggested, because Agamben seeks to articulate a complex theoretical understanding of Western politics while at the same time treating actual political phenomena—rather than keeping to a purely conceptual analysis of the political—both theoretical and empirical aspects of his project open him to a one sided attack: thus there are critics who are dissatisfied with Agamben's treatment of political phenomena on what are essentially theoretical grounds, and then there are those who believe that Agamben's treatment of specific political phenomena within his broader theoretical project represents a betrayal of the empirical specificities of these phenomena.
It is my purpose in what follows to argue that the reception underwriting these two kinds of attack fail to grasp the way Agamben seeks to articulate his theoretical and historico- empirical concerns, and that understanding this articulation necessitates examining the way Heidegger and Benjamin are brought into dialogue across a range of his works.2
2 No doubt this way of posing the problem tempts the reader into assuming that there
are two discreet "aspects" to Agamben's project that must somehow be related as if each
existed separately from the other. One way of correcting this misleading impression is to clarify that the purpose of Agamben's drawing on both Heidegger and Benjamin in the way that he does is to articulate a new understanding of human life and language beyond the specifically metaphysical preoccupation with the biopolitical, an understanding that can only proceed through its indexation to a specific historical emergence or event. It is within this historical emergence that Agamben's messianic concerns take shape, and indeed they would not be possible without it.
The second strand of criticism cited above (those for whom Agamben's theory betrays his attention to empirical specificity) derives largely from an Anglo-American appropriation of the work of Michel Foucault as the "history of the present", an approach valorizing analysis of the discreetly empirical and eschewing "grand" theorizing. A key figure in this movement is represented by Nikolas Rose, who, while granting Agamben's treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camp and its relationship to
Nazism a certain degree of importance, attempts at the same time to situate Agamben's discussion of sovereignty as a relic of history, as a discourse about an institution and set of practices made fundamentally obsolete with the passage to "advanced liberal" societies.3 With this claim, Rose hopes to further his thesis that the kind of biopolitics practiced under the diabolical combination of sovereign power and governmentality one finds in Nazism is no longer relevant to investigating the discreet and discontinuous
3 practices of governing through freedom with which citizens of the more advanced parts of the world must now contend.
Similarly, an aversion to theorizing that strays too far from a tactical analysis of empirical situations is clearly the basis for Andrew Neal's recent claim that not only does
Foucault's work provide an important way to think through the exceptional events of the so-called War on Terror, but that Agamben's own attempts to do so are "caricatured extremes" precisely because of his reliance on figures such as Heidegger, Benjamin and
Schmitt, who are incorrigibly dedicated to sweeping theoretical gestures.4 Agamben would no doubt agree with Neal that Foucault's work provides a key to understanding at least an aspect of the exceptional situation, its negation of the category of the citizen with rights guaranteed under law and the latter's conversion into a biopolitical entity to be managed. Yet to charge Agamben with totalizing theory, as though this leads inevitably to a disregard of empirical phenomena, evades the issue of what Agamben's account of
Western biopolitics seeks to establish, and thus forecloses the question of the adequacy of the treatment of these empirical phenomena relative to the frame that makes them visible.
But these criticisms of Agamben on the part of Rose and Neal are somewhat misleading insofar as there subsists behind them a theoretical commitment rather than a purely empirical gaze. The central theoretical commitment of the "history of the present" approach is that sovereign power is no more, that it has been disassembled or colonized by the teeming practices and techniques of government. From this perspective
Agamben's discussion of sovereignty in the present is portrayed as not paying proper
4 attention to the discreet historical ruptures that have allegedly led away from the large- scale exercise of sovereign power and toward the exercise of micro-tactics of power used to govern us through what is thought to be an irreducible freedom.
The weakness of the approach taken by both Rose and Neal, in endorsing an
"empirical Foucault" centred on the discontinuous practices of government, is that they follow the latter somewhat blindly in taking sovereign power to be nothing but a mode of rule located in the ancient right to kill. As Lora Weir and Brian Singer have recently pointed out, Foucault's concept of sovereignty neglects the idea that sovereign power not only manifests as a specific mode of rule, but is first of all a way of articulating the domain of the political as such.5 In theorizing sovereignty only as an historically delimited mode of rule that is today subsumed by governmental practices, Weir and
Singer go on to argue, the Foucaldian approach typical of the "history of the present" avoids theorizing sovereignty as a specific political reality, and to this extent labours under an impoverished conception of the political.
If in addressing the criticisms of Agamben made by a Foucauldian approach to politics it would be sufficient to show that the empirical is dealt with adequately relative to the theoretical perspective through which it becomes important, in other words
Agamben's perspective on the political, any such demonstration would be insufficient for those whose objections are primarily theoretical in nature. It is to critics having specifically theoretical objections to Agamben's work that I wish to turn my attention, and it is to them that most of the work in this dissertation is directed. But again it pays to
5 specify which set of objections I am most concerned with out of what has become a relatively large field of secondary appropriations of Agamben's oeuvre. Andrew Norris' essay "The Exemplary Exception" has become something of a "classic" in the critical reception of Agamben's work on politics, at least in the North American setting.7 In this paper Norris claims that Agamben's utilization of Carl Schmitt's theory of the exception to understand the workings of sovereign power embroils Agamben in a self-referential paradox of disastrous proportions, making any of his pretentions to articulate a vision of politics beyond sovereign power on Agamben's part absolutely hopeless. According to
Norris, what might have made Agamben's work initially appealing in its "return to the question of practice outside of philosophical reflection that makes Agamben's work appear as a revitalization of the Heideggerian tradition", gets utterly vitiated by the
"acceptance of Schmitt's decisionism", an acceptance that "makes it impossible for his
[Agamben's] analysis to claim any general validity".8 This argument of Norris' is widely cited and seems to have been accepted without critical examination, securing at least in some circles Agamben's reputation as a thinker whose turn to politics goes nowhere.9
While I will have occasion in what follows to contest the conclusions Norris draws, if not his entire reading of the place of the state of exception in Agamben's work, the influential supposition that Agamben's politics is drawn into contradiction and impasse because of the latter's reliance on Schmitt suggests to me a larger problem with what appears to be an increasingly common reading of Agamben. The problem, as I indicated above, lies in the general failure of this literature to appreciate the complex interplay in
6 Agamben's thinking between Heidegger's epochal philosophizing and Benjamin's redemptive, messianic historicity, an interplay that ineluctably stamps Agamben's engagement with Schmitt's conception of sovereignty. One of my main purposes here is to show that once this interplay is taken into account, it is no longer possible to take
Agamben's version of Schmittian sovereignty as a simple repetition of Schmitt's position; instead, Agamben will insist on a subtle and persistent displacement of the terms of the Schmittian model of sovereign power as decision. Hence, the second of my purposes in writing this dissertation is not simply to single out Norris's reading of
Agamben as inadequate, but to raise the bar of wider Agamben scholarship by showing the importance of the thought of Heidegger and Benjamin to Agamben's entire project, one exceeding his explicitly political writings yet remaining integrally connected with them. To accomplish this task it will be necessary to delve into two fields of crucial importance to Agamben, namely, those of language and life. It will be my contention throughout this work that Agamben's thought revolves around re-conceiving the relationship between the living and the speaking being in light of the insights provided by the (explicitly) anti-metaphysical turn of later Heidegger and the equally anti- metaphysical (yet more historically specific) conception of the messianic/redemptive provided by Benjamin. But this undertaking will necessitate disturbing another of the assumptions that seem to inform Agamben's reception in much of the secondary literature, namely, that Agamben's pre-political writings on language and aesthetics are somehow separable from his explicit work on politics and sovereignty.10 On the
7 contrary, as I demonstrate in what follows, Agamben's political writing, reaching its fullest expression in the book Remnants of Auschwitz, brings all of his work's thematic strands together—spanning his career thus far—while providing the starting-point for his more recent investigation of the relationship between the human and the animal in The
Open.n Accordingly, the structure of this work will be something of a narrative designed to show both continuity between earlier and later work, and, if not development in any teleological or systematic sense, at least theoretical "accumulation" or extension.
Needless to say, I hope to show that investigating the cumulative character of Agamben's writing will make his project as a whole more plausible.
It is perhaps equally worthwhile stating at the outset what this dissertation is not concerned with doing. Nothing I have said above can ignore that Agamben is prone to overstatement and overgeneralization, an apparent "occupational hazard" of the kind of philosophical tradition of which he is part. While I will have occasion to point out certain of these overstatements, I cannot critically engage with all of them; this does not mean they are not worth engaging, but simply that I cannot do so here if I am to succeed in my goal of presenting a synthetic reading of Agamben's work. Similarly, given that
Agamben draws on the work of a number of literary and philosophical figures of importance in their own right, the question inevitably arises as to the validity or fairness of Agamben's appropriation of their work. Again, while questions as to the felicity (or lack thereof) of Agamben's readings would be appropriate and worthwhile objects of study, I feel that, except where crucial for my own exposition of Agamben's thought, this
8 task must be left to others. As will become apparent in what immediately follows,
Agamben draws on work that is in some circles itself highly contentious. While I can point out that the claims raised (e.g. by Heidegger) might prove implausible from various points of view, it will again be impossible to delve into the nature of these issues in any detail if the majority of Agamben's work is to be exposited here.
Setting the Stage II: Situating Agamben's Work within Contemporary Theory
To my mind, the core idea that animates Agamben's thinking as whole is that the notion of "humanity" is a project or prospective task to be undertaken rather than a given.
Humanity is not a kind of object innocently existing in the world but a self-activity of a particular sort. What Agamben means more narrowly is that the very notion of what properly pertains to humanity can only be articulated by opposing itself to what it is not.
Such opposition is revealed in such standard categorical distinctions as culture versus nature and (especially) human versus animal. Yet to be operative, these distinctions must be realized within the human being and its cultural forms prior to being projected outwards onto extra-human nature and life. Try as they might, humans cannot cover over the fact that they are also natural and animal, and that these latter are ineluctable features of humanity.
This does not mean, however, that human culture—now understood as a project of bringing the human into existence—cannot attempt to ground itself by excluding a part of its life (the part or parts that get defined as "mere nature"), as what is "not" human. This is what Agamben believes has typified Western culture as a social, political, and
9 ultimately anthropological project from its earliest beginnings: the project of making the human being recognizable to itself. As this might imply, such a project must involve a certain amount of violence, both on a personal and collective or social level. The violence of rejecting a part of oneself as "not" human parallels the forcible exclusion and even the violent suppression of those who are deemed not fit to number among the community of human beings. Yet since there can be no once-and-for-all drawing of the boundary between human and non-human, these boundaries must be continually redrawn.
For Agamben, sovereignty is the function that does this drawing, fixing, and policing of such boundaries, of deciding, in short, who or what qualifies as human and who or what does not. One can well imagine that a culture or society predicated on self-establishment through division and exclusion would be subject to recurrent and even escalating crises.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Agamben situates the great humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century—and in particular the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis—on the terrain of what he describes as the biopolitical attempt to "realize" the human through the destruction of what is considered to be inhuman. While critics, particularly liberal critics, might find in this invocation of the Nazis an implausible way of characterizing Western notions of humanity, Agamben can always respond that it is precisely such extremes that liberals have difficulty explaining or dealing with. The cyclical or even perpetual nature of such human crises, in other words, seem to belie liberal attempts to "prevent" their repetition through strengthening the traditional bulwarks of human rights and liberal-democratic institutions. From Agamben's
10 perspective, one he would share with those on the left of the political spectrum, liberal
politics has shown itself to be incapable of preventing the worst from recurring, and this
is not least because liberals tend not to cast the net widely enough in their diagnosis of
social and political ills.
In a fairly obvious sense, Agamben's comprehensive or epochal diagnosis of
Western culture as animated by a structure of violence is hardly unique. In particular,
Agamben's diagnosis is deeply indebted to Heidegger's description of Western
civilization as promoting a version of what Heidegger terms a metaphysical notion of
subjectivity that is dedicated to mastering or dominating all other living beings, a
subjectivity that seeks (and partly succeeds) at putting the entire world at its disposal.
One could easily recognize in such claims key aspects of contemporary Eurocentric and
Anglo-American-dominated global bourgeois liberal civilization that presently regards
itself as the arbiter of "democratic" values. Agamben's general acceptance of these
Heideggerian claims about the nature of the present loosely parallels those of other members of the so-called post-structural generation in France such as Derrida, Nancy, or even Foucault.
Given that a critique of the idea of metaphysical subjectivity underpins Agamben's work, and that this notion is derived from Heidegger, it might be useful to engage in a more detailed discussion of the "metaphysical attitude" that for Heidegger characterizes
Western culture.13 As already noted, Agamben's thought continues and deepens
Heidegger's sense that although contemporary versions of Western culture—the ones we
11 would most strongly associate with the imbrication of globalization, techno-science and capitalism—have apparently abandoned overly metaphysical attitudes toward being and existence in favour of radically secular disenchantment, such abandonment is only apparent. Remaining deeply implicated in the basic structure of metaphysical thinking, contemporary Western culture and societies have only rejected metaphysics as traditionally conceived. According to Heidegger (and Agamben) the nihilism of contemporary culture is evidence of this fact: for both, nihilism is only possible to the extent that what is (the totality of entities or beings), continues to be thought metaphysically, from out of the historical trajectory of Western metaphysical thinking.
Only if being ceases to be conceived metaphysically can the nihilism of contemporary culture—and thus from Agamben's perspective its sacrificial violence—be overcome, or at least abated. In other words, Agamben follows in the wake of Heidegger's assertion in the essay "Overcoming Metaphysics" that in rejecting traditional metaphysics Western culture has simply entered its terminal phase, its "ending", but where "The ending lasts longer than the previous history of metaphysics".14 This does not mean, of course, that necessarily Agamben accepts Heidegger's specific verdicts on how such "overcoming" is to be achieved.
For Heidegger, and arguably for Agamben as well, contemporary nihilism finds a crucial point of departure in the previous thought of Nietzsche. To Heidegger and many of the thinkers who follow in his wake, the metaphysics Nietzsche attempts to reject is marked by a traditional way of thinking and relating to being, or "what is", that "thinks
12 beings as a whole according to their priority over Being". In traditional metaphysics
"Being is that which is thought from beings as their most universal definition and to
beings as their ground and cause".16 As Heidegger points out, however abstract and removed from actual beings traditional metaphysics might appear, it is in the end all
about beings, as "that which lays claim to an explanation", taking "precedence here as the
standard, the goal, and the actualization of Being".17 Metaphysics, even when it seems to
concern itself with the other-worldly or purely ideal and abstract entities such as the
Platonic Forms, remains a form of objedification because it takes beings or entities as the
final objects of its explanation.
Now, according to Heidegger, the first of Nietzsche's seminal contributions to philosophy was his explicit diagnosis of the impossibility for modern culture to take
seriously the idea that the highest principle for beings could in any sense resemble the entities of which it was the principle, and further, that such principles could have any kind of existence outside or beyond the world of beings. In a sense one can think this
aspect of Nietzsche's contribution as a repatriation of metaphysics back to the only world to which it could belong, the world of actual (physically existent) entities. Thus, the
Christian God dies not just because people become modern and secular, but because the very idea that the ultimate value of an actual existence could be located in a being that
somehow takes its being elsewhere than in the material world becomes an absurdity. But
as Heidegger hastens to point out in the essay "The Word of Nietzsche: "God is Dead""
(a distillation of his monumental lecture-series on Nietzsche's thought), Nietzsche
13 realized—this is for Heidegger Nietzsche's second key contribution—that the death of the traditional metaphysical values of the higher world does not do away with those values as such. Instead, as Heidegger points out, Nietzsche recognized clearly that the cultural phenomenon of "European nihilism" consists not just in the collapse of an extra- worldly source of value or meaning, but that as a defence against the latter's decline contemporary culture would "replace the former [Platonic-Christian] values with others", while keeping those same values "in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory".18 Although no longer beyond the world, the suprasensory values that now condition it are just as ideally metaphysical as before, since their goal is the regulation of beings by means of a supreme or highest principle. The defence against nihilism understood as the decline of the suprasensory is an incomplete nihilism since it results in the mere inversion—and is thus relying on the terms of—what it sought to escape. For Nietzsche incomplete nihilism as a mere inversion of the suprasensory will not do, since it is a question of fashioning a
"completed nihilism" that does away with the place of the supersensory form of valuing altogether.19 For Nietzsche, overcoming nihilism must venture even further into nihilism by bringing the latter's latent significance fully into presence. As Heidegger notes, for
Nietzsche what is needed is a "completed nihilism" that "must in addition do away even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently".
14 Staying with Heidegger's reading, valuing differently in Nietzsche's terms involves fully appreciating that there can be no value that is not attributable to a centre of valuing, a perspective or a will that values. The suprasensory, in both its pre-modern and modern guises, is alienated from the true source of value: the human will. Alienation from the source of value, whatever its type, results in nihilism as an inability to will. For
Nietzsche nihilism properly understood is nothing but an inability on the part of the will to will itself, and thus wills its own stagnation or results in a will to nothingness. For
Nietzsche the decline of Platonic metaphysics results in a sickness of the will and a lack of cultural vitality, because suddenly bereft of the misrecognized sources of value in the otherworldly or suprasensory, the will lacks the capacity (or the audacity) to will itself.
As long as nihilism remains imperfect the will cannot posit new values because it does not fully recognize itself as the source of value. Nihilism in Nietzsche's sense can only be overcome through the will's explicit recognition and embracing of itself as the true and only source of value. Such embracing of the will, self-willing or will-to-will, is deliberately destructive of all external notions of value, and thus appears to those seeking to keep in place these external notions as absolutely without value—nihilism as it is conventionally or popularly understood as the rejection of values transcending the individual. With the notion of completed nihilism Nietzsche seeks to push nihilism to its extreme point where it can only turn into its opposite: the self-conscious willing of new values beyond the decadent Platonic-Christian forms of non- or alienated valuing.
15 As is well-known, Heidegger dissents from Nietzsche's claim to have realized a genuine revaluation of values and thus to have overcome Platonic metaphysics.
According to Heidegger's analysis Nietzsche's form of revaluing does not overcome metaphysics, but brings metaphysics to its ultimate realization or end without truly getting beyond it. This is because, if value-positing is the actuality of the will-to-power or the will-to-will, such self-willing can only be the evaluating perspective of a being
from whose perspective the meaning (or value) of being as such is decided.21 When human self-willing becomes the exclusive and self-conscious principle on which the value or meaning of beings is decided, then the will itself becomes the new and final metaphysical principle. In the completed phase of metaphysics, self-conscious willing puts at its disposal the entire range of beings for the purposes of unrestricted mastery: not just or primarily as objects of knowledge, but more importantly as objects of control and manipulation. According to Heidegger's critique of modern technology in the "Essay
Concerning Technology" , with the culmination of metaphysics, all beings, including human beings, become "standing reserve", a circumstance of thoroughgoing obj edification in which "Everything everywhere is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering".22 The being of beings, that is, they way beings appear or are revealed, is reduced to a value, reduced, that is, to what proves "valuable" according to the shifting evaluative perspectives of the will-to-power. If previous forms of metaphysics acknowledged the being of beings in a distorted manner, they at least grasped that this
16 way of understanding beings was a revelation or opening on beings of a certain kind.
With the culmination of metaphysics, however, being retreats into the background and all but disappears in favour of the self-evidence of being-a-value.
For Heidegger (and Agamben), the extent of this self-evidence for those living in late modern times has advanced to the point where there is no longer anything particularly remarkable about it. In a certain way, almost all of us have become Nietzscheans, if perhaps unwittingly. The place of suprasensory values has long since been regarded as an illusion. But the illusion of an externally transcendent form of value is no longer needed from the moment human power is sufficient to expose transcendent values as imperfect expressions of what they actually are: will-to-power as self-willing. Even the contemporary resurgence of religious feeling has obviously something of desperation or fanaticism about it, as though a religious life can once more be made to occupy a profound place in human existence through sheer (often political) will (and hence such feeling becomes symptomatic of what it seeks to overcome). And yet this condition precisely illustrates Heidegger's point. For humans living in late modernity there is and perhaps can be nothing beyond the will to will. What was once a scandalous Nietzschean postulate has become the stuff of our daily lives. From Heidegger's perspective, the situation where everyone recognizes that there is nothing to beings outside their subjective or positional evaluation represents the completion, but not the overcoming, of metaphysics. To the extent that the imposition of value remains in force, eventually pushing to the sidelines all other possible ways of relating to beings, metaphysics realizes
17 itself as the nihilism it always portended. But the era of completed metaphysics,
according to Heidegger, does not recognize that in the "nihil" that pertains to nihilism
there is concealed the being of beings, the way beings appear as such, but in a way that
cannot be thought by metaphysics because for the latter everything is conceived in terms
of the presence of beings, so that for it what is not a being or a subjective valuing of
being simply and straightforwardly is not.23
Even though Agamben tends to accept much of this account of metaphysics, unlike
Heidegger, Agamben's focus is more specifically fixed on the relationship between
language and the enactment of the political dimension of human existence in the form of
sovereignty. While Heidegger certainly makes language a central feature of his later
work, he does so in a way that for Agamben remains tacitly implicated in metaphysics.
Although this is not the place for a detailed consideration of Heidegger's views on
language, it is enough here to note that in his thought human language is consistently
separated from the question of life and of the living being.24 For Agamben this
Heideggerian division between human language and the fact of living is metaphysical precisely because it repeats the ancient division enacted in Western culture between
living as a property of beings and the properly linguistic life of the human being.
Heidegger's thought keeps intact the project of separating the human from what is not- human in the form of what is merely alive. Whereas for Agamben "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",
18 Heidegger insists in the "Letter on Humanism" that "Metaphysics thinks of man on the
basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas", where the latter
consists in "the simple essential fact that man...is claimed by Being" where the merely
living being is not. Despite the radical sense of the ontological difference in
Heidegger's work, here it is clear that being is understood as the "spiritual" (in the sense
of Geistlich) side of a division between life as such and human life that is troubled but not displaced, that is ultimately reinforced. To the extent that the division is reinforced by Heidegger, Agamben can claim that Heidegger finds himself in the position in which he wanted to place Nietzsche, as still resident in the Western metaphysical edifice.
Agamben, by contrast, seeks to show that to actually displace the division neither of its terms can be taken as given since each of them presupposes their opposite and their exclusion from one another. To uproot the division one must grasp it at a point prior to its articulation, where the division is temporarily suspended in the midst of being enacted.
To give us an actual instance of this, Agamben turns to the origin of the political in the
sovereign ban and to the thought of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin as theorists of the origin of the political in the form of law or nomos.
Excavating the original form of the political as the sovereignty of law and fate requires that metaphysics be conceived as fundamentally political. As Agamben points
out, "Politics... appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar
as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos
19 is realized. In the "politicization" of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence—
the humanity of living man is decided."27
As we will see, thinking metaphysics as politics involves thinking metaphysics as a
kind of fate, a kind of immemorial commencement that has already transpired and cannot
even be thought without the danger of simply recommencing or continuing, of repeating the origin. The origin cannot be thought either in the mode of a once-and-for-all
occurrence nor as what can be simply stepped out of. As Heidegger points out,
"Metaphysics cannot be abolished like an opinion. One can by no means leave it behind as a doctrine no longer believed and represented", not least because one is already living
it. This is especially true to the extent that metaphysics is neither an opinion nor a
doctrine but a set of practices that are initiated and furthered by sovereign, and other
forms of political, violence. To this extent the "pure violence" of sovereignty is the
(political) power to separate the living being from the speaking (human) being; sovereign violence is "the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical
9Q
stakes". But if what might best be described as metaphysical sovereignty is a form of
fatality that no amount of wishing away can undo, it will not be possible to opt for a traditional strategy of transcendence, especially to the extent that positing transcendence beyond beings is one of the key features of metaphysics. Thus as Agamben suggests in his book The Coming Community "the good must be defined as a self-grasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to itself. Getting free of the fatality of metaphysical sovereignty will involve exceeding both of the metaphysical strategies 20 which articulate being as either immanent or transcendent: such freeing movement must take place from the place of immanence while breaking with or moving beyond immanence in a moment of excess that cannot be recaptured in its terms. As I will argue in the third chapter of the dissertation, this is exactly why Agamben turns to both Schmitt and to Benjamin: to Schmitt as the premier explicator of just what is involved in the incessant return to the division between the norm and what jeopardizes it, so that the order of nomic regulation might continually be reborn in and through the excess of (bare) life constituted by it; and to Benjamin as the thinker of law and the repetition of mythical violence in its catastrophic insurgence anterior to historical memory. Yet, as the passage quoted above suggests, the possibility of self-grasping is a Benjaminian gesture, one that opens the prospect of an internal break with metaphysical sovereignty through an actual historical experience in which the repetition of fate is suspended in a moment of recognition, disrupting the temporality of fatal or mythical violence. Indeed, as Benjamin writes, the deliverance from fatality can take place where "the past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again".
Such deliverance, or as Benjamin prefers to call it, "weak messianic power", must appear in a specific, highly charged historical moment, allowing what could not be read at the origin to be deciphered, to "recognize itself as intended in that image" of the past that flashes up.32 The messianic power in question here is weak (Benjamin italicizes the word) precisely because it cannot be grasped in the sense of self-willing proposed by
Nietzsche or through the grasping "self-assertion" proposed by Heidegger during the
21 years of his participation in the National Socialist regime. The weak power thus
remains beyond the purview of metaphysical sovereignty and subjectivity even while
being captured by it and being made subject to it. As we shall see later on, this is entirely
the point of Agamben's discussion of the relationship between Schmitt and Benjamin— that the latter provides the resources to overcome the former.34
The turn to Benjamin on Agamben's part is toward a discreet moment of sovereign power's legibility as fate: in the abject life of the Muselmann, the prisoner of the
concentration camp who has been so dehumanized that any trace of properly human
subjectivity has been erased or submerged. As we will see, the purpose of Agamben's reading of the Muselmann is neither gratuitous, nor is it yet another sovereign decision, but is rather precisely the demonstration that even in the most abject form of life qua life, there remains a weak power, a passive potential that outstrips both subjectivity and the
sovereign form of power that attempts to apportion its limits and decide upon it. Such weak power is messianic precisely to the extent it is what remains after or beyond the destruction of the whole of which it is and is not a part. The remnant is thus a figure of that non-metaphysical difference that Heidegger and Agamben claim we must understand if the repetitive fatality of metaphysics is ever to be escaped. Agamben's political project is thus to show that what metaphysics is constitutively blind to, but what is
simultaneously its condition of possibility, is experience of a life that is simply its being alive with "a// of its predicates, its being such as it is"; in other words a life that is nothing less than a "form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is
22 only its own zoe". Although such an experience of life would refer to an uncharted zone beyond metaphysics, it is also so immediately obvious that it (almost) cannot but be overlooked. The bare or immediate experience of life in its pre-categorical obviousness
or radical openness, would portend a messianic fulfillment in whose terms life would be rescued from metaphysical sovereignty, and thereby abandoned to its own proper
improperness, its whatever-being or to its potentialities of being-such before and beyond any form of division.36 But for this to be possible what is required is a confrontation with sovereign power—albeit an indirect one in keeping with the weak power at issue here— wherein the latter, at the limits of its ability to divide life and maintain it in its politicized bareness, is shown definitively to have failed. This transpires in Agamben's demonstration that the Muselmann's utterly abject life also consists of something other, of a certain singular plurality that no decision to divide it can touch. It is this dimension of life which preserves itself as undivided in its very division, and which remains in such a way that it gives rise to testimony on its behalf on the part of those subjects who experience or are witness to this condition, who survive the ultimate power of the sovereign ban to politicize and divide life.
For something like witnessing to life beyond metaphysical sovereignty to be thinkable, Agamben must show that language beyond metaphysics, prior to the divisions and separations enacted in it, is possible. Once again, while Agamben draws on
Heidegger's conception of poetic speech, he finds less inspiration here than in
Benjamin's early "theological" conception of language as pure medium or pure means.
23 As pure medium language first of all gives itself as pure communicability in speech before any "matter" or content it might transmit. In its pure mediality, language exists as pure undivided potential, which like life itself, enacts a gesture having no possible content separable from its enactment. The pure mediality of language is thus exactly parallel to life as the pure mediality prior to subjectivity, giving the latter's existence through itself. In both life and language, considered as mediality, there is pure relation without extraneous content, a relation that brings about the self that comprises self- relation. Because there is something like language as pure mediality it is possible to witness the mediality of life outside the already constituted reality of the speaking subject and on the other side of all determinate content, without departing from the specificity or singularity of the instant. In witnessing, in which all speech as the simple utterance of the voice partakes, life bears witness to itself through the formation of a subject of testimony.
In this manner, Agamben will argue, it will be possible for metaphysical sovereignty to be overcome and even redeemed by a language of testimony that returns or refers back to itself the initial gesture of linguistic life, only whose after-effect is the violent power over life in the form of division.
A Brief Outline of the Chapters
Chapter 1: Language and Biopolitics
This initial chapter approaches the issue of biopolitics that will form Agamben's explicit concern obliquely from the perspective of Agamben's earlier "pre-political" work. It will argue that for Agamben the Western tradition has always enacted a division of the human
24 and the living from within the Western tradition's relation to language. The issue of
human language is central to Agamben's later discussion of biopolitics because, as we
have seen above, it is in language that human beings enact the division between human
and non-human in order to distinguish between the properly human from life as separate
from other living beings. Here I will show that Agamben's treatment of language in relationship to the tradition's notion of a negative or unspeakable ground both institutes the human linguistic community as presupposed (because unsayable or on negative
ground), and founds human language as an always already enacted division between an excluded natural or animal voice and human speech. Behind such exclusion or removal
of the animal voice from human language is the metaphysical project of assimilating the
latter to an already-constituted present of subjective intentionality, a willing to mean in
speech. But to enable an investigation beyond such intentionality, Agamben will explicate an idea of "infancy" which, far from presupposing the subject, presents a figure of human life in the absence of language, and thus in the absence of subjective intentionality; the taking place of speech, and hence subjectivity, is revealed to take place in the passive potentiality lying between infancy and speech. Infancy offers a glimpse of the threshold of life as pure medium, of pure zoe prior to the separation of animal voice from human speech. The human voice (considered as zoe) will simultaneously be and not be the natural voice of humanity. The chapter will close with a discussion of
Agamben's conception of a sacrificial notion of the historical foundation of human community as the exclusion of natural voice from human speech and as the primordial
25 violence associated with conceptions of the sacred. Such a notion of sacrificial violence will prefigure Agamben's shift (in Homo Sacer) from the sacred to the political as the violent foundation of human community.
Chapter 2: Thresholds Between Heidegger and Benjamin
The investigation of Agamben's work on language picks up with an analysis of the way it draws upon and positions itself in an intimate tension between the work of both
Heidegger and Benjamin. For purposes of understanding what is at stake in Agamben's discussion of the state of exception and sovereignty, it is important to grasp the relative emphasis given to the thought of Heidegger and Benjamin. While an analysis of human being as potentiality is crucial to understanding Agamben's project as a whole, the themes of redemption that become more insistent as his work develops owe a great deal to Benjamin. This chapter explores that link through a critical comparison of the notions of origin in both Heidegger and Benjamin as Agamben takes them up, arguing that
Heidegger is of limited use to Agamben because he maintains being as ultimately abyssal or negative in a way that is consistent with the tradition he seeks to rework. By contrast,
Agamben turns to Benjamin, who provides an analysis of language—and by extension of life—as pure mediality prior to categorization.
Chapter 3: Sovereign Exceptions: Agamben's Reading of Schmitt and Benjamin
This chapter starts with Agamben's argument that Western politics is always already biopolitics because it is centrally concerned with enacting a division between the properly human and the inhuman, a quite literal ex-communication of the in-human in the form of
26 bare life. Establishing this thesis will take us to an extended examination of the mechanism by which such separation is enacted or made operational by sovereign power: the state of exception. This chapter will conclude by trying to understand the state of exception as what Agamben calls the "thing" of politics; in the process it will be important to uncover both Agamben's Benjaminian inspiration, as found in the "Critique of Violence" essay and the rather overt critique of Schmitt that it represents. The extent of Benjamin's critique of Schmitt will be taken up through a reading of Agamben's discussion of their relationship in his book State of Exception. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the notion of a form of power outside of law derived from Benjamin, through which Agamben seeks to bypass Schmitt's notion of sovereignty as decision.
Chapter 4: Modernity and the Camp
This chapter makes the case that Agamben's writing on politics takes the form of a dialectical image juxtaposing ancient and modern forms of sovereignty in order to reveal the sovereign exception as a fatality we must escape. The chapter discusses the socio- historical situation which allows Agamben to present the concentration camp as the
"biopolitical nomos of the modern", situating it in its continuity and difference with the ancient Roman city as the first sovereign paradigm. Distinguishing between the ancient and modern forms of sovereignty depend upon an historical process in which the traditional forms for the regulation of sovereign power disappear and the norm and exception begin to become indistinguishable, becoming a threshold or limit situation.
The chapter concludes with an exposition of how the space of the concentration camp is
27 intended by Agamben as an "Idea" of sovereign power in a precisely Benjaminian sense,
that is, as a constellation of the idea of sovereignty into past and present in which it might
be overcome or deposed.
Chapter 5: The Witness and Indivisible Life
This chapter brings together the previous themes of language, life, and the sovereign
exception, in order to understand the ethics Agamben presents in his books Remnants of
Auschwitz and The Time that Remains. I will argue that Remnants is a highly significant
work in Agamben's thought because it does two things: a) it presents a description of an
actual situation where his conceptual apparatus is brought to bear on the historical instant,
and b) it serves as a threshold in his writing after which the Benjaminian theme of
redemption becomes increasingly important. In this connection I will discuss the
Benjaminian thematic and political significance of the notion of testimony, showing the
significance of this theme to the conception of an opening to life beyond sovereign power
as it appears in earlier work such as the Coming Community; crucial here will be an
understanding of Agamben's notion of form-of-life as a life inseparable from its gestures
or potential modes of living. This account of the ethics of testimony will help to show
the implausibility of Norris' claim that because of the self-referential structure of
sovereign power no account can be given of it that is not merely its repetition.
28 Notes:
1 Andrew Norris also points this out in the introduction to his edited volume Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Agamben 's Homo Sacer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), 2005: 17: "it is recent empirical events that provide the pathos and urgency to Agamben's discussion. Agamben does not set out only to provide us with an insightful way to read the canon, though he does succeed in that. He sets out to address the catastrophe of our time". 2 Although this is in no way meant to suggest that Heidegger "represents" the theoretical and Benjamin the historical or empirical side of the discussion. Agamben draws on both dimensions (theory and history) as they appear in Heidegger and Benjamin, even though the turn to Benjamin compensates to some extent for a lack of engagement with actual political events on the part of Heidegger. 3 Nikolas Rose, "The Politics of Life Itself, Theory, Culture & Society Vol 18 (6) (London: Sage Publications), 2001: 1-30. 4 Andrew Neal, "Cutting off the King's Head: Foucault's Society Must be Defended and the Problem of Sovereignty. Alternatives, Vol. 29, 2004: 373-398, 375. 5 Brian Singer and Lorna Weir, "Politics and Sovereign Power, Considerations on Foucault", European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9 (4) (London: Sage Publications), 2006: 443-465. 6 To be clear here, I am not claiming that Agamben's conception of sovereign power is the same as that outlined by Weir and Singer, who draw extensively on Claude Lefort's account of modern democratic sovereignty. Despite pronounced differences between the respective theories of sovereignty provided by Lefort and Agamben, they both insist that sovereignty consists of more than a mode of rule or a form of power- sovereignty is on both accounts an opening or drawing of the boundaries of political space as such, and it is this aspect of sovereign power that is neglected by Foucault and his followers. 7 Andrew Norris, "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer" Radical Philosophy 119, May/June 2003: 6-16. A slightly expanded version of the essay was reprinted in Norris' edited collection Politics, Metaphysics and Death (cited above), 262-283. 8 Ibid, 278. 9 It is not hard to find secondary literature on Agamben that cites Norris' essay without critical examination. For a representative and inter-disciplinary sample approvingly citing Norris, see the following: Derek Gregory, "The Black Flag: Guantanamo Bay and the Space of Exception", Geografiska Annaler Series B (88 B, 4), 2006: 405-427; Paul Passavant, "The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben", Political Theory, Vol 35 No. 2 (London: Sage Publications), 2007: 147-174; Robert Buch, "Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead: Giorgio Agamben's Gorgon", The Germanic Review, Vol. 82 No. 2, 2007: 179-196; Kirk Wetters, "The Rule of the Norm and the Political Theology of "Real Life" in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben", Diacritics Vol. 36 No. 1 2006: 31-46; J.M. Bernstein, "Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics "After Auschwitz"" New German Critique 97 Vol. 33 No. 1, Winter 2006: 31-52. 10 This is not so much an explicit claim as it is a practice: the majority of secondary literature on Agamben in the English-speaking world has dealt either with his work on linguistics and aesthetics or with his explicitly politically engaged work (that is, from Homo Sacer onwards). I hope to show that this division is suspect, that Agamben's political work is, if anything, a (non-teleological) development of his "pre- political" writings, rather than any kind of rupture with them. 11 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books), 1999; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 2004. 121 am glossing Agamben's discussion of the relationship between humanity and animality in The Open, cited in the previous note. 13 This metaphysical attitude is Heidegger's version of his teacher Husserl's natural attitude, an everyday "realist" attitude that must be bracketed if phenomenology is to be possible. I am indebted to Neil 29 Braganza (in personal conversation) for the explicit parallel between the metaphysical notion of subjectivity and the natural attitude. 14 Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics", reprinted in The Heidegger Controversy Ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press), 1991: 67. The sense that the end of metaphysics lasts longer than the previous history of metaphysics is something Heidegger seemed ambivalent about. He also seems to suggest that thinking the non-conceptual difference already represents a turning out of or away from metaphysical nihilism, and yet is somehow inadequate. 15 Martin Heidegger, "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics", Nietzsche (Vol. 3) trans. D. Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins), 1987: 7. 16 Ibid, 6-7. 17 Ibid, 7. 18 Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: "God is Dead"", The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row), 1977: 69. As Heidegger notes, the replacement of old values for new happens "according to Nietzsche's conception, through doctrines regarding world happiness; through socialism, and equally through Wagnerian music" (ibid). 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Heidegger glosses Nietzsche's will-to-power this way: "What the will wills it has already. For the will wills its will. Its will is what it has willed. The will wills itself. It mounts beyond itself. The self- conscious self-willing of the will-to-power "has conscious disposal over the possibilities for effective action" (ibid, 77). 22 Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (cited above), 3-35; 17. 23 See Heidegger, "Word of Nietzsche", 109-110. 24 Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" is a telling text in this regard. There Heidegger writes that "Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely in the clearing of Being which alone is "world," they lack language.. .in this word "environment" converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing.. .Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself; "Letter on Humanism", Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, Edited David Farrell-Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins), 1993: 230, emphasis added. 25 Agamben is certainly not the first to have noticed this. For an earlier and detailed reading of Heidegger's quite "classical" distinction between language and life see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, trans. Bennington and Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1991. 26 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1998 (1995): 8; Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", cited above, 227. It is important to note that the use of the masculine pronoun "man" to indicate what should be a gender- inclusive or neutral reference to "humanity" is a consistent failing of Agamben's work. While one might be prepared to overlook Heidegger's exclusive use of the masculine term in this text from 1947, it is harder to overlook Agamben's identical practice in 1995. This exclusive use of the masculine term seems consistent with a general blindness in Agamben's work to feminist concerns in his work. In what follows I will tend to keep Agamben's masculine usage intact except in situations where my overall non-sexist language conflicts with the translation. 27 Homo Sacer, 8. 28 Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics", 67. 29 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 2005: 59. 30 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press), 1994: 13.
30 31 Walter Benjamin, Theses V of "On the Concept of History", in Selected Writings Vol IV: 1938-1940, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press), 2003: 390. 32 Ibid, 390-391. 33 The allusion is to Heidegger's infamous Rector's address in 1933, "The Self-Assertion of the German University" given while Heidegger was a Nazi party official. See"The Self-Assertion of the German University" in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. Gunther Neske & Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon House), 1990. 34 The point from this perspective is not whether it is necessary to decide on the basis of the moment of the past's legibility, but of what kind o/decision it is to be: is it to be a decision in favour of the repetition of the fatality of metaphysical sovereignty (and its law) or is it to be a decision that rescues life from the clutches of the former? This implies that only one of these two forms of the decision is capable of comprehending them both, thus from only one of them (the position of what Benjamin will call "divine violence") can there rightly be a decision at all. The risk politically speaking—-a risk that perhaps pertains to the political as such—is that the decision can only be made in a concrete instant (of danger) and not made in advance of that moment. The instantaneous nature of the decision, its moment of actuality, is what most distinguishes Benjamin from Heidegger, as I will argue at greater length further on (see chapter two below). 35 The Coming Community, 2 original emphasis; Homo Sacer, 188. 36 Ibid, 1-2. 37 This is a paraphrase of Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Of Being Singular Plural", (in Being Singular Plural, trans. R.D. Richardson and A.E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2000: 1-99), with whom Agamben philosophically shares a great deal. One might say that Agamben attempts to replace "being" with "life", understood (in Nancy's terms) as "this singular multiplicity of origins" (9).
31 Chapter One: Language and the Biopolitics of Life
In his explicitly political writings—which I am demarcating roughly as the period extending from Homo Sacer onwards—Agamben seeks to retrace the contours of the boundary drawn by metaphysical sovereignty between life as such and properly human life, between nature and culture, zoe and bios, physis and nomos. Such retracing is an attempt at undoing, at leading us into a place prior to the tracing and delimitation of such boundaries. This delimitation brings into intimate proximity language and the life it would divide, for the boundary-drawing action of the political can only take place once there is a speaking being, once there is language that can experience its own taking place in speech. Yet, as this implies, the division enacted in and through language is reflexive: it involves language, and as we will see, language is traditionally taken as an element or criteria according to which such divisions are made.
From this it must be concluded that in the conception of life given by metaphysical sovereignty and politics, human existence is constitutively divided, that to be human means to be both self-different and self-relating. Given the simultaneous divisibility and relation of human (metaphysical) life, it is doubtful that we can rely on Foucault's well- known claim in the History of Sexuality that, for most of human history, "man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence".1 If this proposition is doubtful it is because the alleged externality between the living animal and its political existence is untenable. Because human life is already defined relative to an enacted division and relation, it already suggests the constitutive
32 site of "an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question", a
situation that for Foucault defines only the modern political horizon.2 For Agamben,
what Foucault refers to as the site of a specifically modern form of politics, that is, a
biopolitics in which the living nature of the human being is placed in question, is merely
a reprise of—or at best a historical modification of—the Western image of politics as
such. From this perspective, modern biopolitics brings into our conscious awareness the
metaphysical conception of life as a specific historical problem, because, as Foucault is
no doubt correct in maintaining, beginning with what he calls the modern threshold, "the
fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to
time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's
field of control and power's sphere of intervention."
If the general contours of Agamben's theoretical project take shape in his attempt to
retrace the boundaries of an original division making possible the separation and isolation
of the human being into speaking and living modes, understanding the notion of language
and its relation to life must be of key importance. As this chapter will seek to show,
Agamben's early work, predating his explicit writings on politics, provides a critique of
Western metaphysical conceptions of language, along with an articulation of a different
relationship between language and life by means of the idea of "infancy" as that which is prior to their separation. This critique of Western notions of language and their
reconstruction involves a displacement of the category of the subject displayed by the
metaphysical notion of a pure intention to signify prior to any signified content. The
33 stakes are high because the ancient grammatical categories of the Western logos are also
those underpinning the modern philosophical conception of transcendental subjectivity,
variants of which are still very much at play. For Agamben, it is a matter of redrawing
the boundaries of what is thought to be included in the transcendental in such a way that
they precede the structure of subjectivity, which is what the concept of infancy is meant
to accomplish. But although Agamben does not have an explicitly political conception of
the metaphysical separation of life and language in these writings, it can be argued that
from the beginning his work concerns the biopolitical. This is because the metaphysical
model of language is erected upon the constitutive exclusion of animal voice as the non-
intentional and un-articulated cry of nature. The unbridgeable gap that opens between
animal voice and human language is for Agamben already the space of an unthought
division and exclusion constitutive of the logos. Just as Heidegger claims that for
metaphysics, nothingness can only be non-being, a "without beings", rather than a
thinking of being's obscuring, according to Agamben the placement of negativity at the
foundation of human language demonstrates metaphysics' inability to think its own
violently sacrificial foundation. In other words, the claim in Agamben's work on
language that division and sacrifice form the basis for the human (metaphysical)
community directly prefigures his later understanding of the state of exception as the site
of metaphysical sovereignty, as the origin of the Western political paradigm.
To cover this ground I will first outline Agamben's critical reading of the Western linguistic tradition in terms of its presupposing an origin it cannot name in the form of a
34 negative ontological foundation. In a second section, Agamben's gloss on the tradition of
Western grammar will be reviewed, showing that what is at stake in its history is the
positing of a pure subjective intentionality as the origin of the linguistic utterance, beyond
which lies only the mysterious abyss of the existence of language as such. Agamben will
show that the abyss conceals the removal of the animal voice from the properly linguistic,
a removal that must be displaced by revealing the more original idea of infancy as a pre-
subjective capacity for language. Finally, on the basis of the idea of infancy it will be
possible in a final section to review Agamben's contention that human community in
Western metaphysics is characterized by a foundational notion of sacrificial violence that
must be removed if either politics or community is to proceed on a non-violent footing.
1.1 Presupposing Tradition
For Agamben, the ontological dimension of the Western discourse on language is also a historical question about the reception of its tradition. In an essay entitled "Tradition of the Immemorial", by means of a remarkable series of quotations (accompanied by
commentary),4 spanning the philosophical tradition from Plato down to Heidegger and
Wittgenstein, Agamben argues that language serves the necessary function of providing
an ontological dimension for the transmission of tradition. Before tradition can reveal its
contents there must be a medium through which to transmit it, and this medium is
language itself. The existence of a medium through which tradition is to be passed down
implies a dimension anterior to yet coincident with its contents, since the medium of
language is not a thing which might be caught sight of within tradition, but rather the
35 latter's very possibility,5 As Agamben points out, "It is clear that this transmissibility
cannot be thematized as a First inside tradition, nor can it become the content of one or
more propositions among others, in any hierarchical order. Implicit in every act of
transmission, it [language] must remain unfinished and, at the same time, unthematized".6
In remaining unthematized, language remains oddly "concealed in what it brings to
light", itself displaced in favour of the content made available to be passed down.7 This two-fold aspect of historical transmission which brings to light while simultaneously remaining concealed also accounts for the circumstance in which the ontological dimension of tradition (language itself as transmitting medium) shows up as at once inside and outside of the tradition it transmits. In transmitting, language is obviously included "within" the tradition, and not just as one object among others, but as we have
seen, as the very possibility of tradition, and yet at the same time it remains "outside" or beyond tradition since it never shows up within it as such.
According to Agamben, the Western tradition beginning with the ancient Greeks responds to language's ontological dimension as the medium of the transmission of contents in the mode of presupposing that language has always already begun.
According to Agamben this is apparent right from the start of Western thinking. Even if
Plato might have thought of language as the "thing itself of transmission, making possible knowledge of the Ideas, already with Aristotle, language is "always presuppositional and objectifying" because of its propositional structure, its "saying
o something about something" that must already be in being. The theory of the
36 propositional nature of language accounts for what is for Agamben's purposes one of the most important aspects of Western reflections on language, namely, its division of discourse into subject and predicate, name and proposition; indeed Aristotle's doctrine of the ultimate opacity of primary substances takes root here. As Agamben comments, for the entirety of the tradition, "Discourse cannot say what is named by the name...The name is thus the linguistic cipher of presupposition, of what discourse cannot say but can only presuppose in signification".9 Thus, far from being able to speak adequately about its own condition, its origin, tradition in fact has to presuppose it, has to suppose "that the being about which it speaks is already open and has already taken place".10 This above all is true of language itself; language, more than anything spoken about in it must be presupposed as already given since its name is no name at all, and does not refer to any existent thing that it can name. In this sense perhaps, language is the most primary of all substances.
In the Christian onto-theological appropriation of ancient thought language becomes the divine Word. In an essay entitled "The Idea of Language", Agamben argues that the
Greek philosophical reflection, in which language is presupposed without becoming the explicitly acknowledged possibility of tradition, becomes the Christian onto-theological understanding of revelation. If language is essentially revelation, the Word of God is quite literally revelation's source, and therefore becomes the name of language. God is not just presupposed, but his being serves as a transcendent guarantee of revelation, a positively identified transcendental signifier. However, just as the philosophical tradition
37 from Aristotle onward divides language into name and proposition—and is thus unable to
name the name—the name of God is determined as a curious dimension of absence which
nevertheless provides for the contents of tradition a positive ground. Traditional
doctrines about the nature of the deity ultimately have recourse to the mysterious or the
unsayable nature of the revealer in the revealed. According to Agamben, "This
invisibility of the revealer in what is revealed is the word of God; it is revelation. This is
why the theologians say that the revelation of God is also His concealment, or to put it
differently, that God reveals himself in the word as incomprehensible".11 But if God, the ultimate guarantor of doctrinal positivity, is incomprehensible, his name as much as his word must remain presupposed: "The word that is absolutely in the beginning, that is therefore the absolute presupposition, presupposes nothing if not itself; it has nothing before itself that can explain or reveal it in turn {there is no word for the word)"}1
Agamben's analysis is here quite theologically impeccable insofar as God, the transcendental signifier, transcends the discourse that issues in response to his being. The
content of revelation in this sense is not a saying but something already said. Orthodox theology admits its ignorance of the divine by making all knowledge of the divine
dependent upon the transcendent anterior of revelation.
Just as Heidegger claims that metaphysical onto-theology cannot adequately grasp the reality of being, Agamben similarly makes it clear that he is unsatisfied with this presuppositional structure of the divine Word. In the first place, he suggests, in
acquiescing to the schema in which revelation becomes shrouded in mystery or
38 incomprehensibility, philosophy abandons its historical role to be the science not founded
on presupposition. If philosophy's task consist in "the elimination and "absolution" of presuppositions", by accepting the mystery of revelation philosophy becomes in effect
"the handmaiden" condemned "to a marriage with its theological master".13 This tacit
admission of the a priori status of theology on the part of philosophy represents a rational
defect, a kind of fatality wherein the presuppositional nature of revelation cannot be
gotten past in order to be interrogated.
For Agamben, this veneration of the theological is particularly vexing in that today
"What theology proclaimed to be incomprehensible to reason is now recognized by reason as its presupposition. All comprehension is grounded in the incomprehensible".14
Agamben goes on to discuss two contemporary variants of the idea that what is incomprehensible to reason is in fact its unquestionable precondition, namely, hermeneutics and deconstruction. While at first glance these approaches might appear hostile or even opposed to one another, according to Agamben they both agree on the unsurpassable nature of linguistic or theological presupposition. In the case of hermeneutics, of which Gadamer is the main representative, Agamben writes that
"hermeneutics is capable of nothing other than positing a horizon of infinite tradition and interpretation whose final meaning and foundation must remain unsaid. It can question itself on how understanding takes place, but that there is understanding is what, remaining unthought, renders all understanding possible".15 In a similar manner,
Agamben charges, "an authoritative current of contemporary French thought [i.e.
39 deconstruction] posits language in the beginning and yet conceives of this... according to the negative structure of writing and the gramma". But the understanding of writing as both "in the beginning", and as an infinitely deferred tracing, does not allow Derrida to transcend the presuppositional structure of revelation. On the contrary, "language is always already trace and infinite self-transcendence. In other words: language, which is in the beginning, is the nullification and deferral of itself, and the signifier is nothing other than the irreducible cipher of this ungroundedness". Agamben quickly demonstrates that these different contemporary approaches to language, despite the fact that the first emphasizes unity and a kind of unspeakable wholeness, while the second places irreducible difference at the origin, in effect unquestioningly take over the Western onto-theological position with respect to language and its theological structure. To this extent, Agamben seems to suggest, both approaches retain a deeply conservative dimension that is strangely out of keeping with the radical reputation of at least the second of them.
Another problem with the onto-theological structure of revelation now comes into view, this time in the form of what Agamben—here following Heidegger's account of metaphysics as nihilism—describes in terms of the nihilistic disenchantment of language.
Both hermeneutics and deconstruction have removed any explicit theological content from their approaches to linguistic presupposition. In both these theoretical orientations, but also in more general socio-culrural terms, Agamben declares, "what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names
40 for language". If the Christian onto-theological understandings of the world gave divine names, and thus a proper place to what was in fact the presupposition of language, the existence of language is now experienced as a kind of insistent aporia, an absolute presupposition without mystery and yet all the more mysterious for no longer having an origin or a place. As Agamben rather dramatically puts this, "We now look without veils upon language, which, having breathed out all divinity and all unsayability, is now wholly revealed, absolutely in the beginning".1 But just as for Heidegger completed nihilism remains nihilism just the same, for Agamben this state of radical disenchantment is not free of the theological presupposition. Language is still presupposed as a kind of blank and insignificant fact, one that now inverts linguistic revelation into nihilism. For
Agamben nihilism, as a culmination of metaphysics, "interprets the extreme revelation of language in the sense that there is nothing to reveal, that the truth of language is that it reveals the Nothing of all things". The nothing is not the elimination of presupposition but is "the final veil, the final name of language" through which contemporary culture accepts the insignificance or arbitrary giveness of the linguistic fact.21 Today language is imprisoned within a bad infinity of immanence without "possibility of escape from the infinite play of meaningful propositions" provided by the language-games of everyday speech.22 In this condition of linguistic nihilism or radical disenchantment contemporary culture is separated from the significance of its own tradition, a situation that for
Agamben corresponds to the latter's liquidation and abandonment. Agamben suggests that "The historico-social experience of our time is that of an original partition" between
41 ourselves and the content of our traditions in which "we are anticipated by a
presupposition, but one without an origin; we are divided, without any inheritance" from
our place in tradition.23 However, the division between ourselves and our traditions that
Agamben writes of here is not as entirely nihilistic as he seems to maintain to the extent
that it reveals that "Community is from the beginning a community of parts and parties".24 As Agamben notes, "true community can only be a community that is not
presupposed".25 If so, even tradition's overtly nihilistic form allows for a broader
critique of presupposition itself, since the latter continues the "pure destination" of
presupposition characteristic of the tradition as a whole, but beyond its traditional
content, and thus allows for a possible renewal through the removal of presupposition.26
What is required for the removal or resolution of presupposition, according to
Agamben, is a purely "philosophical presentation" of language.27 He suggests that "What
unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice, or a common
imprisonment in signifying language", but is rather a new "vision of language itself and, therefore, the experience of language's limits, its end". Grasping the limit of language
would liquidate its presuppositional character; rather than confined to the level of the bad
infinite of endless representations or propositions, thought would arrive at a principle it
would no longer have to presuppose. Agamben describes his un-presupposed principle in terms of an "Idea of language" that eludes metaphysical understandings of language: the idea of language "is not a word (a metalanguage), nor is it a vision of an object outside language (there is no such object, no such unsayable thing); it is a vision of language
42 itself'. But at this point we might well ask why it is that philosophy has been unable to provide such a vision of language, and further what this seemingly elusive vision of language might entail. This is what we will now take up by examining in more detail
Agamben's reading of the way in which the philosophical tradition, under its onto- theological tutelage, has generally theorized its relation to the existence of language in terms of a transcending subjective intentionality.
1.2 Enunciation: Voice and Shifters as Intention-to-Signify
Agamben argues that there are two ways that the Western tradition has conceptualized its relationship to language, both of which reflect to varying degrees the presuppositional, and therefore the negative grounding, of language. These are, first, the problem of the pronoun's function in language, marking the indication of concrete instances of speech, and second, the paradigm of the removed voice through which pure indication (intention) is held to occur. These two problems of language are not only interconnected but concern the taking place of actual speech and its relationship to the presuppositional structural of language.
In his 1982 book, Language and Death, Agamben argues that while the problem of the relationship between names and propositions has an ancient pedigree within philosophy, going back at least to Aristotle, the status of pronouns take on a particular importance for the medieval and modern grammarians. For the medieval grammarians, who like the ancients recognized the importance of grammatical categories for logic, the pronoun was held to indicate pure being without content or the presupposed
43 transcendence of existence as such. According to Agamben, "These words were called
"transcendentals" because they cannot be contained in or defined by any other category.
As such, they constitute the maxime scibilia, that which is always already known and said in any received or named object and beyond which nothing can be predicated or known".30 As a place-marker for pure being the pronoun adds nothing to its referent beyond indication, since it refers to something "always already received in every received object and predicated in every predication". Nonetheless, the pure and empty being of the pronoun takes on determination in its use as an indicator. In actual usage, in other words, the emptiness of the pronoun takes form insofar as what is indicated as presupposed by its means "becomes signifiable and determinable" in the act of indication and toward the object to which it refers.32 Each application of the pronoun takes on the ontological weight of the being it indicates, such that "I" refers in each case to the one indicating themselves and so on; outside this act of reference, "I" refers to no one in particular. But given that the pronoun only takes on determinate content in the act of demonstration or indication, the use of pronouns to indicate signification was less clearly understood since it seemed to compromise the presentation-function of indication itself.
Indicating an act of signification (for instance the use of pronouns to report speech) rather than an object of the senses introduces a dimension of negativity, non-identity or spacing, into the act of indication, since as Agamben points out, "The medieval grammarians realized that they were facing two different types of presence, one certain and immediate
[i.e. as when the indication refers to an object of the senses] and another into which a
44 temporal difference had already insinuated itself, and that was, thus, less certain". At
stake here was the linguistic passage from showing or indicating to signifying, a problem
that Agamben tells us was left basically unresolved by the medieval grammarians.
Agamben suggests that the indicative function of pronouns was articulated more
adequately thanks to modern linguistics, a possibility brought forward by modern
philosophy's almost obsessive preoccupation with the status of the "I" of transcendental
subjectivity. As Agamben points out, "modern linguistics classifies pronouns as
indicators of the utterance (Benveniste) or shifters (Jakobson)".34 Because it is
impossible to locate an objective reference of indication for these pronominal terms,
"they can be defined only by means of a reference to the instance of discourse that
contains them". To this extent, they are markers of temporality as much as a form of
objective indication, combining the two forms of reference identified by the medieval
grammarians. To show this in adequate detail, it is worthwhile quoting at some length the passage from Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics that Agamben also draws upon:
What then is the reality to which / or you refers? It is solely a "reality of discourse," and this is a very strange thing. / cannot be defined except in terms of "locution," not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. / signifies "the person" who is uttering the present instance of discourse containing /"... / can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced. But in the same way it is also as an instance of form that / must be taken; the form of / has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered.36
45 What this analysis of the pronoun / makes clear, and which conditions the other pronouns also, is that the / does not refer to an entity outside or beyond linguistic utterance, that is, it cannot be understood as analogous to the nominal sign indicating an existing object, while at the same time the linguistic form of the / specifically corresponds to an act: the act of speaking. The pronouns, according to Benveniste, are a special class of linguistic terms whose function is to show that language is now taking place, having no use outside of the act of producing speech.
So important is the act of producing speech that all other structures of indication in language are tied to it. That is, other indicators such as here, there, now, today, tomorrow, this, or that refer back to instances of utterance, and instances of utterance privilege the present instance in which they occur. Although it is perfectly true that from a more structural perspective the indication of the present instance is only possible on the basis of the modes of indication other than the present, according to Benveniste, these other modes of indication are structured in such a way that they symmetrically reflect the instance of the utterance or discourse while taking account of the temporal difference that has been introduced. Benveniste again: "The essential thing, then, is the relation between the indicator and the present instance of discourse... the language has recourse to a series of distinct terms that have a one-to-one correspondence with the first and which refer, not to the instance of discourse, but to "real" objects, to "historical" times and places".37
These terms are symmetrical to the series indicating the utterance: "I: he—here: there— now: then—today: the very day—yesterday: the day before—tomorrow: the day after—
46 next week: the following week—three days ago: three days before, etc. The language
itself reveals the profound difference between these two planes".38 For Benveniste, the only conceivable explanation as to why there is such a marked difference between the reference to other temporally dispersed events and the event or act of utterance in the present is that it is the role of the indicative pronouns "to provide the instrument of a conversion that one could call the conversion of language into discourse".39 This is a crucial point to which we will need to return several times.
The significance of this analysis for Agamben is that it brings to explicit awareness what had only been grasped vaguely by the medieval logicians. The meaning of pronominal indicators of utterance, or shifters, is to inscribe within the synchronic structure of language a "hollow" in which actual speech may occur, where language may take place, and where such taking place might be grasped, that is, indicated. In other words, as Agamben points out, the passage between langue and parole provided by the shifters should not be confused with a mere instance of parole. Rather:
The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronouns and the other indicators of utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the world of meanings, they permit the reference to the very event of language, the only context in which something can only be signified.40
If parole refers to the content of speech, the shifter as indicator of the utterance, while allowing speech and appearing to coincide with it, in fact always precedes it on a logical or even ontological level. The notion of the transmission of language as the
47 communicability of tradition discussed in the previous section now takes on a more
precise sense in that "prior" does not refer to something chronologically prior but to the
very opening or dimension through which language takes place, and is therefore what
allows the content of tradition to be assembled and passed down. That this transmission
takes place simultaneously within a moment of linguistic division is highly significant to
the constitution of metaphysics. For metaphysics, as Agamben points out, "this
dimension has been called being, ousia. That which is already demonstrated in every act
of speaking...that which is always already indicated in speech without being named, is, for philosophy, being".41 In other words, the ontological dimension of the taking place of language is also that moment in which it is subordinated to the revelation of beings that are already open and which tradition interprets in various ways but always presupposes.
But all of this is only possible because the structure of language allows a reference to its own happening in the act of human speech. As we will see below, it is this particular manner of thinking language's unlimited ability to say itself, and to present or gasp itself in a finite or limited term, which Agamben will want to reconceive.
Agamben's need to rethink the taking place of language in speech follows from the particular manner in which the Western tradition has sought to interpret the dimension of speech as the taking place of language. The problem consists of how we are to understand the manner in which language, "before and beyond what is signified in it...shows its own taking place".42 Here the metaphysical tradition gives a characteristic answer to this problem: the utterance of discourse and its occurrence are grounded in the
48 sounding of the voice of the one who utters discourse, and such sounding refers to a pure
(subjective) intention to signify. At the same time, the pure intention to signify opens
onto that negativity which we saw above forms the presuppositional structure of being for
onto-theological metaphysics. The taking place of the voice refers not to a specified
content, but instead to a pure intention to signify within the content and the revelatory utterance of the voice. Articulation itself, the pure sound of the voice, is what is
important here, although with the stipulation that such sound not be composed of sound alone, but that the voice's sound carry the pure intention to signify in and through its
sounding, and that such sounding contains the prior removal of a-signifying sound, the voice of nature or the animal's voice. It is important to go over these points in more detail.
The sounding of the voice, Agamben argues, concerns the phenomenal dimension of
language which "isolates an experience of the word in which it is no longer mere sound
[and]...is not yet meaning, but the pure intention to signify". Central to the pure
intention to signify is an experience of the incomprehensibility of the spoken word's dimension of content. According to Agamben, St. Augustine's De Trinitate (as a particularly influential instance for tradition) considers the situation of a dead language in which is heard "an unfamiliar sign, the sound of a word whose meaning he does not know"; in this situation, Augustine argues, the hearer would "realize that the sound he heard is not an empty voice (inanem vocem), the mere sound...but meaningful".44
Similarly, at a remove of several centuries, the monk Guanilo, objecting to St. Anselm's
49 ontological proof, draws upon an almost identical scenario. Where Anselm believes that the mere vocalization of the name of "God" is enough to convince anyone who hears it of the necessity of divine existence implied by the name's concept, Guanilo suggests that
Anselm fails to consider the "thought of the voice alone".45 A foreigner or barbarian who hears the word "God" pronounced will realize that behind the word lies an intention to signify while remaining ignorant of the conceptual meaning of the signification itself, thus remaining not only unconvinced of the divine existence but inconvincible as well.
Agamben argues that what is at stake in these examples is an instance of language that is not just "the experience of a mere sound, and not yet the experience of meaning", the effect of which is to expose "a new field in thought, which, indicating the pure taking place of an instance of discourse without any determinate accession of meaning, is presented as a sort of "category of categories," always already subject to every verbal uttering". This category of categories revealed in the instant of discourse is at the same time the ontological foundation of every determinate meaning, thus remaining "singularly close to the field of meaning of pure being".47 This field of meaning was recognized by the medieval grammarians as the condition of possibility for meaning in general and was therefore equivalent to a linguistic ontology, one which Agamben suggests remains central to the history of modern philosophy as well: "The "thought of the voice alone," the notion of the "breath of the voice" (in which, perhaps, we ought to note the first appearance of Hegelian Geisi), is a thinking of what is most universal: being. Being is in the voice...as an unveiling and demonstration of the taking place of language, as
50 Spirit." In these historical instances (i.e. those of Geist and of the intention behind the incomprehensible word), the field of the meaning of being corresponds to a pure intention to signify formally separable from the word's signified content. For Western metaphysics, language's turn toward meaningful speech begins with a field of intentionality that coincides with being as such, and yet in its generality precedes all specific content about beings in being. The pure opening toward beings grounded in the generality of being, however, remains within the orbit of a pure intention to mean or to signify, and thus within the transcending field of a pure subject that means to mean or to signify. For Western metaphysics, just as the revelation of God corresponds to a divine
"subjective" intention displaced by the content of revelation, the content of the Word, so the pure intention to mean before meaningful utterance remains the property of a pure subjectivity reduced to its intention to signify preceding all signified content.
For Agamben it is far from insignificant that the only indication of this evanescent
(or transcendent) will-to-signify is the sounding of the voice that lies between the "no longer" of pure sound and the "not yet" of signified meaning. But if the pure sound of the voice is to truly contain the "no longer" of pure sound in the instant before the irruption of linguistic meaning, this voice must also represent the definitive cancellation of all non-signifying sound: for the tradition this will demand the removal of the natural or purely animal voice. "A voice" Agamben points out, "as mere sound (an animal voice) could certainly be the index of the individual who emits it, but in no way can it refer to the instance of discourse as such, nor open the sphere of utterance" that signifies
51 meaning beyond the indication of the concrete individual. If the instance of the utterance is tied to shifters, such that it marks not just the reference to the concrete individual but to the appropriation or taking place of language in speech, it is easier to see why for the metaphysical tradition the utterance is tied to the subjective intention to open the sphere of signification. From this perspective, any recourse to shifters on the part of an animal voice, if this voice is held to consist of nothing but the expression of immediate being, would require that the animal's expression have language (the dimension of pure being as such) at its disposal. The shifters, located in the margin between inarticulate cry and fully articulated, appropriated meaning, announce the taking place of language as articulated (intentional) sound, and are therefore internal to language in such a way that their use presupposes the prior deferral or suspension of immediate being. Thus,
Agamben writes, "The voice, the animal phone, is indeed presupposed by the shifters, but as that which must necessarily be removed in order for meaningful discourse to take place".50 He continues, "inasmuch as Voice (which we now capitalize to distinguish it from the voice as mere sound) enjoys the status of a no-longer (voice) and of a not-yet
(meaning), it necessarily constitutes a negative dimension. It is ground, but in the sense that it goes to the ground and disappears in order for being and language to take place".51
As the "supreme shifter that allows us to grasp the taking place of language", the Voice forms "the negative ground upon which all ontology rests, the originary negativity sustaining every negation".52 And yet it immediately needs to be added that despite its negativity, the Voice is also the ultimate repository of a transcendental (subjective)
52 intention to signify, one so allegedly purified that it can be at one with its intentionality in the absence of any determinate linguistic content, either of indication or signifying expression.53
As should now be clear, the negativity grounded in the Voice of pure intentionality is what in the metaphysical tradition lends to the instance of discourse its double character of both revelation and obscuration. It is also responsible for both the inordinate privilege accorded to the present instant of discourse and the source of the dialectical project of re- attaining the transcending self-presence of intention "behind" the externality of actual content. According to Agamben, "precisely inasmuch as it is generated in the act of utterance...the present...is necessarily also marked by negativity. The centrality of the relation between being and presence in the history of Western philosophy is grounded in the fact that temporality and being have a common source in the "incessant present" of the instance of discourse. But—precisely for this reason—presence is not something simple...but instead, it guards within itself the secret power of the negative".54
Despite acknowledging the non-simple character of presence, the metaphysical tradition seems largely unaware that the negativity that resides in presence is also negativity in another sense as well: its negativity conceals its exclusion or occlusion of the natural or simply living animal voice as a form exterior to the pure intentionality characterizing the Voice. Because Western philosophy reads the negativity at issue only as the displacement of transcendental intention behind its spoken worldly expression, it cannot grasp that the displacement in question is double: the putatively unintentional or
53 merely indicative voice, the voice of nature or the animal, has already been removed, but in such a way that when philosophy seeks to return to the origin, it never encounters the removal of the natural voice except as something that has already taken place, that is, as
Voice. But since the negativity at issue here is also that of the removal of the unarticulated voice of natural or animal being, it is here that the biopolitical structure of
Western onto-theology's image of language comes into view. Removed in this way, the natural voice is continually presupposed as the unarticulated blind spot upon which, for metaphysics, meaningful discourse proceeds. To put this in a way that anticipates the later discussion in Homo Sacer, the unarticulated voice is included by means of its exclusion, as an ex-ception.55
Now, inasmuch as the Western tradition at once thinks and fails to think what is involved in the taking place of language in the transition from language to speech, and because the Voice obscures what is at stake in the passage from language to speech, the tradition is forced to ground this passage in negativity or in something uncomprehended instead of bringing it to light. This is why philosophy in the West, according to
Agamben, has consistently sought and failed to "absolve man from the violence of the foundation; but this absolution is possible only at the end or in a form that remains, at least partially, excluded from articulation".56 From this perspective, Agamben's work can be read as an attempt to come to the aid of philosophy, this time with the help of contemporary linguistics, and,returning to the site of the utterance, to repeat or retrace the metaphysical paradigm in order to comprehend the place of language differently than
54 through the schema of the Voice. Failure to do so makes it impossible to grasp what
Agamben describes as the "sacrificial mythogeme" underpinning Western cultures and societies.57 Agamben seeks to articulate a different mode of comprehending the origin of language, allowing for "the definitive cancellation of the Voice".58 In place of the negativity of the Voice with its removal and sacrifice of the natural voice, Agamben suggests we must attain to a (non-metaphysical) understanding of human "infantile dwelling" in the place of language. This dwelling, however, does not concern the origin of the "having been" of an animal voice that is removed so that human beings can enter meaningful speech, but rather "has the figure of a history and of a universal language that have never been and are thus no longer destined to be handed down in a grammar".59 It is to this conception of infancy that we now turn.
1.3 Infancy and "Original" Dwelling
To comprehend Agamben's idea of infancy as a way of canceling the sacrificial mythology of the Voice it is necessary to return to one of Agamben's earliest works, entitled significantly enough, Infancy and History: on the Destruction of Experience.60 In this book Agamben's point of departure is once again the linguistic theory of Emile
Benveniste, and in particular the latter's understanding that the event of enunciation must presuppose a state in which enunciation is not (yet) possible. Already this demands the insertion of a dynamic or diachronic level of analysis into the overly synchronic and abstract view that from Aristotle onward has held that humans are the animals rather straightforwardly possessing language.61 The significant feature of the human access to
55 language for Agamben is that "It is not language in general that marks out the human from other living beings...but the split between language and speech, between semiotic and semantic (in Benveniste's sense), between sign system and discourse".62 Contrary to the view rehearsed above that animals possess a merely unarticulated voice, that their voices are mere indications rather than significations, Agamben notes that we now know that animals are not in fact without language, but that "they are always and totally language.. .Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it".63 If language can be defined—following the tradition of structural linguistics—as a sign-system, a semiotic series of latent conceptual content hinging upon its proper recognition, animals must be held to inhabit language because they are born more or less able to recognize and utilize appropriately the sign-systems belonging to their species. The natural voice possessed by most animal species is not devoid of signification, rather, indication and signification cannot be separated: a cry of distress cannot but be understood as a cry of distress from another member of the species capable of making such a cry. Now, given this, the situation of signification has to be distinguished, at least nominally, from the predominantly semantic mode of language belonging to human speech. Agamben quotes
Benveniste's articulation of the difference between the semiotic and the semantic as follows:
At issue are two distinct orders of ideas and two conceptual universes, and this can be further shown by the difference in criteria of validity required by the one and the other. The semiotic (the sign) must be recognized; the semantic (discourse) must be understood. The difference between recognition and understanding entails two separate faculties of the mind: the ability to perceive a correspondence between what is there and what 56 has been there before, and the ability to perceive the meaning of a new enunciation.64
It would seem, according to Benveniste, that a gulf separates these two orders, although they should be understood to indicate ideal types rather than fully empirical realities.
Either way, there appears to be nothing that provides for a transition between them.
For Agamben, the idea of infancy intervenes in precisely the space or gap between the semiotics of language and the semantics of speech. As Agamben puts the idea, "It is the fact of man's infancy (in other words, in order to speak, he needs to be constituted as a subject within language by removing himself from infancy) which breaks the closed world of the sign and transforms pure language into human discourse, semiotic into semantic".65 It is only because human beings are not born already speaking, that "[they] cannot enter into language as a system of signs without radically transforming it".66
Thus, Agamben continues, "Semiotic and semantic are not in substance two realities but are, rather, the two transcendental limits which define and simultaneously are defined by man's infancy".67 If the semiotic is a kind of "language of nature", a vast reservoir of possible combinations of conceptual meanings, the semantic is that by comparison fragile ability of the human subject within discourse to make meaning by introducing a gap between the finite semiotic meaning-potentials of language, reorganizing and infinitely adapting the latter to new ends. In a striking image, Agamben suggests that "Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature.
But the human is nothing other than this very passage from pure language to discourse; and this transition, this instant, is history".68 57 If the human is the very passage from pure language to discourse, rather than locating the subject on either side of the divide, Agamben must draw upon Benveniste's critique of the subject carried out in his linguistic theory. Following Benveniste's account in Problems in General Linguistics, if the subject cannot be located apart from the taking place of discourse, the subject cannot be equated with a psychic substance preceding the discursive. According to Benveniste, it is only thanks to language use that we are able to be constituted as subjects; what provides the ability to attribute our diverse mental and sensuous impressions to ourselves, and therefore to retroactively constitute ourselves as the underlying substance of experience, is the fact of our repeated entry into discourse. As Benveniste writes, "It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of "ego" in reality, in its reality which is that of the being". This ego, constantly enacted through the taking place of speech, is what allows the accumulation of a "psychic unity that transcends the totality of actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness" possible.7 But none of this would transpire if it were not for the shifters of utterance, the pronouns that as we saw have the special role of designating the transition from the structural anonymity of language to the subjectivity of speech. In other words, the shifters that mark the "I" of utterance or the "you" of address cannot be thought of as general concepts referring to a psychic reality underlying the speaker: "they do not refer to a concept or to an individual", even though this is precisely the kind of illusion to which they give rise.71 There could be no general concept "I" which, qua
58 general concept, would refer to anyone using it, for it would indeed create, as Benveniste puts it, "a permanent contradiction" in language, as the general concept would have to refer to each specific individual, creating an "anarchy in its use".72 Thus, rather than referring to an empirical entity (whether of an underlying psychic or even psycho- corporeal "substance"), "/ refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse". It is the productive act of assuming the / in speech or discourse which creates the subject as the / and not the other way around: "It is the instance of discourse in which / designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the "subject." And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language", or at least its appropriation in and through speech.74
For Agamben's purposes, Benveniste's relocation of the subject to the sphere of enunciation or discourse parallels Kant's critique of rational psychology outlined in the
Critique of Pure Reason. If subjectivity exists only in and through the utterance or the taking place of discourse, rather than referring to a subject already constituted behind the scenes, the utterance serves as the transcendental condition for the production of the subject. The utterance is a necessary condition for, even as it continually escapes, the properties of a linguistic subject. But by being included in the production of the subject without ever becoming an attributable property of that subject, the discursive / produces the transcendental illusion that language-use refers back to a substantive psycho-physical
59 entity preceding the utterance and employing language in the manner of an instrument or tool. In a very Kantian manner, then, the act of discourse or utterance plays the role of a kind of "I speak" accompanying all my speaking—and is then transcendental in a way that is quite Kantian: it cannot be an object of history or already-given experience, but is instead what makes all empirical history possible (including the history of the subject which it constitutes). The consequence of shifting the boundary of the transcendental toward the taking place of speech is that the subject which appears as the "origin" and author of language is in fact its product, a mere or empirical appearance taken in the relevant Kantian sense.
In his First Critique, Kant argues that the transcendental subject—understood as the bare logical unity of an "I think" accompanying all spontaneous activity—is a necessary idea of reason; yet because this idea, whose object is a merely logical unity or postulate, is the condition of the subject (without for that reason being subjective), then if these
"concepts of reason contain the unconditioned, then they concern something to which all experience is subject but which itself is never an object of experience" This creates an irresolvable dilemma for any rational psychology, a psychology that seeks to grasp the subject as a kind of thinking substance (a contemporary analogue might be the project of reducing the mind to the brain). Any such positing of psychic substance—a purely empirical or psychological "I"—would be founded on the illegitimate attribution of the transcendental condition of spontaneity to what would be one of its products. The stumbling block for rational psychology is thus that according to Kant:
60 we can lay at the basis of this science [viz. rational psychology] nothing but the simple, and by itself quite empty, presentation /, of which we cannot even say that it is a concept, but only that it is a mere consciousness accompanying all concepts. Now through this / or he or it (the thing) that thinks, nothing more is presented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = x. This subject is cognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and apart from them we can never have the least concept of it; hence we revolve around it in a constant circle, since in order to make any judgment regarding it we must always already make use of its presentation. This is an inconvenience that cannot be separated from it, because consciousness in itself is not so much a presentation distinguishing a particular object, as rather a form of presentation as such....76
Infancy—as what precedes and conditions the utterance—for Agamben plays precisely the same role as does the Kantian "subject of thoughts=x": while it cannot be admitted as an experience of or belonging to the subject, it is that through which the linguistic subject takes place between the poles of language and discourse, and so what makes possible all (subjective) experience and history. If the infant is the one who brings speech into existence by assuming the / in discourse, the infant also becomes the
"mysterious" source of the act which brings speech into being and who produces the utterance. Yet because the infant is the origin of speech, it cannot be thought according to any of the latter's terms, just as the transcendental subject=x could not be cognized on the basis of any of its predicates.
If for Agamben infancy is to be thought as the transcendental condition of discourse, it must be a transcendental condition conceivable on the basis of the radical absence of language. However, this would also entail a critique of the Kantian transcendental subject: the Kantian subject is not transcendental enough because it is still thought
61 metaphysically, according to the grammar of the 7, the linguistic pronoun of subjectivity.
To this extent, the transcendental I, however inaccessible it might be to predication, is already implicitly a linguistic subject. The Kantian critique of the empirical subject on the basis of the transcendental one tacitly admits linguistic subjectivity into what would have to by rights transcend it. As Agamben comments here with respect to both Kant and modern philosophy as a whole, "The transcendental subject is nothing other than the
'ennunciator', and modern thought has been built on this undeclared assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge".77 According to
Agamben, it was the failure to locate the transcendental beyond the sphere of language altogether that allowed neo-Kantian thought to "confer psychological substance on transcendental consciousness" and to carry on the project of rational psychology contrary to Kant's avowed intentions.78
Infancy, as that which is prior to the linguistic subject and allows for the latter's existence through the transition from language to speech, must be placed beyond the linguistic "I think", and thus beyond the limits of human subjective experience as such.
After the acknowledgement that language constitutes the subject rather than the reverse,
"the rigorous Kantian distinction of the transcendental sphere must yet again be restated, it must, however, at the same time be flanked by a metacritique resolutely tracing the boundaries that separate it from the sphere of language". The notion of infancy {infans, without language), is thus the reinstatement of the transcendental limit above the level of the appropriation of language by existing speech, and along with this limit, the
62 liquidation of the notion of a psychic or proto-psychic substance preceding and generating it. As Agamben points out, "if the subject is merely the enunciator.. .we shall never attain in the subject the original status of experience"; instead, "primary experience, far from being subjective, could then only be what in human beings comes before the subject—that is, before language: a 'wordless' experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy [in-fancy] whose boundary would be marked by language".80 What is prior to language's appropriation in speech through the subject cannot be linguistic already, and so cannot be anything like a psychic substance or a proto-subjectivity, since these are phenomenal shadows cast by the use of language.
Agamben's wordless experience cannot be properly subjective at all, and yet is still the ground for a possible "experience" of some type. As Thomas Carl Wall points out in his pathbreaking study of Agamben from 1999 (well before Agamben had become the object of widespread attention), what Agamben is in fact claiming here is that what "Kant describes for us" in the still-inadequate terminology of the tradition, is an experience of infancy as "that which has no Voice, is given no Voice, but must appropriate language nonetheless to be itself. That is to say, it must appropriate that which will expropriate it of all "mineness." "Older" than subjectivity is that which, in human being, precedes language." 81 This something older can only be what is living and not yet speaking, but which all the same contains the potential for speech.
It might be objected that this thought seems to reintroduce the very problem
Agamben had hoped to dispel by recourse to the Kantian transcendental: the negative
63 presupposition, the withdrawal of the revealer in the revealed. In other words, how could a pre-subjective "experience" still be an experience at all, unless we are to have recourse after all to an alleged mystical revelation? It would seem as though Agamben is presenting us with a figure of the ineffable or the mysterious every bit as negative as the revelation grounding metaphysics. But such a criticism would be off the mark, for what
Agamben is seeking to exhibit through the idea of infancy is but the experience of language in its coming-to-speech, that is, as the origin of the subject from out of the openness, the pure phenomenon, of the fact of living, which therefore becomes the new transcendental ground of all experience. We can see Agamben making this move when, in Infancy and History Agamben discusses a form of experience that is impersonal and anonymous, that cannot be called "mine", and yet is somehow the key to all experience had by the subject. Citing the testimony of Montaigne and Rousseau, both of whom recount an experience of regaining consciousness from accidents which incapacitated them, Agamben suggests that what these accounts reveal is the phenomenality of what appears as the transcendental beyond or outside of language, which is in fact an experience of and at the limits of language. Thus, both these accounts concern an experience that can only be recalled by means of language, that is, through the assumption of discourse, and yet what is recounted in discourse cannot be said to
"belong" to the speaking subject able to recount it. Thus, according to Rousseau's account of the first instants of regained awareness:
This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I 64 perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.82
Nothing in this account, of course, is free of paradox. And yet neither is the attribution of unconscious experience to an Es, a third person, "a subjective experience", Agamben tells us, because in its very anonymity, it is "not an experience of the I"; indeed from the
Kantian position discussed above, what is lived in the mode of the non-linguistic "cannot even be called an experience, for it lacks that synthetical unity of consciousness (self- consciousness) which is the fundament and the guarantee of every experience".83
Between complete oblivion—that is, death—and the self-presence of the linguistic subject, lies a paradoxical threshold which is the site of an "experience" that can only be articulated by the subject retroactively. But this experience, while wordless and a- subjective, is not simply a negative and unsayable void because it is primarily an experience of language's coming to speech from out of the living infans that precedes it, presenting us with a paradoxical self-grasping which admits that the "experience" about which the subject is able to speak is not in fact its own, but which the very act of speaking appropriates. The key element of such an experience is thus its very anonymity, its strange universality which, while not belonging to a particular subject, is absolutely specific and singular.
65 As speaking subjects we have become so accustomed to our repeated entry into language that it seems as though there is scarcely anything else. But the kind of limit- experience that Agamben describes by citing Rousseau (and psychoanalysis), and which he attempts to get at with the idea of infancy, presents a moment of irreducible disjuncture between what must be called the anonymous fact of living and the appropriated fact of speaking, so that what we have is the experience of their separation, that is, the experience of language, considered in its anonymity of an infinite living semiotic, coming-to-speech. Yet this disjuncture is not an absolute or impassable chasm, so that it is not primarily negative, mystical or unsayable: it is traversed by the event of enunciation from a position prior to the speaking subject. In this sense, infancy, as an infinite natural semiotic, a "language of nature" in its anonymous living, its latent capacity to signify, breaks with or interrupts itself to enter speech. Infancy is thus not an initial state left behind once and for all in the course of psycho-somatic development, but instead, references something entirely different, namely, an idea of origin as continuous activation rather than as chronological event. As Agamben points out, "the experience, the infancy at issue here, cannot be merely something which chronologically precedes language and which, at a certain point, ceases to exist in order to spill into speech".84
Instead, infancy, as the possibility of enunciation, "coexists in its origins with language— indeed, is itself constituted through the appropriation of it by language in each instance to produce the individual as subject".
66 If we now refer back to the problem of the metaphysical division between the animal's unarticulated voice and the human (or divine) Voice, we find that its discreet alternatives rely on an untenable conception of origin which supposes something that has always already taken place and must therefore (perhaps) be recovered, but in any event must always be placed in a past time. The presupposition of this past time is what produces the division between the subjective and the non-subjective, the linguistic and the pre-linguistic, and ultimately between the human subject and the natural or animal object, living and speaking, culture and nature, and so on. Agamben argues that it is the notion of origin located "in a chronology, a primary cause which separates in time a
Of- before and after" which must be abandoned. Instead of this chronological notion of origin Agamben argues that we must attain a conception of origin that is "itself constitutive of the human", yet without presupposing the human, and thus without necessitating the removal of the non-human to arrive at the human.87 Such a non- chronological concept of origin must abandon the idea of representing itself as a moment in time, since the "origin of a 'being' of this kind cannot be historicized, because it is itself historicizing, and itself founds the possibility of there being any 'history'".88
According to Agamben, "the origin of language" as speech, which is infancy, "must necessarily be located at a break with the continual opposition of diachronic and synchronic, historical and structural, in which it is possible to grasp some kind of Ur- event, or Ur-factum, the unity-difference of invention and gift, human and non-human, speech and infancy". Infancy, conceived as origin, ,must be "located in a convergence 67 of diachronic and synchronic" planes, in the position of what Agamben describes as "a present, operative instance in the historical languages".90 The origin, in its anonymous living, has never ceased to subsist within human linguistic history, in fact constituting "a transcendental history, which in a sense constitutes the a priori limit and structure of all historical knowledge".91
With the idea of infancy Agamben has redrawn the boundaries between the metaphysically conceived division between a natural and unarticulated voice and a human Voice consisting of pure intentionality. It is clear that if "In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic", it is no longer so easy neatly to separate the animal from the human.92 An integral part of the human is its anonymously living being, "The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant", and this part overlaps with what has traditionally been thought of as animal or natural.93 Yet given that this part of the living being in its protean anonymity is the very origin of the subject, of what the tradition proclaims is the properly human, it is no longer possible cleanly to separate it from the human, to construe it as something entirely other. The experience to which this redrawing of boundaries gives rise is a situation in which, as Agamben puts it in the Epilogue to Language and
Death, "We can only think, in language, because language is and yet is not our voice".94
If the animal voice is held to be without intention, this cannot be different than the experience of human infancy, which, as a-subjective, is beyond all appropriation by an intentional subject. It consequently becomes unclear if language is "our voice, as baying
68 is the voice of the ass or chirping the voice of the cricket". While this certainly does not eliminate the relative difference between human and animal voices—Agamben points out that the cricket's chirping cannot be a form of thought, that the cricket cannot think its chirping—between, that is, the difference between the semiotic and the semantic, the living being and the (intentional) speaking being, it does serve to render their opposition radically problematic.96 Yet if this relative difference between the human and the animal is but a relative, and perhaps not so significant, difference, why is it that the Western tradition has seen fit to ground the human in a subjective intention that posits itself as groundless and negative in relation to all forms of natural voice? The answer to this question, Agamben argues, is again provided only through the idea of infancy, since it is on the cusp or margin of the subject provided by infancy that we can grasp the emergence of human history in the form of an event, the event of subjectivity. This event, as we will now see, is for Agamben what initially appears in humanity's violent misconception of its own foundation.
1.4 The Violence of Foundation
Even if Agamben renders problematic the division between the human Voice and the animal voice, the crucial distinction Agamben does seek to maintain between human and animal is the specific kind of historicity produced by the former. Agamben argues that
"nature in the absolute has no need of a history", and that a human being who did not have to acquire language, to enter it as a speaking being, would experience "neither any break between language and speech nor any historicity of language. But such a man
69 would thereby at once be united with his nature; his nature would always pre-exist, and nowhere in it would he find any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of history could be produced". Agamben's point here is not that non-human language never changes, but that such changes can never amount to history in the human sense, because in animal languages "speakers" can never acquire their language as "a pre existing thing to be appropriated", and so could never consciously set out to modify it.98
It is the emergence of a subject in language from out of the difference of a prior but persistent infancy, then, which provides the transcendental possibility of history, and in turn, the birth of the subject depends upon that part of the human where the subject of language exists in a state of potentiality.
This point about history requiring an anterior dimension of the a-historical enables
Agamben's idea of the redemption of the tradition beyond its constitutive division or split between human and non-human that metaphysics places at the origin. That humans are not already speaking, that they must assume or appropriate language in order to use it, rather than possessing it as a kind of endowment, makes possible the grasping of the limits of language. For human beings language is finite because it is divided into language and speech, where infancy is the excluded middle where both coexist but are not given (as previously existing), and where the human being must become capable of its own potential for discourse and history, and hence for subjectivity; infancy—as we will see in more detail in the next chapter—is thus pure potentiality because it serves as a limit or a boundary through which language must pass in order to become speech. If, as
70 Agamben points out, there were no such limit, no infancy, there would be no human history, since "language would undoubtedly be a 'game' in Wittgenstein's sense, its truth coinciding with its correct usage according to logical rules. But from the point where there is experience, where there is infancy, whose expropriation is the subject of language, then language appears as the place where experience must become truth".99
But because there is infancy, the human potentiality to appropriate language in becoming subject, Agamben argues it is possible to articulate the difference between language and speech as the characteristic feature of human language in contrast with animal language as noted above. Human infancy "sets up in language that split between language and discourse which exclusively and fundamentally characterizes human language. For the fact that there is a difference between language (langue) and speech (parole), and that it is possible to pass from one to the other...is...the central phenomena of human language", and of human experience in general.100
One very important implication of the idea that humans must assume language in the form of subjectivity is that their history "cannot be the continuous progress of speaking humanity through linear time, but in its essence is hiatus, discontinuity, epoche. That which has its place of origin in infancy must keep on traveling towards and through infancy".101 If the assumption of language in discourse ruptures the continuity of nature, introducing the infinite finitude of the speaking voice into an otherwise unbroken infinite semiotic of living continuity, the history produced by this being must also be finite in the sense of being punctual and discontinuous. In this sense, human history cannot be only
71 the place of tradition and continuity, but of the permanent possibility of rupture with tradition. Human freedom, which originates in the non-subjective passivity of infancy, perpetually holds out the possibility of starting again rather than simply continuing the already-begun, precisely because, in the appropriation of language as discourse, humans appropriate the possibility of founding and breaking with tradition itself. Far from being consigned to existing potentials-for-being, then, human subjectivity allows for the creation of new ones, since language can be appropriated afresh through discourse. Such creation is in fact the possibility of an idea of language which does not depend upon presupposition and the unsayable. To return to our starting point at the beginning of the chapter, overcoming the (metaphysical) tradition of presupposition and the unsayble means grasping, as Agamben claims in the important programmatic essay "Form of Life" that "what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. This means precisely that there is a possible form of life "in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power".104 What this suggests to Agamben is that "each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility", something it is possible to do or not to do.105 But this entails, Agamben significantly claims, that "this immediately constitutes form-of-life as political life".106 It will be the task of later chapters to spell out what this might mean in more specific terms.
72 In a fragment in his book The Idea of Prose from the mid-1980s, Agamben articulates a highly speculative account of human evolution in which humans emerged as the infantile form of a more mature primate species by precociously acquiring the capacity for reproduction. Born without the fixed biological capacities characteristic of mature animals, the human being was effectively an infantile primate, one whose organic capacities retained the "neotenic" characteristic of infants to "pay attention .. .to somatic possibilities that are arbitrary and uncodified".107 The development of human language as speech, Agamben suggests, may well be a consequence of this infantile condition that results in a kind of infancy as its permanent condition. But because the development of the human species-infant had nothing to do with a specific biological vocation, its capacity for speech "is...something that must remain absolutely external" to a somatic
(biological) programme, "and that, as such, can only be entrusted to oblivion, which is to
1 Oft say, to an exosemantic memory and to a tradition". Here ontogeny repeats morphology, since it is only infant humans who learn how to speak, and thus learn how to pass down the linguistic precondition for all tradition. At this point, however, Agamben suggests that the need to give to themselves a tradition is a way of coping with the inexplicable lack of a natural vocation that characterizes the species. Thus, according to
Agamben, "the plurality of nations and the numerous historical languages are the false callings by which man attempts to respond to his intolerable absence of voice; or, if one prefers, they are attempts, fatally come to nothing, to make graspable the ungraspable, to become—this eternal child—an adult", an animal with a specific vocation.109 Because 73 the human voice both is and is not a natural voice, tradition (and, as we will see, politics), attempts to come to the rescue by grounding humanity in a specific vocation, attempting to give it an essential purpose precisely to the degree that it is manifestly lacking one as the outcome of a specific genetic destiny or heritage. But all these conceptions,
Agamben thinks, are ways of avoiding what is really at stake, namely, the final groundlessness of human infantile being. This groundlessness is intolerable because, as we have seen, human existence is bound up with a particular mode of passivity, weakness and incapacity that can never be fully assumed or appropriated by the subject. Thus, tradition begins with the misrecognition by human beings of what constitutes their specificity in relation to other beings. The metaphysical tradition of the removed voice of the animal distantly but distortedly reflects this specificity, since the assumption of a proper voice for humanity in the Voice can occur only through the removal of infancy, from which it is a short step to the removal of anything defined to be non-human, that does not contribute to the task of establishing a proper human vocation.
According to Agamben, the perceived need to ground human being in a tradition and equip it with a prosthetic nature, in other words, to transform the infant into an "adult" with a specific "natural" vocation, has been met by means of what is described in
Language and Death as the "sacrificial function" of the social.110 "However one interprets the sacrificial function", Agamben writes, "the essential thing is that in every case, the action of the human community is grounded only in another action", even if this last action is systematically misrecognized or forgotten.111 Sacrifice, the removal of the
74 natural or animal voice, "furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning: that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded, and it is assumed by the society as an immemorial, and yet memorable, past".112 The human community, unable to recall its true origin in the infancy which characterizes it, makes as its first exercise of subjective agency the repudiation or sacrifice of part of its life. This is, according to Agamben, what accounts for the well-known idea of the ambivalence of the sacred and its relationship to sacrifice in ancient societies. If the sacred is what is "marked by exclusion" in order to serve as the foundation of community, neither is the sacred "simply excluded", but becomes instead "only accessible for certain people and according to determinate rules".114 Because it marks the liminal threshold of the human community, the sacred is "necessarily an ambiguous and circular concept"; the sacred object or person is both "vile, ignominious, and also august, reserved for the gods", since on the threshold it can be neither fully included nor simply excluded.115
In this connection it is not surprising or fortuitous that the sacrificial gesture is typically a violent and murderous one. Not explainable by natural necessity, the violence of sacrifice is in the last instance "a historical product of man", decidedly unnatural and
"without common measure with respect to natural violence". l This is because, for
Agamben, sacrificial violence is among the earliest gestures of human subjectivity, marking its entry-point into history, hence "implicit in the very conception of the relation between nature and culture, between living being and logos, where man grounds his own
75 humanity. The foundation of violence is the violence of foundation". Yet this violence
of the (response to) the origin is what is most covered up. What is in fact included as the
foundation of community always appears as humanity's other in the mode of exclusion.
We have already seen as much with respect to the exclusion of the animal voice.
Agamben argues that the only way to remove the immemorial violence of the
foundation would be to remove the fiction of (natural) foundation itself, since sacrificial
violence is both constituted by and seeks to deny the "very ungroundedness of human
action (which the sacrificial mythogeme hopes to cure)"; from the perspective of the
mythology of sacrifice, which seeks to justify violence on the basis of the exterior
necessity of natural violence, the situation is portrayed in an inverted manner: "inasmuch
as it is not naturally grounded but must construct its own foundation, [humanity] is,
according to the sacrificial mythogeme, violent". Positing violence as naturally or
externally necessary is thus the most primitive form of social ideology, a way to avoid
what is obscured in the positing, namely, the groundless action of human being, which
might therefore be grounded otherwise or not at all.
This is not to say that there have not been attempts to overcome the sacrificial
mythology. As we have seen above, Agamben claims that philosophy is one such
attempt. By seeking to overcome all presuppositions, philosophy seeks to remove the
necessity of (violent) presupposition. Yet philosophy as metaphysics is by itself unable
to get beyond the negative presupposition which thinks in a distorted form the situation of human ungroundedness. In a certain sense, then, "through the mythogeme of the Voice,
76 [philosophy] thinks the ungroundedness of man. Philosophy is precisely the foundation of man as human being (that is, as a living being that has logos) and the attempt to absolve man of his ungroundedness and of the unspeakability of the sacrificial mystery".119 Although the attempt to think without presupposition has a beneficent aspiration, however, because philosophy as metaphysics only thinks to the "edge" (but not beyond) the threshold of human infancy, humanity remains "conceived on the basis of a having-been and a negative foundation", so that "philosophy finds itself obliged to
"justify" violence. The arreton, the unspeakable tradition, continues to dominate the tradition of philosophy" in just that place—the place of the speaking subject—where the unspeakable tradition would have to be liquidated in order for the saving function of thought to come to the aid of practical life. In other words, what Agamben describes as the "completed foundation" of humanity would be a humanity without presupposition, one signifying "the definitive elimination of the sacrificial mythogeme and of the ideas of nature and culture, of the unspeakable and the speakable, which are grounded in it"121
Only then might there be a humanity not grounded in the metaphysical presupposition having its correlate in the sacrificial violence grounding the human community.
This chapter has attempted to show that Agamben's work predating his specific meditations on politics nonetheless have a specific political content. His work dedicated to an analysis of language as it has been theorized in the tradition of Western metaphysics shows that it is grounded in the final analysis on a pure subjective intention, a silent
Voice, and that the latter is also a negative ground in that it has no common ground with
77 the (unintentional or purely indicative) voice of the animal. Seeking to justify the subject's intention as the ground of the transcendent, the tradition in its Christian form supposed a God only knowable through revelation, but then had to suppose that the source (the divine Being in itself) of such revelation remained unknowable. This tradition conceives negativity as the unknowable revealer concealed in revelation, and this grounds human being in subjectivity outside of which is a mysterious or immemorial and unsayable origin. But Agamben argues that the negativity of the origin as conceived by metaphysics conceals another dimension within the "nothing" of its negativity: that of the removal or exclusion of the animal voice. The tradition cannot be thought as simply an idealism of thought, at least not without reflecting that such idealism is also the cipher of a sacrificial mythology seeking to ground human community through the project of constituting a "proper" form of the human through the violent exclusion and removal of what does not count as human, the non-human. As the non-intentionality of the animal voice suggests, what is not part of the subject must be removed from the subject in order also to remove what is intolerable: the ungrounded character of humans as such, their infancy, the passivity of the subject with respect to its living being, a passivity evinced by the need to exit the semiotic of natural language and enter the domain of a subjective history.
In a very real sense, then, the history of Western subjectivity has been the attempt to swallow its tail, to appropriate once and for all what makes it possible by turning the constitutive condition of infancy, which it does not control, into an accident pertaining to
78 subjective substance. Yet, for Agamben, if the sacrificial paradigm is to be left behind, if the discontinuous history of humanity is going to be founded on something other than the violent removal of non-intentional life, the violence of the origin has to be recognized.
This latter problem will lead to an extended discussion in the next chapter of Agamben's major theoretical sources: Heidegger and Benjamin. It is fair to say that if Heidegger is the inspiration for Agamben's treatment of the Western metaphysics of language in terms of a self-concealing origin that cannot grasp its own taking place, it is equally true that in
Agamben's writings the idea of how one might awake from this history of violence is very clearly of Benjaminian provenance. In other words, if Heidegger provides the anatomy of the poison, the general theory of the nature of origin as appropriation- exappropriation, of the history of the West as metaphysics oblivious to its origin,
Benjamin provides the actual antidote in the form of a vision of history as redemption, as awakening from the history of violence in a singular historical flash of recognition.
79 Notes:
1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurely (New York: Random House), 1978: 143. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid, 142. 4 The form of this essay recalls Benjamin's ambition to write a work comprised entirely of quotations, although unlike Benjamin, Agamben is not at all reticent about providing interpretations of his quotations. 5 Girogio Agamben, "Tradition of the Immemorial", in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univeristy Press), 1999 (1985): 105. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Agamben, "Tradition", 107 9 Ibid 107-108; it is hardly fortuitous here that Agamben quotes Wittgenstein's famous declaration from the Tractatus that "I can only name objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak o/them. I cannot assert them, A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is" (Wittgenstein's Tractatus quoted in Ibid, 108). 0 Ibid, 107. 1 Giorgio Agamben, "The Idea of Language", in Potentialities, (citd above), 40. 2 Ibid, 41. 3 Ibid, 45. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid, 44. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 45. Ibid, 46. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, 45. 23 Agamben, "Tradition", 112. 24 Ibid. 25 Agamben, "The Idea of Language", 47. 26 Agamben, "Tradition", 113. 27 Agamben, "The Idea of Language", 47. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. K. Pinkus and M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1991 (1982), 21. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid, 22. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid, 23. 35 Ibid. 36 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meeks (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press), 1971: 218. 37 Ibid, 219. 38 Ibid, original emphasis removed. 39 Ibid, 220. 80 40 Agamben Language and Death, 25. 41Ibid. 42 Ibid, 32. 43 Ibid, 33, original emphasis. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid, 34. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid, 35, original emphasis. 49 Ibid, original emphasis. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid, original emphasis. 52 Ibid, 36. 53 Agamben's discussion of the withdrawn or negative ground that is at simultaneously the "location" of a pure intention-to-signify bears a striking (although entirely unacknowledged) resemblance to Derrida's reading of Husserl's phenomenology of language in "Speech and Phenomena" in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. D. B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 1973: 3-104. In the title essay (which would likely be more accurately translated as Voice and Phenomena), Derrida argues that for Husserl "Phenomenological "silence," then, can only be reconstituted by a double exclusion or double reduction: that of the relation to the other within me in indicative communication, and that of expression as a stratum that is subsequent to, above, and external to that of sense" (70). As the leading statement of the section entitled "The Voice that Keeps Silence", Derrida shows that Husserl's transcendental Ego consists of a dimension of pure sense that transcends the realms of both empirical indication and linguistic expression, either of which would serve to contaminate the Ego's purity. Both Derrida and Agamben point out that for Western metaphysics (here repeated by Husserl's attempt to reconstitute the tradition), transcendental subjectivity must be shown to transcend all worldly indication and expression, to constitute, as it were, pure being by itself, in order to ground the order of subsequent worldly involvements. 54 Agamben, Language and Death, 36. 55 See chapter three below for an account of the logic of the exception. 56 Agamben, Language and Death, 106. "Ibid. 58 Ibid, 104. 59 Ibid. 60 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso), 1993. 61 Agamben, in following upon and radicalizing Benveniste's theory of the centrality of the shifter to language continues the tradition of post-Saussureian linguistics in privileging parole over langue. As Hodge and Kress point out, Saussure's initial separation of langue and parole valorized the former over the latter. If langue represented for Saussure "the abstract system of rules underlying speech", and thus made an ideal candidate for systematic study, parole was "conceived of as an intrinsically unordered morass, an infinite and arbitrary combination of elements of langue by individual speakers" to be "discarded... as an impossible object for systematic study". For later linguistic theorists such as Benveniste, it is parole that becomes important precisely because through shifters it transcends the abstract plane of langue, becoming the means by which the latter changes over time. See Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics, (Cambridge: Polity Press), 1988: 16. 62 Ibid, 59. 63 Ibid. 64 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, quoted in Agamben, Infancy, 62. 81 65 Agamben, Infancy and History, 63. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid, 64. 68 Ibid. 69 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, (cited above), 224. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid, 226. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers), 1996: (A311/B367),360. 76 Ibid, B 404/A346, 385 77 Agamben, Infancy and History, 53. It is worth pointing out the ambiguity of this statement. It is likely that Agamben's intended meaning is simply that the enunciator is the grammatical "I" to which all discourse is attributed. In this case, the transcendental subject is indeed a shadow cast by language, since language would then present the subject as if it were a pre-existing entity, in contradiction to the analysis of enunciation advanced by Benveniste and endorsed by Agamben. But in another sense, the enunciator could just as easily refer to what does the enunciating, the "active agent" of discourse; in this case, the enunciator could be the infans that Agamben posits as the non-subjective origin of enunciation. But if so, this infans plays the same role as the Kantian transcendental "subject" (which, as Kant makes clear, precisely because it cannot be identified with any of its appearances, is not a subject in any substantive sense). My suggestion here is that in equating the infans with life on the one side and with the transcendental subject on the other, Agamben is practicing a kind of post-Heideggerian return to Kant, but one—as we will see below—that paradoxically wants to keep open the phenomenality of life without a subject (of language) as a possible experience. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid, 53-54. 80 Ibid, 54. 81 Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: SUNY), 1999: 160, original emphasis. Wall provides a much more comprehensive account of the issue of Agamben's relation to Kant than I am providing here. 82 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, quoted in Agamben, Infancy and History, 46. 83 Agamben, Infancy and History, 47. Agamben closes his Remnants of Auschwitz with a similarly paradoxical testimony. In the final section of the book Agamben reprints the testimony of those prisoners of the concentration camp who were made unable to speak, to testify on their own behalf by the enormity of the physical straits imposed on them in the camps. Ironically titled "I was a Muselmann", these testimonies on die part of those whose linguistic subjectivity was lost and later regained bear the same marks of anonymous experience featured in Rousseau's testimony above while at the same time are devoid of the horror one might expect to accompany this condition. 84 Ibid, 55. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid, 56. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid, 57. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid, 58. 82 93 Ibid. 94 Agamben, Language and Death, 107, original de-emphasized. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid, 60. 98 Ibid. 99 Agamben, Infancy and History, 58. 100 Ibid, 59. 101 Ibid, 60. 102 This is obviously not to claim that language does not have its own form of history: evolutionary biology obviously creates new species, and thus ruptures with its own "traditions" and introduces discontinuity into its forms. But Agamben's point here is simply that in nature none of these ruptures occur in the mode of a subject that is able to experience the rupture as such. 103 Giorgio Agamben, "Form of Life" in Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press), 2000 (1996): 3-41; 4. 104 Ibid. It should be kept in mind that, as Agamben's translator notes, the word "power" in English renders the Italian term Potenza which has its opposing correlate in Potere. Potenza corresponds to the Latin potentia (potential), and thereby signifies not the constituted (and implicitly centralized) and established organization of power (Potere), but "potentiality as well as with decentralized or mass conceptions of force or strength" (Ibid, 143). 05 Ibid. 06 Ibid. 07 Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, trans. M. Sullivan and M. Whitsitt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), 1995 (1985): 96. 08 Ibid, 97. 09 Ibid, 98. 10 Agamben, Language and Death, 105. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. Since what is excluded by the community or society is simultaneously assumed by the society as its immemorial past, the ground of its tradition, exclusion is not simple exclusion but is rather a form of included exclusion which will become central to Agamben's discussion of politics and the sovereign exception in later books such as Homo Sacer. 13 Agamben will later reject the ambivalence of the sacred in favour of the repeated application of the sovereign decision as a primordial and specifically political foundation of community. 14 Agamben, Language and Death, 105. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid, 106. 17 Ibid, original emphasis. 18 Ibid, 105. 19 Ibid, 106. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. In *Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis", an essay that appeared almost contemporaneously with Language and Death, Agamben suggests that the self-grasping movement he proposes, through which language grasps its ungrounded (free) taking place through the infancy of the subject, has more than a little in common with both Hegel's and Heidegger's attempts to think the ground of history. In place of eventually arriving at the absolute Idea that reveals itself in terms of what Hegel calls an "original word", which for Agamben suggests either an animal voice (at least on its Kojeveian interpretation) or a glossolalia, "a word whose meaning has been forgotten, an immemorial human word that has exhausted all its possibilities of meaning", Agamben proposes that "what is at issue here [is] a 83 language that, while remaining human and alive, dwells in itself—a language no longer destined to grammatical and historical transmission, a language that, as the universal and novel language of redeemed humanity, coincides without residue with human activity and praxis" (126-27) See *Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis, in Potentialities, 116-137. It should be obvious that such a conception of "redeemed humanity" owes much more to Benjamin than to Hegel, despite the similarities with the latter.
84 Chapter Two: On The Threshold Between Heidegger and Benjamin
The discussion of language and the nascent biopolitical paradigm of sacrificial violence will have already suggested Agamben's reliance on the work of Heidegger (with whom he studied in the late 1960s), and to Benjamin (of whose Gesamtausgabe he is the Italian editor). Agamben's portrayal of the Western philosophical approach to language reveals a pure intention to signify prior to all content, an intention in the form of a Voice that is negative in a double sense: from the perspective of the tradition itself, the Voice is an origin without issue, but from "beyond" the tradition it reveals the simultaneous obscuration of something removed from the light of presence (here the animal's natural or non-intentional voice). It would be easy to show that this analysis draws extensively on the later Heidegger's articulation of a fundamental negativity bound up with the origin of Western culture, one that troubles the notion of origin developed by this culture in which it thinks being as emerging into the light of presence. Likewise, Agamben's understanding of infancy as an experience of passivity in the face of a non-intentional life prior to speech reveals a close affinity both with Heidegger's desire to think the origin more originally than it can be thought by metaphysics (which as we saw, pulls up short, retreats in the face of the non-subjective), and with Benjamin's idea of language as pure medium, as a self-transmitting that differs within itself to produce the human subject of language.
Tracing these motifs of inspiration in Agamben's thought runs the risk of appearing to be a mere academic exercise in erudition for its own sake, an impression Agamben's
85 own thought sometimes seems to give. As Agamben warns his readers, however, apropos of a discussion of Heidegger as teacher, "so as to be able to write, so as to become an inspiration also for us, the teacher had to smother his inspiration, to come to terms with it".1 The tension in this passage is between inspiration, the Muse which inspires thought while remaining hidden from it, and the demands of communicability, in other words, temporality, and in the final analysis, the possibility of history. This is why the "extinguishing of inspiration" can take no other form than "the exposition of the
Muse: the idea".2 Indeed the title of the book in which this passage appears—The Idea of
Prose—suggests as much, setting up a kind of fractal self-resemblance between the levels of writing in the book between the fragmentary part and the whole comprised of such fragments, yet taking on a sense that is not reducible to any of the fragments it contains.
The very idea of Prose suggests a different relation to time than that portended by its opposite, Poetry. The former is the place of temporality and history, the rhythm of events, even while the latter evokes the inspirational and hermetic interiority of the
Muse.3
Perhaps such a reading is going "too far" if pressed into the service of an interpretive heuristic, and yet there is an undeniable parallel between the juxtaposition of the Muse of poetic inspiration and the expositional and historical rhythm of prose on the one hand and
Heidegger's turn from history to poetry and Benjamin's preoccupation with the communicability of the idea in and as historical event on the other. Even if it would be a vain pursuit to attempt to actually separate out these aspects, since as Agamben specifies,
86 the idea of language is for him, as it was for Plato, "neither poetry nor prose, but their middle term", this does not preclude the possibility of a greater relative emphasis on one side over the other. From this perspective, it will be a question in this chapter of finding a relative emphasis in Agamben's writing that favours Benjamin over Heidegger, while certainly never going as far as an outright subordination of one to the other. The importance of locating this relative emphasis, quite beyond the issue of erudition, is that the weighting of such influence on Agamben's writing acts as a kind of rebus through which to view the latter's work as a whole. The chapter at hand plays an important role in this study because, while simultaneously looking back to the prior chapter on language, showing Agamben's reading of the tradition and his attempt to go beyond it through the concept of infancy, this chapter also sheds further light on those interpretive strategies already encountered. However, the present chapter also allows Agamben's subsequent moves in relation to the political and the messianic attempt to move beyond metaphysical sovereignty to be deciphered with respect to the theoretical index drawn here to the work of Heidegger and Benjamin. In terms of the dissertation's argumentative structure, it is important to be able to locate a certain relative weighting in
Agamben's writings on politics towards a conception of historical specificity following the expositional powers of prose rather than remaining within the inspirational thought of poetry; it is this relative weighting that will render Agamben's attempt to deal with specific events more decipherable. As we have seen, while Agamben's inclusion of specific historico-political events is what makes his work particularly distinctive, it is
87 also what has caused much confusion among many of his readers. Being able to track the influence of Heidegger and Benjamin will do much to alleviate that confusion.
Given this set of priorities, this chapter will proceed on the basis of a fairly straightforward thesis: that Agamben's work is the site of a shift of emphasis between
Heidegger and Benjamin, a claim that the following chapters will substantiate more fully.
This claim should not be taken to suggest that there is a slow but steady eclipse of
Heidgger's influence in relation to Benjamin's, but rather that Heidegger's usefulness in approaching concrete political events will be rather more limited than Benjamin's insistence on historical legibility as redemption from history; because of this, Agamben comes to crucially rely on Benjamin in these political discussions. This first claim about a shift of emphasis as Agamben moves more toward political events depends upon a second claim, namely, that Heidegger's work remains for Agamben still too bound up with the tradition which it purports to "overcome", that Heidegger has gone as far as possible down the road of thinking yet without entirely removing himself from the paradigm of the Voice. What is needed is not simply thought, but a method that focuses on historical events; and for the latter Agamben turns to Benjamin. In Benjamin we find the theory of Ideas that serves as Agamben's reference-point for the Idea of language which remains Agamben's reference-point throughout his work, not to mention the focus on actual historical events that provide for the Idea an index of political content.
To establish these claims, I will proceed as follows. First I will show Agamben's reliance on the thought of the later Heidegger for the reading of the metaphysical
88 tradition we encountered in the previous chapter and, in part, for the idea of infancy that
serves as an alternative to it. In this way, Agamben reads Heidegger "backwards",
moving from the later thought on the gift of being as revealing-concealing toward a
retrospective analysis of Dasein in terms of this same structure of revealing-concealing,
Eigentlich and Uneigentlich. Secondly, I will demonstrate that although Agamben will
endorse the direction of Heidegger's attempt to think beyond the tradition, he will
express strong reservations about the latter's tacit repetition of this tradition in his
poeticizing thinking. Thirdly, then, I will turn to Agamben's reading of Benjamin's
thought with respect to language and history, attempting to elucidate the role played by
the crucial notions of language as communicability or pure medium and historical
legibility as a theory of Ideas and in the theory of the dialectical image that is its
development. Finally, I will attempt to show how Benjamin can be understood to move
beyond the sort of impasse Agamben still detects in Heidegger's thinking.
2.1 Later Heidegger, Dasein and the Revealing-Concealing (of) Origin
As any reader who knows even a little Heidegger by now realizes, it is quite impossible
to read Agamben's account of the ontological splitting of language into the planes of
content and revelation without it bringing to mind Heidegger's account of the ontological
difference between beings and being. If revelation is the very openness of tradition, a
"there is" of unconcealment allowing any content to be presented at all, this openness is
virtually identical to what Heidegger describes as the dis-closure or a-lethia of being through which beings first appear as such. In his early works, most notably in Being and
89 Time, Heidegger defines the alethia as a form of revelation "taking entities out of their hiddenness and letting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness)", as truth.4 That such uncovering or disclosure is closely connected to the logos sets up a close correspondence between being and language, which first reveals, opens, or uncovers beings in the truth of their being. Heidegger argues that the notion of disclosure provides a more original understanding of truth, conceptually and also temporally prior to the philosophical tradition's conception of truth as the adequate correspondence between repraesentans and repraesentatio. In the Heidegger of Being and Time, such opening or disclosure already implies its opposite, namely lethe, concealing or forgetting, as a necessary part of revealing; here Heidegger's definition of phenomenology as an attempt to uncover or discover beings in their being is especially significant. For Heidegger, in fact, disclosure is but a modified closure, a-lethia a modified lethe, so that the latter has a certain priority over the former. In this period of Heidegger's work a certain "heroic subject" is never far from the scene of fundamental ontology, and it is up to the daring of this still rather classical philosophical subject to ensure that revealing takes precedence over concealment: "Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery".6 This is the Heidegger of resolve, the Heidegger who but a few years later will counsel the university community in the necessity of self-assertive willing for the "guardians of the destiny of the German people".7
90 Many years later, from the perspective of the so-called turn or Kehre in his thought,
Heidegger will abandon fundamental ontology as still too oriented toward the metaphysical subject, attempting to think being "without regard to its being grounded in terms of beings". In the lecture "On Time and Being", which provides an exemplary treatment of these changes in his approach, Heidegger will again claim the same priority of concealing in relationship to unconcealing that belongs to the phenomena which he now terms the gift or the es gibt. Just as Agamben claims that language, as the necessary condition for the transmission of tradition, retreats "behind" its content or what it allows to be understood and remembered, Heidegger emphasizes that in the giving of the gift,
"the giving holds itself back and withdraws" in favour of what is manifested, sent, or given,9 As in Agamben's account of tradition, for Heidegger sending makes history epochal in the Greek sense of the epoche, meaning to close off or to hold back, resonating with the phenomenological procedure of "bracketing" or reducing things to their appearance. Later Heidegger's procedure remains phenomenological to the extent that he understands its approach as the attempt to bring to light what is hidden or obscured. Yet in the case of Western history conceived as metaphysics, a history of "epochs" presents itself through an appearance in which each span of time unfolds in the wake of a fundamental withdraw or withholding of the es gibt. Paradoxically, what phenomenology is to bring to light is nothing visible, but a primary obscuration or originary concealing that is itself concealed by metaphysics. If, as Heidegger comments,
"what is appropriate shows itself in the belonging together of the epochs" in which "the
91 original sending of Being as presence is more and more obscured in different ways", such obscuring must be understood on the basis of a withdrawing that cannot be grasped in metaphysical terms.10 This is because metaphysics from its very beginning thinks being only in terms of its coming to presence, in terms of what appears, beings taken as a whole. Yet for later Heidegger, "In the beginning of Western thinking, Being is thought, but not the "It gives" as such. The latter withdraws in favor of the gift which It gives.
That gift is thought and conceptualized from then on exclusively as Being with regard to beings".11 In the "It" that fails to be thought by metaphysics there is an absence or withdrawing that exceeds the categories of the logical alternatives of either/or: either present being or not-present being (absence); and this is because the "It" eludes or exceeds the category of presence altogether.
This brief gloss allows us to understand the complicated structure of what Heidegger describes as the Ereignis or Event of Appropriation. Appropriation, or its event, in contrast to metaphysics, prioritizes the dimension of concealing or withdrawal over any possibility of presence. Appropriation is not just an event's "happening" in the sense of a determined occurrence in a chain of events, nor is it even the initial event in such a chain, but is according to Heidegger "that which makes any occurrence possible".12 The
Ereignis or event of appropriation is disturbingly unheimlich in the sense that it cannot be grasped as such, it remains concealed or in excess of the terms of a situation, and yet there is only a situation because of the event's taking place. Simultaneously legible and illegible, appropriation appropriates itself, its very place, so that it is displaced by what
92 seems to take its place, the gift that it gives. But what seems to take its place is still an aspect or dimension of itself, its legible face possible only on the basis of what remains hidden or illegible. Such displacement of the origin is then nothing but the origin: origin as self-displacement, withdrawing or (as Heidegger calls it) ex-appropriation [Enteignis].
Thus, Heidegger points out, we are misled by propositional grammar if we come to think of appropriation in terms of something that "happens", that can be placed in front of us and represented. Since appropriation is equally ex-appropriation, since it is only graspable in terms of its withdrawing or ungraspability, "Appropriation neither is, nor is
Appropriation there... What remains to be said? Only this: Appropriation appropriates".13 What the original event "is", (if it is anything at all), is an event consisting of (self) difference "itself, the excluded middle freed of all exclusive decisions and divisions of the type "either/or".1
This brief reading of Heidegger's late work supposes a conceptual continuity with the early work, in fact reading the former in light of the latter might "correct" the allegiance to a version of metaphysical subjectivity canvassed above. This strategy of reading Heidegger as it were back-to-front—a strategy Agamben shares with Jean-Luc
Nancy and other recent French philosophers—is prominently on display in one of
Agamben's most detailed essays on Heidegger called "The Passion of Facticity".15 In this essay, Agamben reads Heidegger's conception of Dasein's thrownness into the world through Heidegger's early notion of facticity but as inflected through the Janus-faced notion of the Ereignis, presenting us with a sense of human being irreducibly doubled.
93 This doubling, as we will see shortly, allows Agamben to provide an "anthropology" of sorts in which the idea of infancy as irreducible and passive potentiality takes shape.
Agamben begins his analysis of Heidegger's conception of facticity by suggesting that the latter is designed to redraw the boundaries between the (neo-Kantian) categories of subject and object that had found their way into Husserl's attempt sharply to distinguish between an intentional consciousness and its intended content. In turn, what eventually became the infamous subject/object dualism could be traced back to the distinctiones introduced by Descartes between the substances of res extensa and res cogitans. On Agamben's analysis facticity combines two modes of human existence that are irreducible in Heidegger's phenomenology of human existence without positing a new dualism. On the one hand, Dasein must be present in the world in precisely the sense commonly designated as "objective"; Heidegger uses the term Vorhandenheit or
"presence-at-hand" to convey this sense. But on the other hand, Dasein is never simply an objective presence, a simple Vorhandensein, a bare present-at-hand thing, because
Dasein is also the being that is concerned for and with the inner-worldly objects among which it finds itself. About this contrast Agamben remarks that:
facticity presents us with the paradox of an existential that is also a categorial and a "fact" {Faktum) that is not factual. Neither "present-at- hand" (vorhanderi) nor "ready-to-hand" (zuhcmderi), neither pure presence nor object of use, facticity is a specific mode of Being, one whose conceptualization marks Heidegger's reformulation of the question of Being in an essential manner.16
One consequence of Heidegger's new idea of facticity is that it captures two phenomenally separate aspects of human being: that of being "there" in the world prior to 94 anything like a subjective intention, and thus marking a dimension of passivity or exposure prior to taking up a position with respect to the active/passive alternative, while at the same time implying the necessity of response or affection, of taking up some kind of relationship to this passivity or exposure in the form of a subjective mode of being.
Subjectivity is not the "author" of experience for Heidegger, according to Agamben, but is instead a response to that which is prior. But what is prior is not just something like natural causality understood as a series of higher order causes bringing about a given human being's situation in time and space. Such a view would in fact conceive of human being on the model of an inner-worldly object in a causal system of objects; and this is precisely the view Heidegger is trying to displace.
Instead of abstractly conceptualizing facticity in terms of an element in a causal system of objects, Heidegger maintains that mood [Stimmung] is the primordial way facticity is experienced by Dasein. As Agamben points out here, "what characterizes this disclosure [of Dasein in terms of mood] is not the full light of the origin but precisely irreducible facticity and opacity", something the objective schema of "fact" is largely designed to overcome.17 Dasein does not so much "have" moods as find itself in them, and it is this quality of "finding oneself in a mood that reflects the situation of what
Heidegger refers to as Dasein's "thrownness", the experience that our "being-there" [i.e. our literal Da-sein]- inescapably exceeds its grasp, and in relation to which what we commonly think of as (subjective) agency is always posterior. As Heidegger articulates this (in a passage also quoted at length in Agamben's text), "This characteristic of
95 Dasein's Being—this "that it is"—is veiled in its "whence" and "whither," yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the "thrownness" of this entity into its
"there"...The expression "thrownness" is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over".18 The kind of being belonging to Dasein is invariably the kind of being that, as "moody", exhibits its thrownness, and hence its facticity.
According to Agamben, the structure of thrownness grounded in facticity heralds both the necessity and the possibility for Dasein to take upon itself a way of being as a response to the pre-subjective facticity of its thrownness; Agamben utilizes the language of "guise" to explicate this idea. As he writes, "for Dasein, quality... is not a "property" but solely a "possible guise" (mogliche Weise) to be.. .in which Dasein must be its Weise, its fashion of Being, and in which Being and its guise are both distinguishable and the same".19 The reason quality or guise cannot be a property is because it is not something
"innate" or already belonging to Dasein, but is derived from thrownness as (one of the) possible ways to be that are presented to Dasein in and through its facticity. But the guises through which Dasein comes to inhabit or take over its thrownness are also equally its disguises, since Dasein cannot be reduced to or equated with them, even if it also becomes them in a way that is not simply exterior to the sense of who or what one is.
Taking up the theme of concealing as an indelible feature of every revelation, Agamben argues that Dasein is a being that is fundamentally opaque in the sense that nothing it becomes can ever fully catch up with or be equal to its original facticity or thrownness; or, put more dramatically by Agamben, Dasein remains "disguised—hidden away in
96 what opens it, concealed in what exposes it, and darkened by its own light". Because of such opacity or concealedness, Dasein can never simply assume an identity (although this inability at the same time enables all identification) - it is always ecstatic in the sense of remaining beyond, outside, or exterior to itself. Dasein's non-coincidence and opacity with respect to itself is the feature of ontological facticity that indicates to Agamben
Heidegger's profound re-thinking of the tradition of philosophical subjectivity away from the terms of the tradition in which self-sameness or self-identity only afterwards encounters the non-self-identical.
Heidegger's rethinking of subjectivity as Dasein also portends a fundamental reversal in the traditional prioritizing of the actual over the potential, for facticity just is what is meant by saying that Dasein "is" its possibility for being over and above any actual way it has become or guise it has assumed. As Heidegger declares early on in
Being and Time, what he means by the phrase "The essence of Dasein lies in its existence" is that "those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not
"properties" present-at-hand...they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that...So when we designate this entity with the term "Dasein", we are expressing not its "what" (as if it were a table, house or tree) but its Being", by which is meant nothing but its possible ways of being.22 In other words, it is because Dasein's possibilities comprise its being, because its essence lies only in its existence or its Da sein, that there can be anything like a personal or individual (subjective) sense to
Dasein's being; once again the same is constituted on the basis of its self-difference
97 rather than from out of the self-same. As Heidegger remarks, what is "an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine", that is, the possible ways that this being might be.23 To be even more precise here, the "in each case" at issue marks the fact of
Dasein's non-self-coincidence that turns up only because Dasein is an entity whose being is composed of nothing but the possible ways presented by its being, which, as we have already noted, are not pre-existing properties. As Francois Raffoul comments in his masterful study of Heidegger's concept of subjectivity, "Dasein is "mine" because it is delivered over to itself each time. Each time, the Being of the Dasein is given to it as its own. Time, here, is no longer natural time, but the true principle of individuation. I am time, better, I am my time"; this time is nothing but the existence of a certain set of possibilities "stretched" between the poles of birth and death.24 In this time of the "I am", each Dasein is confronted with the "Stroke of existence, each time interrupted and each time renewed" that "constitutes the Selfhood of the I, its singular, unique and identical character".25 Dasein can only be its "mine" on the basis of a time that is nothing but its possibilities, and hence bears within it a structure of on-going self-differentiation.
While it would be too easy to interpret the notion of the "each time" in a
"humanistic"—perhaps even heroic—manner, as the project of assembling a "oneself out of the circumstances to which one is initially consigned in order to create a permanent and stable self, Agamben emphasizes that self-grasping or self-assembly is but a secondary consideration. Emphasizing that Dasein can never catch up with itself, with the situation in which its guises are always disguises that can never come to truly
98 constitute a self-identical essence, Agamben wants to hold onto the dimension of possibility as a kind of "post-humanistic" surplus beyond all narratives of self- construction. Accordingly, Agamben describes Dasein as a kind of "original fetish" that
"cannot ever appropriate the being it is, the being to which it is irreparably consigned".26
In a section of his Coming Community, Agamben writes that the irreparable is "not properly a modality of being, but it is the being that is always already given in modality,
97 that is its modalities. It is not thus, but rather it is its thus". The sense of "mineness"
Agamben is construing here is not that of self-identity but something that always operates
"alongside" it, quietly providing its very basis. Each Dasein, according to Agamben, has no essence because it is nothing other than its modalities, which hover over it "something like a halo", a swarm of possibilities it never "is" but which it can only potentially assume. For Agamben this insistence on the irreparable is reflected clearly in
Heidegger's claim that Dasein's being consists of an originary impropriety. In Being and
Time, Agamben claims, "several passages could be said to imply the primacy of the improper": in particular the much-celebrated sections on Dasein's authentic being are 90 described "solely by means of an analysis of impropriety". The key passage which
Agamben cites contains Heidegger's claim with respect to the status of the authentic relative to the inauthentic. The latter writes that "authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon".30 But precisely for this reason, Heidegger asserts,
"Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself. This passage only 99 makes sense because of facticity and irreparability, because Dasein is first of all thrown into a world and an historical situation over which it does not preside but which comes passionately (in the etymological sense of something one undergoes or suffers through) to matter; Dasein's guises, its manners of being that are available will not constitute the simple choices of an existing subject from a number of pre-existing possibilities, but instead constitute guises it must assume and which bring the subject about; yet even the assumption of certain possibilities in the constitution of the subject do not exhaust
Dasein's possibilities of being its there. Authentic existence can only consist, as
Agamben puts it, in "seiz[ing] hold of its impropriety alone, mastering an alienation and becoming attentive to a distraction".32 Authenticity for Heidegger, on Agamben's reading, can have "no content other than inauthentic existence; the proper is nothing other
•5-2 than the apprehension of the improper".
Despite Heidegger's vacillation on this last claim, particularly evident during his period valorizing subjective self-assertion, Agamben maintains that the primacy of the improper—which is nothing but the primacy of the irreparable or of the possible—is in the final analysis affirmed throughout Heidegger's work, coming to the fore in the latter's re-articulation of potential as something fundamentally passive. As Agamben argues,
"Insofar as it exists factically (that is, insofar as it must be its manners of Being), Dasein always exists in the mode of the possible: in the excess of possibilities with respect to beings and, at the same time, in a lack of possibilities with respect to them, since its possibilities appear as radical incapacities in the face of the very being to which it is 100 always already consigned". In establishing this point, Agamben refers to Heidegger's attempt in the "Letter on Humanism" to understand potentiality or capacity in a way other than as construed by metaphysics.35 Traditionally, Heidegger says, the subject is placed in the position of actuality, and it is on the basis of actuality that potentiality is conceived, an understanding going back to Aristotle and formalized unthinkingly since. In attacking the reception of his work in France, and in particular reacting against the radical humanism of Sartre's philosophy of subjective freedom, Heidegger attempts to show up traditional humanism's dependence on metaphysics. At an important point early in the discussion, Heidegger attempts to articulate the relationship between being and possibility in a way that recalls Agamben's discussion of Being and Time above:
Being is the "quiet power" of the favoring-enabling, that is, of the possible. Of course, our words moglich [possible] and Moglichkeit [possibility], under the dominance of "logic" and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are thought on the basis of a definite—the metaphysical—interpretation of Being as actus and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak of the "quiet power of the possible" I do not mean the possible of a merely represented possibilitas, nor potentia as the essentia of an actus of existentia; rather, I mean Being itself. 6
In contrast to the metaphysical understanding in which potential or capacity must be viewed as the potential action of an existing being (or subject) in its actuality—and whose power is thereby available to be actualized as a kind of property even if it has yet to be presented—Heidegger is referring to Being as the event of self-showing that makes
101 possible the founded order of actual beings (with their various capacities understood in the traditional sense of "properties").
In the "Passion of Facticity", Agamben argues that it is early Heidegger's study of
Aristotle that allows the insight that "All potentiality...is impotentiality, and all capacity...is essentially passivity". A few years before his essay on Heidegger appeared, Agamben had given a lecture on Aristotelian potentiality that appears to follow closely the view taken by Heidegger in his early lectures on Aristotle (which are cited by
Agamben in the essay on "Facticity" as justification for attributing the idea of passive potentiality to Heidegger).38 Going back to the beginning of the tradition, Heidegger, followed closely by Agamben, locates a moment of instability in Aristotle's account of potentiality allowing it to emerge without being immediately subordinated to the metaphysical prioritization of actuality or presence. According to Agamben in
"Potentiality", the initial sense of the potential is, as Aristotle claims, that "Every potentiality is at one and the same time a potentiality for the opposite; for, while that which is not capable of being in a subject cannot be present, everything that is capable of being may possibly not be actual". In this passage, at least according to
Heidegger/Agamben, Aristotle opens the door to an excluded middle between the alternatives of being or non-being, since it is possible for something to exist in the form of potential, that is, for it to have a kind of non-actual being. For Aristotle having a capacity, before we even get to the question of its actuality, involves a question about the nature of the curious being of potentiality. Here it is clear that every capacity that might
102 come to exist in actuality itself has the capacity (or the potential) to be actual or non- actual, irrespective of whether or not it is actualized, for that "which is capable of being may either be or not be; the same thing, then, is capable both of being and of not being".40 According to Agamben, Aristotle's conception of potentiality, "in its originary structure, dynamis, potentiality, maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its own steresis, its own non-Being. This relation constitutes the essence of potentiality".41
Agamben goes on to consider what it might mean to maintain a relation to non- being, since something capable of such a relation is both being and non-being.
According to Agamben, Aristotle sought to understand this problem in relation to the issue of how privation or lack, the relation to non-being, might be said to have being or to exist. In the De Anima, Aristotle considers this problem more fully in relation to the senses. Aristotle first asks why it is that "we have no sensation of the senses themselves; that is, why they give no sensation apart from external objects, although they contain...elements...which...excite sensation".42 His answer: "the faculty of sensation has no actual but only potential existence. So it is like the case of fuel, which does not burn by itself without something to set fire to it; for otherwise it would burn by itself'.43
However, the only way we might experience this potential of the senses on their own
(and so know potential as such) is through their privation or lack in a situation where they are not actually being used. In such a situation, according to Aristotle, far from simply ceasing to function, the senses sense their potentiality in the form of privation. As
Aristotle writes, in a passage also quoted by Agamben in his lecture "On Potentiality", "if
103 perception by vision is seeing, and that which is seen either is color or has color, then if one is to see that which sees [i.e. sight itself], it follows that what primarily sees will possess color. It is therefore obvious that the phrase "perceiving by vision" has not merely one meaning; for, even when we do not see, we discern darkness and light by vision".44 For Agamben, Aristotle's claim suggests that it is possible to understand what it means to say that senses in their privation exist as (im)potential: "When we do not see
(that is, when our vision is potential), we nevertheless distinguish darkness from light; we see darkness".45 The sense of sight possesses the two modalities of "light and darkness, actuality and potentiality".46 In this sense, to see darkness is not just to be deprived of light, as though darkness were merely the default of the ability to see light. Instead, seeing darkness is the existence of vision's non-being, not just as something lacking but as having a form of existence of its own. Strangely, incapacity, capacity in its "deficient" mode, is not simply privative, since capacities are in some way also capable of their incapacity, they are somehow borne alongside and even through capacity. That is, according to Agamben, capacity or potential "is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality".47 The priority of the
"negative" side of potential is on display here, since the alethia of actuality, of light, is a modified form of the primacy of "darkness", lethe, or impotentiality on which the former depends.
However, this leaves incomplete a consideration of the relation between the two sides of potentiality. In working through this relation Agamben provides an unorthodox
104 reading of a key passage in Aristotle's Book Theta of the Metaphysics (which also fascinated Heidegger), where Aristotle discusses the problem of how it is that the impotential becomes potential to be actualized. The context of the passage is Aristotle's dispute with the Magarian School, who seem to have espoused an extreme (or vulgar) form of material realism. As Aristotle summarizes their position, "a thing can act only when it is acting, and when it is not acting it cannot act"; Aristotle criticizes this view by claiming "evidently potentiality and actuality are different; but these views make potentiality and actuality the same".48 In contrast, Aristotle wants to preserve the existence of the potential apart from its actuality, so that "it is possible that a thing may be capable of being and not be, and capable of not being and yet be, and similarly with the other kinds of predicate...a thing is capable of doing something if there is nothing impossible in its having the actuality of that of which it is said to have the capacity".49
Agamben's gloss on this last line is given as follows: "A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential".50
According to Agamben, the way this last line is often interpreted attributes to
Aristotle the trivial point that "What is possible (or potential) is that with respect to which nothing is impossible (or impotential)".51 In seeking to demonstrate the radical independence and priority of the potential in the form of impotential, Agamben interprets this passage as follows: "if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind
105 actuality but fully passes into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality". For Agamben's
Aristotle, in other words, impotentiality, far from being subordinate to the being of actuality, is capable of "surviving" its actualization, and therefore remains capable of being grasped or experienced as such.53 Impotentiality, in Heidegger's terms, "is passive potentiality, but not a passive potentiality that undergoes something other than itself; rather, it undergoes and suffers its own non-Being"; it is therefore also capable of being, and of being grasped as such.
Turning the issue of impotentiality back toward the theme of Dasein's existence as an issue that must be taken up, Agamben suggests that since "every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation", "human power...is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings... [because] human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality''\55 As we have seen with respect to Agamben's discussion of infancy in the previous chapter (and shedding additional light on it), human beings, having no essential nature, vocation, or destiny, are first of all characterized by impotentiality rather than by the discreet potential or capacity of specific performances. Human beings are the beings that are constituted by their relation to a fundamental passivity or incapacity, and which they must experience in order to become capable of this or that activity, just as the capacity for language and history is conditioned by the experience of infancy. For this reason, Agamben maintains, "The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality".56 Dasein, in other words, actually is its possibilities
106 because it is first of all capable of being incapable of them; its being is the being of thrownness.
There is a clear relationship here between Agamben's discussion of infancy and the idea of passion as passivity or what must be undergone in order to be. "Passion",
Agamben writes in "Passion of Facticity", "potentia passiva, is therefore the most radical experience of possibility at issue in Dasein: a capacity that is capable not only of potentiality (the manners of Being that are in fact possible), but also, and above all, of impotentiality".51 Freedom, Agamben argues following Heidegger, is not the property or the essence of a specific (actual) being, as the humanistic tradition would have it, but in the first instance is precisely the opposite, passion understood as "the experience of impotentiality, which is situated at the level of original facticity or "original dispersion""
CO outside of being conceived metaphysically as presence. The strange "humanism"
Heidegger is advancing in his "Letter on Humanism" portends that the Dasein of human being cannot be reduced either to actuality or potentiality (as metaphysically conceived), because the sort of freedom Heidegger has in mind (as Agamben puts it), permits "not only the possible but also the impossible, thus gathering together Dasein in its ground" of primary impropriety or dispersion.59
It is in the wake of this discussion of passive potentiality, situated in terms of
Dasein, through which Agamben moves to Heidegger's later work. Agamben argues that for Heidegger, getting free of metaphysics will consist in recognizing passive potential or impotential in its quality as dispersion and impropriety, rather than as an unlimited 107 mastery of humans over beings as a whole. From this perspective, the insight that
Ereignis consists equally of Enteignis now involves the corresponding understanding that originally, human authenticity or propriety consists of its inauthenticity and impropriety, that is, its potential for impotentiality. Agamben notes that "We know that Heidegger explains the word Ereignis on the basis of the term eigen [own] and understands it as
"appropriation," situating it with respect to Being and Time's dialectic of eigentlich and uneigentlich. But here it is a matter of an appropriation in which what is appropriated is neither something foreign that must become proper nor something dark that must be illuminated".60 Instead, the metaphysical horizon is breached when the abandonment of being is accepted in the form of its concealment, dispersion or impropriety, leaving metaphysics alone. As Heidegger suggests in "On Time and Being", if metaphysics consists of the sending of being as presence from out of its withdrawal and concealing, then thinking the original "source" of such sending—which we saw earlier could not be thought from within metaphysics— in terms of appropriation, that is, thinking withdrawal and abandonment as its essential feature, would be no longer to think within the destiny of metaphysics. Having reached the end of metaphysics by thinking its original feature as sending in withdrawal, metaphysics is "transcended", but only in a certain way. Such
"transcending" would not locate a new term that would subsume previous metaphysical terms, but would now locate thought in "the dimension of concealment itself, bringing the latter into the open or the light of thought, but as concealed, that is, as having nothing more to reveal.61 Appropriation does not appropriate something to be illuminated, but is
108 only an awareness of concealment as such. Agamben points out that in order to be free of metaphysical destinies, that is, to cease arranging the world to reflect a transcending principle (of whatever type), "what human beings must appropriate here is not a hidden thing but the very fact of hiddenness, Dasein's very impropriety and facticity".62 To properly appropriate impropriety would consist in being "properly improper, to abandon oneself to the inappropriable. Withdrawal, lethe, must come to thinking as such".63
Human existence would come to the end of historical destinies that take the form of successive historical guises, and instead would inhabit the region of impropriety
"properly", as a kind of dwelling. Existing without destiny, without historical tasks,
"Being (the possible) has truly exhausted its historical possibilities, and Dasein, who is capable of its own incapacity, attains its own extreme manner: the immobile force of the possible".64
Agamben's reading of Heidegger's conception (via Aristotle) of the potentiality of
Dasein sheds further light on the notion of infancy introduced in the previous chapter.
Infancy is situated by Agamben as an original potential-for-language as that aspect or dimension of human being that can fall outside subjective (linguistic) experience in the form of dispersion or impropriety. Yet the priority of such dispersion is obviously not simply negative in the sense of something lacking; rather, it is only through this "lack" or impotential that human being becomes capable at all. But as we have also noted with respect to the paradigm of sacrifice, the point of such an analysis is not to supplement human capacity so as to make it all the more capable or powerful—any such move, like
109 the attempt to subsume Heideggerian lethe in some higher concept, would be the most metaphysical of gestures. In the case of the sacrificial paradigm this would be disastrous, since it would effectively justify the violence of foundation, even if in supposedly higher forms of community. For Agamben, as for later Heidegger, recognizing human infancy in the form of its authentic impotentiality is to grasp human passivity in a way that allows the ungrounded character of human existence to be accepted, rather than being covered up by an essentialist mythology. For human beings to grasp their own impotentiality, their own infancy, would allow them to attain a form of existence described in
Agamben's Coming Community as "whatever being", where "The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to some common property
(to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is".65 In other words, as we have seen in the context of both infancy and impotentiality, if "Human beings do not originally dwell in the proper", neither do they simply "inhabit the improper and the ungrounded" as a sort of intolerable void; instead of this false choice between essentialism and nihilism, Agamben suggests that beyond metaphysics human beings are properly abandoned to their impropriety, their being without foundation.66
Although Agamben's reading of Heidegger seems to endorse the latter's understanding of the appropriation of concealment, taking it up and using it to think the human appropriation of language in infancy, other texts make clear that this endorsement is ambivalent. Agamben's ambivalence comes from the simple fact that for Heidegger
110 the dimension of the "there is" that gives being from out of its withdrawal remains—even for the step beyond metaphysics—concealed, and to just that extent, negative. In other words, Agamben is not satisfied that later Heidegger has freed himself sufficiently from the Western metaphysical tradition, and as we shall see in particular, from the tradition of the removed voice characteristic of the sacrificial paradigm. It is to an analysis of
Agamben's critique of Heidegger that we now turn as a necessary stepping stone to a discussion of his move toward Benjamin.
2.2 Heidegger's Negativity of Origin
A feature of Agamben's reading of the Western philosophical tradition as grounded on the negativity of the Voice is that it includes Heidegger's interpretation of the revelation of being from out of the "there is" of concealing withdrawal. If the Western tradition establishes itself on the basis of something already accomplished, namely, the removal of the animal voice in favour of the pure intention of the Voice, it will turn out that
Heidegger's understanding of language not only does not depart from this tradition, but actually reinforces it. What this suggests is that Agamben's interpretation of the tradition does not exclude Heidegger, positioning him as somehow the first non-metaphysical thinker, but instead serves to position him as its most acute representative; positioning
Heidegger in this way effectively situates him the way Heidegger situates Nietzsche: not as the thinker who overcomes the tradition, but as the one who simply articulates its internal limit. If my view is correct, then it will be possible to understand exactly why
111 Agamben's appropriation of Heidegger remains ambiguous, and why the movement to
Benjamin's work becomes necessary.
As Agamben shows in Language and Death, not only does Heidegger fail to overcome the metaphysical tradition's negative ground, for Heidegger negativity takes the form of an abyssal silence even more radical than the negativity of the Voice: in the metaphysics of the Voice there is still some kind of connection to the natural voice as something living, as a potentiality of life. Agamben argues that while negativity is locatable in both Hegel and Heidegger, the latter's conception of the negativity of the
Voice attempts to short-circuit the dialectic between being and non-being and thus found being more originally than is possible in metaphysics. "If, already for Hegel", Agamben claims "language was not simply the [natural] voice of man, but the articulation of this voice in "the voice of consciousness" through a Voice of death, for Heidegger there is an abyss between the living being (with his voice) and man (with his language): language is
en not the voice of the living man". This understanding of Heidegger's work accords well with the brief reading of the "Letter on Humanism" we provided in the Introduction to this work; Heidegger there argues that any attempt to think the human on the basis of the animal, even if its purpose is to immediately differentiate the latter from the former, is still to remain within metaphysics. For Heidegger, then, leaving metaphysics behind involves thinking the human and the animal as absolutely separate. It is thus necessary to examine this juxtaposition in more detail, if only to ascertain the importance to Agamben of Heidegger's attempt to ground language beyond the metaphysical tradition as well as 112 Agamben's ultimate rejection of this attempt as inadequate precisely because of its intensification rather than overcoming of metaphysics.
Agamben argues in Language and Death that Hegel presents the "classically" metaphysical transition from the animal voice to the (human) Voice through the removal of the former in the negativity of violent death. In violent death, Hegel suggests, the animal's cry of anguish is no longer simply an expression of its immediate being, but whose expression is already beyond itself, containing its other (death) within its life, its non-being within its being as its own. Commenting on Hegel's statement in the Jenenser
Realphilosophie that "Every animal finds a voice in its violent death", Agamben writes,
"The voice, as expression and memory of the animal's death, is no longer a mere, natural sign that finds its other outside of itself. And although it is not yet meaningful speech, it already contains within itself the power of the negative and of memory...In dying, the animal finds its voice, it exalts the soul in one voice, and, in this act, it expresses and preserves itself as dead".6* The voice of the animal in Hegel's text is thus the voice of death (in the objective sense of the genitive), since the animal's cry of anguish is no longer the indication of a merely natural being, but is already expressing the pure intentional negativity of the removed voice. Here the sound of the voice alone is also the voice of death as a pure remove from the positive order of nature. The lesson of this for
Hegel is that in human language, in a closely proximate but also slightly different way, the Voice which acts as the ontological foundation for human language is the sustained condition of human speaking. In human language, death, in the dialectical form of the
113 sublation of merely natural indication, is given a permanent place in human speech; humans are the beings who, in being removed from nature, speak in the place of death as the negating force of Spirit. In sum, according to Agamben, this is how Hegel understands the transition from nature to culture, from animal voice to human language:
"human language, articulating and arresting the pure sound of this voice (the vowel)— that is to say, articulating and arresting the voice of death—become[s] the voice of consciousness, meaningful language" with its intentional signification.69
Now, when Agamben turns to Heidegger, he sees that things are immediately more complicated because the latter denies any sort of connection between the human voice in language and the natural voice of the living. As we have shown, the traditional philosophical definition of the human as the rational animal is too much a part of the metaphysical tradition of which Heidegger would be free. If for Heidegger the human being is to be rearticulated as Da-sein, as "being there", then as Agamben notes, "Unlike in Hegel, the living being, the animal, is the thing most estranged from Being-there, "the most difficult thing" for Being-there to conceive".70 For Heidegger, because an abyss lies between human language and the voice of the living being, in "Being Da, man is in
71 the place of language without having a voice". Agamben argues that since language is originary for Heidegger, one must look toward moods, the Stimmungen, for the presentation of the "fundamental existential mode" of Dasein's disclosure.72 In Being and Time Heidegger describes anxiety as the fundamental mood by which Dasein is brought before itself, where its being is disclosed to itself as already consigned to the Da 114 into which it is thrown, revealing its being as facticity. Agamben comments that "in revealing Dasein as always already thrown, [anxiety] unveils the fact that Dasein is not brought into its Da of its own accord", but is revealed as marked by an original passivity which it can never fully appropriate.73 Agamben maintains that dasein's realization of its thrownness in Heidegger's account is connected to human language as follows: "If we recall that Being-the-Da signifies the place of being in language... and that—on the other hand—for Heidegger language is not the [natural] voice of humanity, then we understand why Stimmung—by disclosing Da—reveals at the same time to Dasein, that it is never master of its ownmost being".74 In being consigned to its thrownness Dasein is at the same time consigned to a language that always already escapes it; Dasein "can never grasp the taking place of language, it can never be its Da (the pure instance, the event of language), without discovering that it is always already thrown and consigned to discourse".75 Dasein thus meets with a form of negativity, and thereby a structure of presupposition, more profound or abyssal than that figured in the Hegelian transition from natural voice to human speech, since for Heidegger, on Agamben's reading, the latter is absolutely isomorphic with respect to the living being of the animal.
This sense of consignment as being held into the open or into the revelation of being, yet only in the mode of a radical silence, becomes the object of critique in Agamben's subsequent discussion of the experience of the voice of conscience in Being and Time.
With Heidegger's thought "negativity is even more radical because it does not seem to rest on a removed voice; language is not the voice of Dasein, and Dasein, thrown in Da,
115 experiences the taking place of language as a nonplace (a Nirgends)". Accompanying the non-place of language in the fundamental Stimmung of anxiety is a silence which cannot be penetrated by speech since it is not even the trace of the natural voice. But at this point Agamben inquires whether Heidegger has in fact succeeded in breaking free of the linguistic presupposition of the removed voice characteristic of metaphysics by means of this more abyssal silence. Arguing that Heidegger indeed has not dispensed with the metaphysical problematic of the voice, Agamben turns to the call of conscience in Being and Time. He claims that the call of conscience, while remaining a "silent" call, is nevertheless a Voice in the sense of a removed voice. As Heidegger puts his claim, "The fact that what is called in the call has not been formulated in words, does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice, but merely indicates that our understanding of what is "called" is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication". Not an ontic content concerning beings, the call of conscience is first of all the advent of Dasein's being revealed to itself; the important thing about this to
Agamben is that "For Heidegger, what calls in the experience of the Voice is Dasein itself, from the depths of its loss in Stimmung. Having reached the limit, in its anxiety, of the experience of its being thrown, without a voice in the place of language, in its anxiety
Dasein finds another Voice, even if this is a Voice that calls only in the mode of silence". The silence of this Voice, its impossibility of ontic attribution, entails that conscience is what gives Dasein back to itself in its thrownness, allowing it to be its own negative foundation. The appropriation of Dasein's being through the silent call of a
116 Voice is thus more originary than the anxiety by which Dasein confronts the fact of its thrownness. As Agamben points out, "Without the call of the Voice, even the authentic decision...would be impossible, just as it would be impossible for Dasein to assume its ownmost and insuperable possibility: death".79 Yet it is in the very possibility of
Dasein's assumption of its death that the inner connection between death and the Voice is once again revealed. Agamben argues that "Only inasmuch as Dasein finds a Voice and lets itself be called by this Voice, can it accede to that Insuperable that is the possibility to not be Da, to not be the place of language", and thus to take its being over as thrown*0
In other words, "If Dasein is simply thrown without voice into the place of language, then it will never be able to rise above its having been thrown in Da and thus, it will never be able to authentically think death (which is precisely the possibility of not being the
Da)".81 It is only on condition of being able to think death, and hence of not being wholly consigned to its there, that Dasein is capable of death as death, that Dasein can die rather than merely cease living.82 Agamben concludes his analysis by saying that "Just as, for Hegel, the animal finds its voice in violent death, so Dasein, in its authentic Being toward death, finds a Voice: and as in Hegel, this Voice preserves the "magic power" that inverts the negative into being; it demonstrates, that is, that nothingness is only the "veil" of being".83
Even if Heidegger's intention was to escape metaphysics by locating Dasein's language in a negative ground more impenetrable than that posited by the metaphysical tradition, Agamben shows that "at this point Heidegger's thought seems to reach a limit
117 that he is unable to overcome" through the "sudden reintegration" of the negativity of the place of language and the Voice of death. In other words, as Agamben continues his thought a few pages later, if metaphysics consists not just in locating the experience of language "on the basis of an (animal) voice, but rather, if it always already thinks this experience on the basis of the negative dimension of a Voice, then Heidegger's attempt to think a "voice without sound" beyond the horizon of metaphysics falls back inside this
or horizon". Heidegger's attempt to transgress the confines of the philosophical tradition in at least this respect remains too classical in its insistence on the radical difference between human language and animal being. Nor is this a problem only affecting the
Heidegger of the pre-Kehre writings. Indeed, Agamben begins Language and Death with a quote from Heidegger's The Nature of Language (from 1959, well after the turn) that runs: "Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought".86 Just as in Being and Time, the relation between language and death flashes up in the silent call of being, a Voice that gives language and thus allows death to be caught sight of a* such.
Throughout Heidegger's work, just as for the philosophical tradition as a whole, ,
"language remains even here metaphysically divided into two distinct planes: first die
Sage, the originary and silent speech of Being, which, inasmuch as it coincides with the very taking place of language and with the disclosure of the world, shows itself, but remains unspeakable for human words; and second, human discourse, the "word of 118 mortals," which can only respond to the silent Voice of Being. The relation between these two planes...is once again governed by negativity; the demonstration of Sage is unnameable in terms of human language".87 Once again we are left with metaphysics' inability to articulate the taking place of language, taking thought only as far as "that limit where the silent experience of the taking place of language" is revealed in the
Voice.88 While Heidegger might have revealed with unparalleled clarity the negative foundation of the metaphysical tradition's ontological dimension, Agamben demonstrates that Heidegger is unable truly to move beyond the inscrutable presupposition of linguistic revelation as "in the beginning".89
Heidegger's inability to move beyond the paradigm of the Voice has systemic implications for the way being is thought in his work. If it is true that "language is the house of Being", and language is thought in terms of the silent and hence negative Sage of foundation, a closed relay or circuit is established between the Voice (of being) and human culture.90 Being always already "speaks" its inspiring word, its poeticizing thought, in a manner addressed exclusively to the forms and traditions of human culture.
To put this point in the terms Agamben uses to describe Heidegger's conception of inspiration, it is fair to say that being becomes the Muse of human culture. However, an additional consequence—and a very serious one—of the circuit between being and culture is that there is no outside to human history, no way to critically evaluate the categories "handed down" by the past, at least until they become revitalized by a new
119 inspiration or sending from being; and this feature of Heidegger's work ends up for
Agamben in an unacceptable fatalism.
The situation just sketched out can be seen relatively clearly in Being in Time in the sections on historicity and authenticity (§74-75), although it can also be seen in later
Heidegger as well (as we will see). To the end of seeing this clearly, let us quote in full the passage in which Heidegger puts forward his notion of "resolution" which inevitably accompanies authenticity:
The resoluteness in which Da-sein comes back to itself discloses the actual factical possibilities of authentic existing in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness takes over as thrown. Resolute coming back to thrownness involves handing oneself over to traditional possibilities, although not necessarily as traditional ones. If everything "good" is a matter of heritage and if the character of "goodness" lies in making authentic existence possible, then handing down a heritage is always constituted in resoluteness. The more authentically Da-sein resolves itself, that is, understands itself unambiguously in terms of its ownmost eminent possibility of anticipating death, the more unequivocal and inevitable is the choice in finding the possibility of its existence.91
There are several claims which deserve attention in this passage and which are significant for the thesis presented above. First, Heidegger's sense of authenticity remains throughout a matter of a heritage that must be taken over, although not necessarily in its terms. This idea is buttressed by the claim that "everything "good" is a matter of heritage". What is evident here is that for Heidegger there is a direct relation between the cultural heritage's "origin" as the sending of/from being and the inescapability of the terms of that heritage's historicity. Even if the heritage must be (as it were) "worked over" by a more authentic intention, there is certainly no possibility of
120 getting beyond its terms. Tradition appears here as the same kind of self-enclosed horizon that we have seen Agamben locate in Gadamer's hermeneutics in the previous chapter. But secondly, the authentic intention itself is problematic: not only insofar as it manifests in Being and Time (and in other writings into the early 1930s) as "heroic" subjectivity, but more importantly, as it depends upon a relation to death and language.
In other words, what I am calling the authentic intention, the resoluteness required to choose authentically among the numerous possibilities presented in the present by the heritage, depends upon a relation to death. It is Dasein's grasping of death as its
"ownmost" possibility that supports authentic resolution. As we have seen, Agamben argues that for Heidegger grasping death as such (and here it matters little of it is a matter of understanding that death is my death), depends upon language. But language in turn is the "medium" in which being "speaks". The capacity for authentic resolution, authentic orientation to death and heritage, is a matter of authentic orientation to language as the silent Voice of being. But this move turns being into Muse and inspiration, confining it within both the terms of the heritage and the inscrutability of the inspiration toward authentic revaluation of the heritage on the part of the heroic subject.
As I have suggested, however, this problem does not change substantially in
Heidegger's later writing. While there is no suggestion of a heroic or resolute subject who is to wrest the authentic heritage from out of its concealment, being continues to be both inspiration and Muse for a future humanity delivered from the confines of metaphysics. Thus, in Language and Death, Agamben points out that the later
121 Heidegger's conception of the completion of metaphysics fails to unambiguously bring an end to the historical destinies, because it continues to preserve the having-been of the origin as Voice. Agamben writes that while for Heidegger "the history of Being reaches its end" in the thinking of Ereignis, "and is no longer veiled in historical figures or words, but is shown as such: as pure sending without destiny, pure forgetting of the beginning", the termination of historical figures "does not seem to be entirely liberated from negativity and the unspeakable". The expropriation of Ereignis does not so much resolve the issue of the Voice as it reveals it in pure form: "In Ereignis, we might say,
Voice shows itself as that which, remaining unsaid and unsignified in every word and in every historical tradition, consigns humanity to history and signification as the unspeakable tradition that forms the foundation for all tradition and human speech"93 As we noted earlier, this is entirely consistent with Agamben's claim that Heidegger, although undoubtedly one of the most sensitive thinkers of the metaphysical tradition, in the end fails entirely to clear its horizon of constitutive negativity lodged in the paradigm of the Voice. In this respect the location of inspiration between early and later Heidegger has certainly shifted from the heroic subject to the "there is'Ve^ gibt of being's abandonment. And yet the notion of the Voice as abyssal "source" remains the foundation of these two different figures of inspiration. It is not coincidental, Agamben thinks, that in Heidegger the paradigm of the Voice is dramatically displayed in the radical split between the human and anything like humanity's other, since in Heidegger the animal is excluded from the inspiration of signification and language. In other words,
122 if the silent voice of being is always already the Voice of cultural intentionality, it is also the site of a prior exclusion of the animal or even of the human insofar as the human is also a living being.
This is precisely why Agamben rejects Heidegger's phenomenological understanding of being as a structure of appearing-veiling, since what appears by means of this structure is already articulated in the terms of the Voice, and is thus already the site of a constitutive exclusion of what is judged non-human, including what is simply alive. From this perspective, there is no escaping the terms of tradition, an especially disastrous situation with respect to the continuation of the sacrificial paradigm accompanying that of the Voice. This is very likely why Agamben does not continue to think phenomenological appearing in terms of being, but instead seeks to think a non- metaphysical origin of Western history in terms of infancy as coming-to-speech, and as a simple fact of living that appears as purely open, simply as such; and in this as such, as we have seen, life transcends or exceeds all categories that would be attributable to it without being their negative image.94 At this point, however, it is possible to say that by articulating a perspective outside of the paradigm of the Voice, infancy in Agamben's sense is "older" than the Heideggerian understanding of being as self-sending/veiling.
Infancy offers a way of thinking that is no longer imprisoned within the terms of cultural repetition or renewal. Just what this "no longer" might imply, however, necessitates a turn toward the other of Agamben's key sources of influence: the work of Walter
Benjamin.
123 2.3 Benjamin and the Historical Fulfillment of Tradition
The purpose of this section is to show that what is at stake in Agamben's use of Benjamin is a turn away from the notion of phenomenological appearing in terms of being—even as represented by later Heidegger in terms of the simultaneous appropriation/expropriation, the structure of abandonment—and towards an account of life's appearing in history allowing a new image of life to be grasped. To this extent it will be necessary to lend a new credence to Benjamin's claim in "Convolute N" of the Arcades Project that "What distinguishes images from the "essences" of phenomenology is their historical index.
(Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through
"historicity").95 Although this rather audacious and perhaps even ill-informed statement might seem to apply only to early Heidegger, it seems possible from the perspective just advocated above to apply it equally to the later Heidegger as well.96 For what one finds in Benjamin's contrast between historical images and phenomenological essences is precisely a different understanding of history, one that aims at bringing about a reconciliation of the split between the historical transmission of language as medium, and tradition as its contents, which we have seen dogs the Western meditation on language; ultimately, this sense of reconciliation will aim at community by making it possible to end the sacrifice of the bare life that is excluded from the Voice.
124 A first pass at this issue demands an examination of what is a key, albeit earlier, articulation of Benjamin's thinking of history than is presented in the "mature"
Passagenwerk, as expounded in the "Epistemological-Critical Prologue" to the Origin of
German Tragic Drama. What Benjamin presents in this work is a theory of quasi-
Platonic essences (the Ideas) that pervade the world of becoming and events without ever being reducible to them. The ideas require the world for their expression, but without turning the latter into a mere epiphenomenon of the latter. To understand the relationship being put forward properly, a particular paragraph demands to be quoted at some length:
Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Enstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something no
imperfect and incomplete.
The origin of the idea, qua idea, should not be confused or equated with its genesis in history. Historicity, the specificity of historical events, is not to be confused with the ideas that are manifest in it. This point serves to establish two levels of reality that are kept distinct but not unrelated. If the ideas cannot have a reductive material genesis, neither can they be accessed apart from their origin in the material world that becomes the vehicle of their expression or manifestation. Somewhat resembling Heidegger's conception of origin as comprised by the duality of revealing and concealing, Benjamin 125 posits the origin of the idea as the "restoration and re-establishment" of something whose origin is "imperfect and incomplete", and whose historical origin is thus initially obscured by its very taking place. Also close to Heidegger is Benjamin's subsequent statement that the incompletion and imperfection of the origin of the idea is the very
"form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed as fulfilled, in the totality of its history".99 Both Benjamin and Heidegger would agree that only at the point of completion of its history will it be possible to understand the origin properly; this is precisely why the origin cannot be simply read off the facts in the form of historicism or positivism.
Where Benjamin seems to markedly differ from Heidegger, however, is in his insistence that the idea in its historical origin can never dispense with the specific historical contents or materials on which it depends. A few pages later in his text,
Benjamin notes, "When the idea absorbs a sequence of historical formulations, it does not do so in order to construct a unity out of them, let alone to abstract something common to them all. There is no analogy between the relationship of the individual to the idea, and its relationship to the concept".100 There is thus no possibility for Benjamin of reading the history of a phenomenon such as the history of metaphysics from out of the epochal sending of being as withdrawal or oblivion. In Benjamin's terms the origin (the idea) originates in history but is never the latter's inspiration, determining, however subtly, its contents or the events to which it gives rise. As Benjamin puts this more pointedly, "The past and subsequent history of such essences [viz. the ideas] is...not pure history, but
126 natural history". This is why, as the next line implies, the idea of an artwork cannot be reduced to the authorial intentions governing its creation: "The life of the works and forms...in order to unfold clearly and unclouded by human life" requires "a natural life" not the same as and irreducible to the former.102 To Benjamin the human world of cultural intentions cannot be the house of being or the temple of origin because the origin would remain unrecognizable if it were not for the exteriority of a natural life whose contents unfolded as it were autonomously. The idea's origin takes place or becomes legible only on the threshold or in the margin between human history and natural life. It is the transience and impermanence of natural life, following its own cycle of repetition, which, in befalling the historical contents in which the idea becomes manifest, allows the latter to break with natural repetition in its movement of restoration and re-establishment; from Benjamin's theological perspective, in other words, the fall is entirely necessary to salvation. As Benjamin puts this thought in his "Theological-Political Fragment", in which the Platonic idea has become the more overtly theological category of the messianic, "nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus"103
From the standpoint of history, then, the coming of the messianic or the restoration of the idea in its temporal legibility is not something that can be willed, nor is it something that can achieved by taking up a passive or even pietistic stance toward the un-
127 thought. Instead, the messianic or the idea comes to the historical from the outside, unbidden, if not entirely unanticipated. The origin a la Benjamin is something that occurs, as it were, passively, irreducible to a subjective intention, even one that deliberately takes up an attitude of passivity; this occurrence can only take place if history and the ideas are separate, but capable of being related. However, this once again puts Benjamin's sense of the idea in contact with Heidegger's sense of passive potential as endorsed by Agamben. The ideas, separated from the history to which they are essential, are from the viewpoint of history only potentially legible, or to use Benjamin's term, virtual.105 Salvation, while always possible, is never assured; just as the messiah may or may not come, the ideas may or may not reveal themselves in history. In either case, it is not up to us in any direct way, and in this sense the potential of the ideas at stake here is entirely passive with respect to the history they would appear within. But neither does this situation reduce humanity to helplessness or render them the playthings of fate. This is because, confined within the natural order of repetition, human life seeks happiness. Although happiness is natural rather than messianic, it is also covertly related to the messianic. As Benjamin puts this thought in the "Theological Political Fragment",
"the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality... [as] the rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away". The struggle for "earthly happiness" on the part of natural life is related to the messianic (the recognition of the idea) because of their separate yet secret compatibility. Thus, as Benjamin puts it, the "secular [or natural or
128 worldly].. .though not itself a category of this [messianic] kingdom, is a decisive category of its most unobtrusive approach".107 In striving for happiness, understood by Benjamin as a secular political and even natural goal, humanity's natural existence indirectly furthers the coming of the messianic kingdom.
However, this last thought strongly suggests that the present for Benjamin, in contrast with Heidegger's understanding, is not to be conceived merely as a veiling of the essential that must be expropriated in favour of the more "profoundly" original. Rather, the present is the medium of the origin's expression, harbouring the potential of the messianic arrival.108 Precisely because it is incomplete, the present offers an image of the origin that may be recognized and hence find completion. As Benjamin puts this thought in the language of his later essay "On the Concept of History", "The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again". But because the past which establishes the idea's historical origin repeats throughout its history until it is recognized, more significant to the messianic is the passage of time since the origin's first historical expression.110 As Benjamin expresses this thought in his Trauerspiel study cited above,
"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 as fulfilled".111 As this thought is expressed in "On the Concept of History", "like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim".112 Benjamin is offering a thinking of the origin as a retroactive and
129 passive potentiality, as a possibility, however passive (or weak) its power, that can be brought to completion through temporal recognizability. It is thus possible to summarize the difference between Heidegger and Benjamin with respect to the question of the origin the way Andrew Benjamin does in his essay "Time and Task" as follows:
In both instances, Heidegger and Benjamin, the present is to be differentiated from itself. In Heidegger's case this is necessary because the present is taken to be metaphysics - the 'age' - and therefore the task involves 'leaving metaphysics to itself and thus to think 'without' it. Here there is a differentiation that necessarily eschews relation. With Benjamin the differentiation occurs by an act of repetition, a repetition that can be thought and thus presented in a number of different ways.. .In each instance there is a juxtaposition or constellation that breaks the effect of continuity.113
The only thing that might be added to this analysis is that for Heidegger the eschewal of relation to the present involves thinking being without relation to beings, including and especially those beings categorized as "natural", as living, whereas for Benjamin, the relation that must be maintained (although differentiated) with the present must retain its relation to beings, and in particular, to natural life as such. This difference between
Heidegger and Benjamin will become particularly important for Agamben's purpose of thinking the history of metaphysics as a politics of the living being in Homo Sacer and beyond.
Benjamin's methodology of reinterpretation or reworking of the past of tradition in terms of its redemption—the legibility of its messianic contours—that we have been examining here plays an extremely important role in Agamben's work. Agamben takes over Benjamin's relation to the past in terms of a citation that is at once destructive and
130 simultaneously fulfilling (or redeeming). In an essay entitled "Benjamin and the
Demonic", which largely consists of an argument with Scholem over Benjamin's supposed historical pessimism, Agamben argues that "For Benjamin, what is at issue is an interruption of tradition in which the past is fulfilled and thereby brought to its end once and for all".114 Agamben argues that even though the past is to be shaken off in such a way that it is finally made accessible to humanity, for Benjamin "tradition does not aim to perpetuate and repeat the past but to lead it to its decline in a context in which past and present, content of transmission and act of transmission, what is unique and what is repeatable, are wholly identified".1 5 As we have seen, such identification would entail the coming of the idea to history, the legibility of the former in the midst of the latter.
It is in the relation between the repeatable and the unique that the potential for the completion of the past is to be found. According to Agamben, this is how we must read
Benjamin's claim that a redeemed humanity is able to cite all of its historical moments.
The citation at issue is not "the past as it was, the past as such", since this is what
Benjamin's reworking of tradition destroys or reconfigures. Instead of the past as portrayed by tradition, "what is saved is what never was, something new. This is the sense of the "transfiguration" that takes place in the origin".
It is far from accidental that Agamben turns to Benjamin's work on language as a way of carrying out the transfiguration of tradition just described. It is evident that the ideas Benjamin describes in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" (to the Trauerspiel), are the model for Agamben's idea of language. Like Benjamin's historical essences, Agamben's
131 idea of language liquidates tradition while releasing or fulfilling it from its task of endlessly repeating or transmitting itself. As we saw with Benjamin's reworking of tradition, the ideas and their historical contents must be united in a form of legibility that is nothing like a subsumption of particulars under universals in the concept, nor is it akin to Heidegger's bypassing of tradition's degraded form in the present in order to recover a more pristine origin. But for this unity or totality to be possible or thinkable, there must be a medium in which the act of transmission and its contents might become equal yet not equivalent. Agamben treats the relationship between historical transmission and language in another one of his essays on Benjamin, "Language and History".
Agamben points out at the beginning of this piece that, as we have seen, tradition immemorially breaks language into two planes, those of nomination and of discourse or predication. The problem from Agamben's point of view will be how the origin can be understood as not already broken into these two planes, how to comprehend the (so to speak) original face of tradition before its disjuncture into the either/or of presupposed nomination and predication; we have seen, however, that the notion of a return to a pristine origin has been rejected as a false option because it could too easily lapse into a repetition of onto-theology that wants to find an original principle prior to its "fall" into time and history. Instead, for Agamben, it will only be a matter of bringing tradition to its conceptual limit or end in the midst of the accomplished split that forms its ongoing history.
132 Since it is not a question of looking for an endpoint outside of time, the problem is posed as one of the historical transmission (and thus presupposition) of names. Agamben notes that "this character of human access to language, which is such that every act of speech presupposes the level of names" can be "reached" only "historically, through a
"thus it was said" that is in fact a "thus it is said"".119 Once again, the problem is that
"Reason cannot reach the origin of names and cannot master them" since those names
"reach reason only through history, in descending".120 The problem of the immemorial, of the dead weight of history, is posed here as that of a language which "always anticipates the original place of speaking beings, retreating toward the past and the future
191 in an infinite descent, such that thinking can never find an end to it". In other words, as long as tradition stands in the position of having to presuppose its own beginning, that 199 is, "as long as there is the transmission of names, there will be history and destiny".
It is in direct contrast to this understanding of history, tradition and language, that
Agamben turns to Benjamin's early Biblically-inspired theory of language, which, for
Agamben, presents "The historical condition of human beings [as] inseparable from their condition as speaking beings; it is inscribed in their very mode of access to language, which is originally marked by a fracture".123 For Benjamin, however, the historical condition of fracture marks the fall of humans into language from a prelapsarian state of linguistic wholeness in a language of pure names. Referring to Benjamin's essay of
1916, "On Language as Such and On the Language of Humanity", Agamben points out that "What Benjamin defines here as "pure language" (reine Sprache) or the language of 133 names (Namensprache), however, is in no way what we, according to a more and more common conception, understand as language—that is, meaningful speech as the means of a communication that transmits a message from one subject to another".124 The conception of language on the model of the transmission or communication of information-content represents what Benjamin describes as a debased and "bourgeois" view of language, language as a kind of utilitarian tool in which subjects communicate their "mental contents" to one another using language as a mere medium.125 Against this view of language, Benjamin returns to the name as the original element of language, or in other words, to precisely that aspect of language which Western grammar presupposes as the always already of what tradition hands down. For Benjamin, the language of names opens onto pure language because in the name the two dimensions of language—its communicability and its contents—are one and the same, an inseparable unity. In this sense, according to Benjamin, far from something presupposed by language, the name "is the innermost nature of language itself. He continues, "The name is that through which, and in which, language itself communicates itself absolutely. In the name, the mental entity that communicates itself is language", in its unique capacity to combine singularity and communicability. For Benjamin, by means of human naming "God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks". The name enacts an intensive form of language, in which "to express oneself and to address everything else amounts to the same thing", and it is for this reason that Benjamin argues that "Man can call name the language of language (if
134 the genitive refers to the relationship not of a means but of a medium)". In the language of names, what is named by human speech is not abandoned to propositional violence but instead exists in a state of completion, since even the isolated silence of the inanimate object is broken by the communicability of its essence in the uttering of its name. We can see here that Agamben is drawing on Benjamin's theory of language in his discussion of infancy: infancy or life, as the pure potential to speak, in coming-to- language as speech, expresses the pure communicability of language itself. The taking place of language in speech for Agamben corresponds to what Benjamin calls the name as the language of language; in speech, the open and infinite semiotic of life—life as language—breaks with itself in coming to speech from out of infancy.
As Boltz and Van Reijen explain in their treatment of the early Benjamin's theology of language, in his naming of the created entities Adam perfects creation by establishing
"a magical "non-sensory" correspondence which enables man to recognize things as God made them. God has granted this non-sensory correspondence by handing over to man his language of creation in the form of the language of naming". Before the fall, human language, as the language of pure names, was also pure language in the sense that such language expressed the essence of all created beings as God had made them; language was not an "externality" predicated about things, it was not their judgment, but rather their direct saying. But crucially for Agamben's argument, it follows that, as Boltz and Van Reijen contend, "If the spiritual nature of things is revealed in their names, then it is not something inexpressible. Revelation leaves nothing unexpressed or
135 inexpressible. The more spiritual this inexpressed element was, the more linguistic it would be—for it is a truth that spiritual nature is completely recognized, if not in words then in names".131 The language of names, their pure communicability or impartibility, is a language that presupposes nothing because what it communicates and what is communicated are one and the same; the name is a pure idea of the thing named, it is thus not "knowledge about" but an immediate mediation which grasps what it mediates in its unity-difference. By the same token, the taking place of language in human speech gives to the human being the potentiality of an immediate mediation in which all of language, all of life, becomes sayable. The coming to speech of language creates the subject as its effect only through the pure mediality or communicability of language.
According to Benjamin, from this point of unity-difference to be found in the language of names, the biblical account of the fall outlines the separation of language, the division of the name and the human word or predicative statement that seeks to know things externally, that is, propositionally, by means of judgment and abstraction; by this means language becomes a "tool" or "means" rather than a pure medium. The pure naming function of language becomes the familiar structure of presupposed and historically transmitted meanings. This is of course also the birth of "Babelic" language, which according to Benjamin has three consequences: first, "In stepping outside the purer language of name, man makes language a means (that is, a knowledge inappropriate to him), and therefore also, in one part at any rate, a mere sign; and this later results in the plurality of languages"; secondly, "from the Fall, in exchange for the immediacy of name
136 that was damaged by it, a new immediacy arises: the magic of judgment, which no longer rests blissfully in itself but rather presupposes the pure language of names without any longer being able to reach it.132 What Benjamin calls "the magic of judgment" gives rise to the third consequence of the Fall, namely, the external position and abstraction of knowledge from that which is to be known. Benjamin writes that "This immediacy in the communication of abstraction came into being as judgment, when, in the Fall, man abandoned immediacy in the communication of the concrete—that is, name—and fell into the abyss of the mediatedness of all communication".133 What is handed down to actually existing languages is the already-existing structure of tradition, historical tables of categorial judgments, abstraction and alienation from the things themselves. This situation would correspond to the one in which human subjects are thought to be the transcendental authors of their own statements, and where the paradigm of the Voice we have been investigating goes with it hand in glove.
For Agamben, this discussion of pure language and the conditions of its separation into name and proposition leads more or less directly into Benjamin's theory of translation as expressed in the 1921 preface to his study of Baudelaire, "The Task of the
Translator".134 Agamben notes that the fallen language Benjamin presents in "On
Language as Such" becomes the object of a possible restoration or messianic fulfillment in the "Task of the Translator": the one essay (to use an image Benjamin himself might have enjoyed) is a photonegative of the other. At any rate, according to Agamben
"What is meant in language lies in every single language in expectation of flowering, of
137 the harmony of all languages, into the one language" of a redeemed or purely human language. All natural languages, by dint of their fall from the pure language of names, harbor the hidden potential of their mutual translation, which, in a sort of constellation between the "then" of the fall that is their origin, and the "now" of the re-combination of languages in their fulfilled translation, completes the multiplicity of languages without simply eliminating them. As Benjamin writes in his essay, "to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation...as expressionless and creative word, that which is meant in all languages—all communication, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished".137 Agamben suggests that Benjamin's essay presents us with the paradoxical task of thinking an "expressionless word" that means nothing, and that has been purged of all significance. Agamben comments that "All languages mean to say the word that does not mean anything". The word does not mean anything because, as eminently translatable, it intends not just a specific meaning, but meaning in general, that is, the communicability or impartibility of the name. The paradoxical status of this word is thus that while meaning nothing, in gesturing toward the purely communicative language of language, it is what all historical languages mean to say but cannot. It is thus that historical languages "signify and have meaning because they mean to say something; but what they mean to say—pure language—remains unsaid in them".139 We are once again presented with the image of historical being (in this case
138 historical language) that "wants" to say the messianic language of pure names but cannot do so of its own accord, even though it might gesture in this direction through translation.
Yet according to Agamben in the essay "Language and History", Benjamin's later work, in particular several fragments from the preparatory sketches to "On the Concept of
History", takes up where the earlier essay on translation leaves off, announcing not simply the possibility of the messianic completion of the idea of language (and hence the liquidation of tradition conceived as the fate or as the prison-house of infinite transmission), but presenting the figure of a universal language that all peoples will be able to understand because all languages will have been fully translated into it.
According to Agamben, Benjamin writes that the universal language in which the
"confusion" of languages presented at the Tower of Babel is "smoothed out",
"presupposes the language into which every text of a living or dead language must be wholly translated"; such translation, he continues, is what provides "the world of total and integral actuality" of the messianic or redeemed world. The theme of totality in question here ("wholly translated"; "total and integral actuality"), outlines the realization or grasping of a virtuality or potentiality of linguistic expression that has itself come to speech. Agamben writes, commenting on Benjamin's text, that from the perspective of the completed idea of language, "As origin, the language of names is therefore not an initial chronological point, just as the messianic end of languages, the universal language of redeemed humanity, is not a simple chronological cessation. Together, they constitute the two faces of the single Idea of language, which the 1916 essay "On Language as
139 Such and the Language of Men" and the 1921 essay on the task of the translator presented as divided".141 The reason the origin, the infancy of language, can be thought of other than in terms of a chronological point is that it is now grasped as "what is continually said and what continually takes place in every language not as an unsayable presupposition, but as what, in never having been, sustains the life of language. The Idea of language is language that no longer presupposes any other language" because it exists in "the perfect transparency...in which there is no more distinction between the level of names and the level of signifying speech, between what is meant and what is said".142 In
Agamben's terms, the text of history is open because the nature of coming-to-speech or the taking place of language as an impotentiality belonging to life or infancy, has been grasped by speaking humanity. But the moment in which this occurs—the coming of the messiah—cannot be predicted, but must become legible in history in the fullness of its time.
Such fulfillment does not portend the end of language in any literal sense, nor does it portend a collapse of the multiplicity of languages, or even of their traditions: it is instead the end of that conception of language founded on the "incurable division between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission, names and discourse".143 But in the overcoming of tradition conceived as an incurable division, Agamben argues, a new historical existence for humanity can begin in which there is the complete identification of "language and history, praxis and speech. This is why universal history has no past to transmit, being instead a world of "integral actuality"".144 Freed from history conceived
140 along the lines of an infinite causal sequence—a view Benjamin relentlessly attacks in
"On the Concept of History"—a conception that ultimately depends upon the presupposition of an "original" event, conceived along the lines of a first cause, human beings are no longer the prisoners of tradition conceived as fatality or presupposition.
While taking nothing away from their historicality, the idea of tradition and language
Agamben advocates, in a manner almost inseparable from Benjamin, allows human beings to appropriate tradition, although not in a way that leaves it in place as a kind of destiny. Tradition, as Agamben claims at the end of the essay "Language and History", moves from being something mysterious and immemorially destined to what it actually is: an expression of free and ungrounded human practice—and it is this recognition that allows the distinction between language and history to be effectively erased. Such recognition signifies the liquidation of (the tradition of) inspiration, coinciding for
Benjamin with "the Idea of prose itself, and which for Agamben lies somewhere
"between prose and poetry", which in every utterance language is both inspired and exposited.1 5
Let us at this point begin to summarize the ground that has been covered in this chapter. What should be evident by now is that Agamben endorses Heidegger's reading of Aristotle as the thinker of passive potentiality or impotentiality; along with Heidegger he takes this sense of impotentiality, the preservation of a creative capacity to begin that is not already actual, in the way metaphysics understands this term, to be in some sense the "essence" of the human being. This is already quite radical, since it refuses to locate
141 any essential property of humanity within any given attribute or characteristic that can be attributed to a merely actual being, locating the human beyond its given actuality in an impotential that is retained beyond everything actual. As this last point indicates,
Agamben also takes over Heidegger's concern with the issue of origin as a problem exceeding the capabilities of metaphysics to come to terms with or even to think adequately. Fixated on the present in which beings present themselves in appearance to the (subjective) intentional gaze, metaphysics cannot grasp absence as anything other than in terms of a "place" where beings are not. This Heideggerian critique of metaphysics extends to the tradition of language, since, as the previous chapter argued, tradition is conceived along the lines of a Voice, the place where the subject enters language, stabilizing the latter in the silent intention of a transcending meaning-to-say.
Yet as has also been established here, Agamben severely criticizes Heidegger for ultimately remaining within the very terms of metaphysics whose critique he first made possible. This is because of Heidegger's drastic separation between the human being, the one having language, and the animal or natural being, who is deprived of language though not of voice, and who therefore has no access to the "as such" of being. As
Agamben shows, with this reinstatement of the split between (human) speaking and
(animal or natural) living, the tradition's assumption of a negative or immemorial ground of an inspired (subjective and intentional) saying {of being) is strikingly and forcefully rearticulated. According to Agamben, Heidegger remains the last and greatest thinker of metaphysics, a label that as we have seen Heidegger sought to apply to Nietzsche.
142 This much is crucial to appreciating what it is in Benjamin's work that Agamben finds liberating. As we have just shown, in the first place, Benjamin maintains the link between human living or natural being and human speaking being. Unlike in Heidegger, the Benjaminian messianic fulfillment of the present does not demand a rejection or eschewal of the relation to historical beings in their living specificity, but rather requires their concrete existence be a requirement of the very content of that fulfillment. The repetition or citation of the past requires the natural being's living of the present to allow the legibility of that past to flash up in a moment of concrete historical tension. But for this to be possible also requires that there be a medium in which the two levels (the idea and its natural contents, the messianic and the profane) can coincide. This level, as
Agamben makes clear, is for Benjamin nothing but (pure) language itself that allows itself to be grasped in human speaking. As an original language of names where idea and content were one and the same, language's impartibility was at the same time one with that which it imparted. In being nothing other than itself, everything was in language, and language was the language of the pure mediality or openness of life, but in a language free of concepts and signs that spoke itself directly through its name: it is this self-speaking that gives rise to a subject capable of appropriating language as apparently its own. For Agamben, only the pure mediality of language makes it possible to think the relation between what tradition passes down as already divided into name and predication. After the fall, in our secular or natural time, the grasping of language as original word or name—and thus the completion of tradition—can occur only through a
143 subject that comprehends itself as infans, not as the sovereign author of its utterances in some kind of absolute sense, but as the self-grasping of language, as the subject of that weak messianic power in which the past seeks completion through what it has become.
It should be clear that Agamben's figure of the infant and the situation of infancy described in the previous chapter are also figures of pure language as impotentiality-for- speech. The subject that might grasp its taking place as the event of language—as pure communicability—requires at one and the same time the recognition that the infant is its own impotentiality for speaking, the pure capacity for speech that is not always already realized, and therefore prior to the transcendental illusion of the subjective and intentional mastery of language. The linguistic subject's grasping of itself as fundamentally passive with respect to pure language is nothing other than that subject's self-recognition in the form of infancy, that is, as pure language's subsistent impartibility in and through the subject through which language takes place. As in Benjamin's notion of the moment of historical fulfillment, for Agamben what is required for the liquidation and fulfillment of tradition is an historical instance in which the speaking being becomes capable of grasping or recognizing itself as the saying of pure language, as an impartibility that has realized itself as such. But this in turn requires a moment in which it is possible to glimpse that the infant and the subject are not opposed, but are two faces of a single impotential mediality of speaking inherent in pure language and pure living, no longer thought metaphysically.
144 It might be advisable at this point to look ahead. Agamben's reliance on Benjamin's sense of the specific historical legibility of the fulfilling moment precludes any meditation on general circumstances or even "phenomenological essences" as figurations of Heideggerian being. This clearly follows from Benjamin's requirement that the moment of fulfillment or legibility must break not only with subjective intension, but also, as he puts it in the same passage in which he criticizes Heideggerian historicity, "the historical index of images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time".146 It is this specific temporal index that flashes up when it can be read that distinguishes it from mere subjective intention, equally divorcing it from the project of metaphysical self-willing
(even in the form of willing oneself passive), and constituting that "death of intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth".147
Even though the legibility of the saving moment is emphatically not willed by the subject, in keeping with Benjamin's sense of the messianic yet natural longing for worldly happiness, fulfillment is not separated from a sense of urgency cognized by the historical subject as the danger of irretrievable loss. As Benjamin again points out, "The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded".148 Given the historical context of these writings, this "perilous critical moment" Benjamin refers to is above all apolitical moment.
145 If Agamben is going to get beyond the impasse he sees in Heidegger by recourse to
Benjamin's method of historical (materialist) reading, there must be a specific historical index relative to which the infancy and simple mediate life producing the subject can be recognized and tradition's presuppositions liquidated and fulfilled. We have seen already that for Agamben the presupposition on which tradition is founded is not innocuous, but entails the sacrificial paradigm of the removal of what is not construed to be human (the critique of Heidegger in this regard is not just taken with a concern for its supposed philosophical "radicality", but now takes on an ethical dimension). The reason tradition must be overcome is that it results in a situation of violence occasioned by the division of living beings into the human and the non-human, and within the human itself, the division between zoe and bios, mere life and qualified life. If this division already implies the political, Agamben needs to expand his account of the political beyond a mere implication of a paradigm of violent sacrifice. This is what he proceeds to do from the publication of Homo Sacer onwards. From this perspective, it is by no means accidental that Agamben insists on the parallel between the metaphysical logos and the violence of the political order founded by the sovereign. Not only does this provide the historical index Agamben requires for the liquidation of tradition, as we will see in the next chapter, Agamben follows Benjamin's discussion of the political in terms of an archaic law-founding violence at the basis of the Western theological-political, and its avatar, sovereign power. The specific danger Agamben sees is the biopolitical capture of simple mediate natural life in the meshes of sovereign power over life, the transformation
146 of mediate life into bare life. The specific danger here is that if the infant, the cipher for the destruction/fulfillment of tradition, is successfully excluded by the political armature of the Western tradition as non-human (because non-linguistic or not subject), the possibility of undoing the sacrificial paradigm disappears. Yet the Benjaminian notion of reading suggests that it is precisely at the zenith of the sovereign's biopolitical domination over life that the infant or the impotentiality of the nonhuman within the human can be most clearly seen, and thus that the possibility of removing the paradigm of sacrificial violence can come into view as a real possibility. As is by now well-known,
Agamben locates in the modern concentration camp the zenith of sovereign power and simultaneously the redemptive image of the impotentiality of the human being in the figure of the extreme bare life of the Muselmann and its mirror-image, the witness.
147 Notes:
Agamben, The Idea of Prose, 60. 2 Ibid. 3 As the concept of infancy suggests the "middle term" between language and speech, semiotic and semantic, however, it is not a question of the actual opposition between poetry and prose, as though they were two substantial "things" juxtaposed in space; rather, as Agamben claims of the idea of language, it is as it was for Plato, "neither poetry nor prose, but their middle term", Ibid, 41. 4Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell), 1962 (1927): 262. s Ibid, 262-63. 6 Ibid, 265. 7 Martin Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University" in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. Gunther Neske & Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon House), 1990: 5. Many critics (including Heidegger himself) have made the link between Heidegger's fascism and his continued reliance on a paradigm of heroic subjectivity whose purpose is to seize and retrieve the authentic destiny from out of its historical oblivion. See especially Derrida's influential Of Spirit (cited in the introduction to this dissertation). 8 Martin Heidegger, "On Time and Being" trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1972 (1969): 2-5. 9 Ibid, 8. 10 Ibid, 9. 11 Ibid, 8. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, 24. 14 Heidegger's example of this would be the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition from out its prehistory with the Greek pre-Socratics. For Heidegger the pre-Socratics did not just say this or that "influential" thing, they actually set up the terms of the debate for the next several millennia. Another example of appropriation might be a revolution in which the events set the terms for the political system that is to follow: the way, for instance, in which the French Revolution galvanized certain currents of humanist liberalism into a form that set the standard for what a liberal state was or could be. 15 Giorgio Agamben, "Passion of Facticity" in Potentialities, 185-204. For an essay in which Nancy employs a similar strategy see in particular "The Decision of Existence" in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press), 1993: 82-109. In general terms, reading Heidegger's later work back into the early work so that it becomes an analysis of human existence, in order to call into question the primacy of subjectivity, is a strategy initiated by both Blanchot and Levinas, who in turn influenced widely the subsequent generation of Continental philosophers such as Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben. For more on this see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existentiale: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 2005. 16 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 192. 17 Ibid. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 174, original emphasis. 19 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 194-95. 20 Ibid, 195. 21 Of course this does not mean that Dasein can encounter the non-self prior to its realization that it has already become something, an identity, a specific sort of person, and so on. An important aspect to the analysis of death in Being and Time is Heidegger's attempt to indicate the way everyday human being can become aware of its facticity or its Dasein (which is not to suggest that this is the only way that awareness might be attained). 148 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, 67. 23 Ibid. ^Francois Raffoul, Heidegger and the Subject, trans. D. Pettigrew and G. Recco (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press), 1998: 222. 25 Ibid, 223. 26 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 196. 27 Agamben, The Coming Community, 92. 28 Ibid. 29 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 196. 30 Heidegger, Being and Time, 224. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid, original de-emphasized. 34 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 200. 35 See Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", in Basic Writings, ed. D. Farrell-Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers), 1993: 213-265. 36 Ibid, 220. Agamben quotes from this passage in "Passion of Facticity" on page 199-200. 37 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 201. 38 Agamben cites Heidegger's lecture-course on Aristotle of 1931, translated as Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta 1-3, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1995 [The title of this lectures series is incorrectly cited as Omega 1-3 in the English translation of Agamben's essays collected in Potentialities]. The lecture of Agamben's is entitled simply "On Potentiality", in Potentialities, 177-184. 39 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IX, 8, 1050b8-10, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: the Revised Oxford Translation Ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1995. 40 Ibid, 1050b (10-11). 41 Agamben, "On Potentiality", Potentialities, 182. 42 Aristotle, De Anima, II, 4, 417a3-5 in Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, Vol. 8: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W.S. Hertt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1986. 43Ibid,417a6-9. 44 Ibid, 111,2,425bl 5-25. 45 Agamben, "On Potentiality", 181. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid, 179-80. 48 Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX 3 1046b (29-30); 1047a (17-20). 49 Ibid, 1047b (21-25). 50 Agamben, "On Potentiality", 183. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Note that I am not suggesting that Agamben (or Heidegger, from whose reading Agamben's is derived), is providing a reliable reading of Aristotle, unless of course centuries of Aristotle-interpretation are simply wrong (which is possible). The complexities of Aristotle-interpretation are quite beside my concern here. 54 Agamben, "On Potentiality", 182. 55 Ibid, original emphasis. 56 Ibid, original emphasis. 57 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 201. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 201-02. 60 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 202. 149 01 Heidegger, "On Time and Being", 41. 62 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 202. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid, 203. 65 Agamben, The Coming Community, 1. 66 Agamben, "Passion of Facticity", 204. Agamben's thinking of impotentiality is substantially similar to Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of (human) being's abandonment at the conclusion of metaphysics. See Nancy, "Abandoned Being" in The Birth to Presence, 36-47. 67 Agamben, Language and Death, 55 original emphasis. We should note here that this gloss on Hegel's account of the transition between animal voice and human speech seems to go back on Agamben's earlier claim that human language is founded on an abyss or radical rupture with animal voice. Perhaps in light of this we might suggest that what Agamben means to say is that even in Hegel the animal attains to something like human or subjective intention only in the event of violent death, that is, in sacrifice. Thus although Hegel seems to posit a transition of sorts between animal and human, what is presented is less a transition than a moment of sacrificial violence that allows the latter to take the place of the former only at the cost of its removal. 68 Hegel quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 45; Agamben quotation also at Ibid, 45. 69 Ibid, original emphasis. 70 Ibid, 54, original emphasis; the words in quotation marks are from Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism". The full sentence runs: "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" (230). 71 Ibid, 55, original de-emphasized. 72 Heidegger quoted in Agamben, Ibid. 73 Ibid, 56. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid, 57. 77 Heidegger quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 59. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid, 60. 84 Ibid, 58. 85 Ibid, 61. 86 Martin Heidegger, The Nature of Language, in On The Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers), 1982 (1959): 107. Agamben quotes this passage on page xi of the introduction to Language and Death. 87Agamben, Language and Death, 61. 88 Ibid, 62. 89 More recently, in The Open: On Man and Animal of 2002, Agamben has articulated this critique of Heidegger through the latter's resolute refusal to grant any sort of connection between human and animal. While this is no doubt an important re-articulation of Agamben's critique occurring after the explicit consideration of politics in the post-Homo Sacer writings, it should be noted that this latest critique is already present in Language and Death. See The Open: On Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2004 (2002): especially pages 49-73. 90 Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 63. 150 Agamben, Language and Death, 62. 92 Ibid, 102-03. 93 Ibid, 102. 94 It is no accident in this sense that one of Agamben's most intense meditations on Heidegger would be called The Open: On Man and Animal. 95 Walter Benjamin, "Convolute N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress" in The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland and McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1999: 462. 96 Christopher Fynsk for one takes exception to Benjamin's claim, trying to show that it is not an accurate understanding of Heidegger's work on history. See Fynsk, "The Claim of History" in Diacritics Vol. 22 (Autumn-Winter) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1992: 115-126. 97 Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso), 1977 (1928). 98 Ibid, 45. 99 Ibid, 45-46. 100 Ibid, 46. 101 Ibid, 47. 102 Ibid. 103 Benjamin, "Theological-Political Fragment" in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. Ill (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press), 2002: 305. 104 Although from a Heideggerian perspective, this makes Benjamin's messianism too otherworldly, and thus a mere repetition of ontotheology. 105 Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47. 106 "Theological-Political Fragment", 306. 107 Ibid, 305. 108 As Benjamin puts this in his "On the Concept of History", for the Jews, "every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter", quoted in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. IV (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 2002: 397. 109 Ibid, 390. 110 Agamben will articulate this messianic thought in The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 2005, in terms of Messianic time, that is, (as he puts it) "the time that remains between time and its end" (62). We will discuss this at greater length in the fifth chapter and in the conclusion. 111 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45. 112 Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 390. 113 Andrew Benjamin, "Time and Task" in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, Eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge), 1994: 245. 114 Agamben, "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption", in Potentialities, 153. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid, 158. 117 Ibid. Agamben makes it clear that he does not understand Benjamin's notion of a completed origin as equivalent to the idea that history bears within it repressed or subjugated knowledges, or "alternative heredities" that must be excavated beneath officially recorded history. This view, for Agamben, would presuppose that "the tradition of the oppressed classes is, in its goals and in its structures, altogether analogous to the tradition of the ruling classes", differing from the latter only "with respect to its content" (Ibid, 153). In other words, the idea of alternative heredities fails to read what was never written, or at least interprets this phrase in too literal or superficial a manner, since what the notion of alternative heredities in fact aims at are really actualities that because of repression simply failed to enter the archive of historical memory. This falls short of the radicality of the ending or fulfillment of the history of the origin because
151 these historical alternatives merely enact a change of content, leaving the form of historical transmission (and hence the origin) untouched. 118 "Language and History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamin's Thought" in Potentialities, 48-6.1 119 Ibid, 50. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. This image of time and tradition is presented by Agamben recurrently as the position of Gadamer's hermeneutics. In virtually every essay on the problem of time and tradition, Agamben presents Gadamer as the theorist who more than any other conceives of tradition as something both permanent and infinite in whose wake human beings are consigned to the infinite task of interpretation: "authentic interpretation is interpretation that, in sheltering the openness the infinite historical community of messages, situates everything said within the historical unsaid that is destined to infinite interpretation.. .hermeneutics transforms ideal language into the unsayable foundation that, without ever coming to speech, destines the infinite movement of all language" (quoted in ibid, 56). As we can see from this rehearsal of Gadamer's idea of interpretation, Agamben's critique of the infinity of tradition and history, as much as it might constitute a critique of a certain reception of Heidegger, also positions Benjamin's work as directly opposed to the idea of tradition proposed by hermeneutics. "22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 51. 24 Ibid. 25 Benjamin, "On Language as Such", Selected Writings, Vol I, 65; Agamben, "Language and History", 51. 26 Agamben, "Language as Such", ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. Agamben also quotes this last sentence in "Language and History", ibid. 30 Norbert Boltz and WillemVan Reijen, Walter Benjamin, L. Mazzarins trans. (New Jersey: Humanities Press), 1996: 23-24. 31 Ibid, 23. 32 Benjamin, "Language as Such", 71-72; Agamben quotes this passage as well in "Language and History", 52. 33 Benjamin, "Language as Such", 72. 34 Benjamin, "Task of the Translator", in Selected Writings, Vol. I, 253-266. 35Agamben, "Language and History", 52. 36 Ibid, 53. 37 Agamben quotes this in Ibid; the passage appears on p. 261 of Benjamin's "Task of the Translator". 38 Ibid, original de-emphasized. 39 Ibid, 54. 40 Benjamin, quoted in Agamben, "Language and History", 48. 41 Agamben, "Idea of Language", original emphasis, 59. 42 Ibid, 60. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid, 61. 45 Agamben, "Language and History", 60. 46 Benjamin, "Convolute N", Arcades Project, 462. 47 Ibid, 463. 48 Ibid.
152 Chapter 3: Sovereign Exceptions in Agamben's Readings of Benjamin and Schmitt
As the previous chapter has attempted to show, Benjamin's work influences in far- reaching ways Agamben's thinking about the Western tradition's attempt to ground itself on the Voice—on the exclusion of a natural or animal voice that in the view of the tradition merely indicates rather than signifies or intends. It is also clear that the exclusion or removal of the indicating voice is also a paradigm of sacrificial violence in the sense that the exclusion of the indicative voice lies anterior to the determination of the human; consequently, whenever one finds an extant definition of the human, one will also find an indication of just what has been excluded in order for that definition to hold.
But it has been suggested further that from the Benjaminian perspective adopted by
Agamben, bringing the tradition to its downfall and fulfillment gets hampered by the tradition's terms: excluded from the domain of the properly human, construed as signifying rather than indicating, is precisely that dimension of the human that is not already speaking, that is, the infant; and yet as we saw in the last chapter, it is entirely necessary that the infantile condition of the human being be included within the domain of the human if the place of language is to come to itself in human speech, ending the autarkic sovereignty of the metaphysical subject.
As we saw in the previous chapter as well, the sacrificial paradigm as understood by
Agamben implies a form of politics. In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Agamben articulates this form of politics in a very succinct manner: "there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life
153 and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion".1 While it will be necessary to consider in detail the mechanism of power
Agamben intends for the enactment of such inclusive exclusion, it is enough at this point to note that opposing one's speaking to the fact of living within the medium of language is to articulate and enact a primordial form of judgment and division upon oneself and upon one's community, one that excludes something that of necessity cannot be excluded: the medium of one's very life. In this sense, the idea of bare life in the quote above takes on a double signification in Agamben's work. In the first place, bare life will mean that form or aspect of human life that is removed from speech and the community of speakers, rendered incapable of speaking by political power. Here we have a figure of an abject humanity, separated from its potential for speech by political violence. But as the previous chapters have implied, there is a second conception of bare life at work in
Agamben's thought as well. As the original meaning of the Greek zoe, this conception implies that bare life is nothing but human life expressed as a sheer impotentiality-for- living, a pre-categorial or purely mediate life that, whatever form it takes or is forced to take, remains or retains its simple and open potentiality. It follows that the infant, as the pure potential of and for language, is also bare life in this second sense: a life with all its qualities, a non-subjective life which retains the impotential for all of its qualities within its bare or naked (pre-categorial or unqualified) existence. It also follows, as Agamben's passage quoted above implies, that the two senses of bare life cannot actually be separated, and that the first depends upon the second. The second, as pure mediality or
154 pure impotentiality is the sheer appearance of life qua life, its extractive qualifiers must presuppose it, and will hence always derive from it. If human life is at bottom bare and infantile potentiality, even the human life that is separated and opposed to itself, turned into bare life by political power, remains itself, its own bare life in its sheer openness or mediality. It is this irreducibility of bare life that Agamben will utilize as the gambit to bring the sacrificial paradigm to a halt. The famous distinction Agamben introduces, following Aristotle, between zoe and bios, that is, the simple fact of living and a qualified form of life, human life in a properly constituted political association for example, cannot
(unlike for Aristotle) be an exclusive one.2 In some sense, the political project of the
West has always known this, and this is its Achilles heel, its need to go on taking life in hand.
Yet Agamben will insist that just as the Western tradition's notion of the Voice entails the sacrificial separation and removal of every kind of utterance (and uttering being) that is held to merely indicate rather than to signify, so the "logi-caF (in the etymological sense of pertaining to logos), dimension of Western metaphysics entails a tangible political dimension that wields the physical violence necessary to enact a stable separation between these two modes of being (the living and the speaking) that onto- theology will subsequently justify by finding already in being. This is why in the
Western history of politics "the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the meshes of the logos" depends upon "pure violence as the extreme political object, as the "thing" of politics"; far from representing a purely linguistic or "idealist" strategy
155 of separation, the Western logos has material teeth in the form of "pure violence" as the vocation of Western politics.3 So much is this true, Agamben thinks, that the linguistic component we have previously examined, the philosophical articulations of pure being through the grammatical theories of the Voice as pure intention, can be regarded as subsequent to the primordial form of politics: of making the division or cut in human life that simultaneously sets up the boundaries within the human between the proper and the improper, the cultural and the natural. As Agamben puts this idea in Homo Sacer,
"Politics therefore appears as 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".4 This threshold must already have been there for something like a metaphysical justification for it to emerge, as we will presently see.
While this last statement will doubtless recall Heidegger's diagnosis of Western metaphysics as an immemorial withdrawing of origin in favour of that which it sends, and while one would not be wrong to detect such a resonance, there is a Benjaminian one that is perhaps more pertinent. Agamben points out that when the modern state takes charge of human life, it is in fact "reaffirming the bond.. .between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii", a bond which is "derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres". The language of correspondence between the modern (i.e. the present) and the archaic past immediately suggests Benjamin's discussion of the dialectical image as the flashing up of a correspondence or legibility between the archaic past (the origin of
156 the idea) and the temporal repetition of its contents. In describing the dialectical image in
"Convolute N" of his Arcades Project, Benjamin states, "It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill"6 If this allusion to Benjamin is as significant as is suggested here, it would appear to follow that Agamben's political texts are attempting to present his readers with a dialectical image that juxtaposes the archaic past of Western political power with its present practices in order to create a constellation of the two. The purpose of this is to show that the essence of Western political power is
"the inclusion of bare life in the political realm", and that such inclusion "is the original activity of sovereign power". The dialectical telescoping of what we earlier described as metaphysical sovereignty would exhibit the limits of the latter, leading it to its downfall, completion, and ultimately messianic transfiguration. In a first section of this chapter, it will be important to articulate Benjamin's idea of the repetition of archaic politics as envisioned in the essay of 1921 "Critique of Violence" and as this structure is rendered in terms of the late essay "On the Concept of History".
Curiously, however, as the introduction to this dissertation suggested, more often than not, Agamben's discussion of sovereign power and the state of exception are not understood by his most of his readers in this Benjaminian light, namely, as the attempt to
o wrest free of sovereign power. Instead, an influential strand of Agamben criticism portrays him as a kind of neo-Schmittian whose work on sovereignty gets caught up in 157 the same political impasse of authoritarian politics that characterizes Schmitt's own deeply conservative-reactionary political stance.9 In order to show the inaccuracy of these claims, it will be necessary to first investigate the role Benjamin's work plays in
Homo Sacer and the subsequent works explicitly concerned with politics. This will be done in three steps. First, I will look at Agamben's positioning of his project in Homo
Sacer by means of an examination of his use of Carl Schmitt's understanding of the sovereign state of exception. Second, I will follow up on this discussion of Schmitt with an account of Agamben's close proximity to Benjamin that provides the overall orientation toward Agamben's examination of bare life in his political work. Finally, to establish this argument for the overall importance of Benjamin to Agamben's use of
Schmitt, I will examine in his State of Exception Agamben's discussion of the relationship between Benjamin and Schmitt, a relation that despite its somewhat obscure character, proves to be quite antagonistic.
3.1 Carl Schmitt's Sovereignty as the State of Exception
It is an accurate commonplace that Agamben's work on political sovereignty draws substantially on Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty understood as a decision on the state of exception. But the status of Agamben's turn to Schmitt is not clearly understood.
In some ways, it is merely part of a broader interest in Schmitt's work on the part of many on the radical left.1 Nonetheless, given Schmitt's status as both an arch- conservative and an apologist for the Nazi Reich, it remains at least slightly problematic that Agamben's work would be seen to owe so much to Schmitt's thought. Indeed, the
158 putative dangers of anything but a purely hostile engagement with Schmitt's thought— the danger of an unwitting contamination by a fascist politic foremost among them— remains an implicit presumption in Norris's and Bernstein's case against Agamben's politics. Given this, it is useful to say a few words about the significance of Schmitt in
Agamben's work before turning to an exposition of the way Schmitt's state of exception is formally interpreted therein.
As Agamben argues in the first chapter of his State of Exception, specifically modern juridical theory, unlike the juridical theory of earlier periods (such as that of the Middle
Ages), is "positivist" in attempting to understand all forms of legal as well as extra-legal behaviour within a framework of law. But at certain historical moments, this approach appears insufficient and the key question arises as to the relationship between extra-legal action and the juridical order itself. In periods of political upheaval, revolutionary action, and declarations of martial law, what is the relationship of what happens in these situations to the law? What is common to the various theorists of exceptional government measures that Agamben considers in this opening chapter of State of
Exception, (Friedrich, Rossiter, Tingsten, and others), is that while recognizing that under certain exceptional circumstances it is apparently necessary to sanction extra-legal action in the "defence of democracy" beyond the legally normative, none of these theorists can supply satisfactory criteria for these powers so that they would indeed defend democracy rather than supplant it. As Agamben puts this in the opening pages of his book, "All such theories remain prisoner of the vicious circle in which the emergency measures they seek
159 to justify in the name of defending the democratic constitution are the same ones that lead to its ruin".11 Pointing out that there are historically two schools of thought with respect to the status of the state of exception in democratic constitutional orders, namely, those who argue that all measures exceeding the rule of law should be included and provided for within the law, and those who argue that the law in some cases must exceed its normative articulation, Agamben notes that what neither side seems to realize is that their respective positions are equivalent: "the two positions agree in ruling out the existence of a sphere of human action that is entirely removed from law".12
From this perspective, the particular advantage to Agamben of Schmitt's attempt to theorize the state of exception is that it corrects the un-theorized existence (because it is put down to simple "necessity") of emergency powers in the constitution of all European and broadly Western democratic states. Leaving the state of exception unexamined entails a particular blindness about what Agamben describes as the emergence of the exception as a paradigm of government in times where the normal rule of law seems increasingly unable to regulate many areas of life (we will have more to say about this in the following chapter). For Agamben's purposes, what Schmitt provides is both a theorization of the state of exception and an attempt to link the latter to a form of law.
However, as we will see, in proposing that actions exceeding the law nonetheless partake of law in some way, Schmitt does not stray too far outside the positivist boundaries he seems to explicitly reject. But in providing a topological model of sovereign power,
Schmitt is able to theorize a sovereign exception to the law that is both inside and outside
160 the normal legal order, and this move on his part is what allows him to argue that even power exceeding normal law continues to reference legality even in its suspension. In his discussion of the notion of force-of-law, Agamben notes that what is important about
Schmitt's theory of sovereignty involves the separation of law from its application. It is the suspension of legality and its simultaneous application to an "external reality" in the state of exception which defines the function of sovereignty: the sovereign, in Schmitt's conception, is what "proceeds by establishing within the body of the law a series of caesurae and division whose ends do not quite meet, but which, by means of the articulation and opposition, allow the machine of law to function". Hence the importance of the concept of the state of exception for Agamben is that it renders theoretically intelligible "the separation of "force of law" from the law" itself.14
It should be noticed right away that there is a relationship of homology between the law that is able to contain the exceptional and the tradition of Western grammar in which that which exceeds the subject ("pure being", the silent Voice), is nonetheless attributed to a pure intentionality (and thus remains subjective). From Benjamin's point of view, as we will see, this is also the perspective of the rhythm of nature that cannot relate itself from its own ground to the messianic. From this perspective, the messianic will be that which exceeds law and subjectivity but which cannot be contained within the latter's terms: in some sense it is an excess "without return" to the law, a pure deposition of the law rather than a decision which reinstates it. This must be established by examining
Agamben's exposition of Schmitt's state of exception more closely.
161 Carl Schmitt famously claims in his Political Theology that "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception".15 To begin with it is useful to understand what Schmitt intends by his claim about sovereignty being tied to the decision on the exception.
Schmitt lays this out very clearly in the opening pages of Political Theology. The sovereign, he says, is the one who "decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it". As we have suggested, against proponents of positive law such as Hans Kelsen, who maintain that the liberal constitutional state is capable of forming an all-inclusive legal totality where nothing need be thought outside the rule of law, Schmitt maintains that the "emergency cannot be anticipated"; there must be some power beyond the rule of law, namely the sovereign, whose particular task it is to impose order on a situation where the ordinary rule of law cannot be applied.17 It is significant that the limit of the rule of law cannot refer to a sovereign power that stands altogether beyond or outside the law, but rather, is itself the threshold between normal law and lawlessness. As we have noted previously, the exception, along with the sovereign who decides on it, is law in excess of itself, but this entails that sovereignty is law's own excess, a not-belonging that still somehow belongs: in other words, a figure of self-differing totality. As Schmitt puts it, "Although he [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety". 8 In order for the totality that is law to be effective even in its own self-displacement, the totality requires a state of exception that is not only exceptional vis-a-vis the norm but that also exceeds the stable
162 spatial boundaries that separate inside from outside. The sovereign and the exception it
brings into being are entities of the threshold formed between two states, between the
lawful and the lawless.
In this regard Agamben argues that Schmitt's German term for the exception,
Ausnahme, must be taken literally. Literally translated, Aus-nahme means to "take the
outside". What is taken as outside does not simply leave the inside from which it is
removed, but instead continues to have a relationship to the inside precisely qua removed.
As we have seen, "what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the
rule in the form of the rule's suspension".19 For Schmitt, according to Agamben, "The
particular "force" of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an
exteriority" which as sovereign it first in fact defines. This immediately entails that
contrary to a common sense idea about emergency political situations (one that sovereign powers often perpetuate for ideological reasons), the sovereign power is not merely
reactive, that is, its actions are not primarily about "the control or neutralization of an
excess" that disrupts the normal legal order from without. Indeed, as Agamben notes,
"chaos must first be included in the juridical order through the creation of a zone of
indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal situation".21 Thus,
sovereign power represents "the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity", rather than acting as the latter's mere
defender.22
163 One implication of the structure of the exception is the difficulty in locating it. The exception does not deal with excess, but is itself excessive with respect to every determinate localizable instance of legal order. This is because the exception is prior to the categories that would render it intelligible, that is, those of fact and right, the included and the excluded. Since "the state of exception opens the space" of localization and juridical meaning, "the state of exception is thus essentially unrealizable".23 The exception thus contains a fundamental ambiguity, one constituting "a principle of its infinite dislocation".24 Schmitt, Agamben argues, underestimates the complexity implied by the claim that the exception is both inside and outside the normal legal order, tending instead to present the exception as though it were simply outside the normal legal order.
Yet because Schmitt also wants to argue that the exception exists for the sake of the normal legal order, what Agamben wants to bring out is the complexity of the threshold or limit state obtaining between the normal and the exceptional, the inside and the outside.
In pursuing the complex topological structure Agamben believes the state of exception to be, much of his exposition of the state of exception is provided through the concepts of linguistics that Agamben has previously utilized. Specifically, Agamben argues for a conceptual parallel between the (ontological) relationship of the legal rule to its suspension in the exception and language's presupposition of the sense of a rule-in- general prior to its application to any particular situation of linguistic use. As Agamben puts it, "To refer to something, a rule must both presuppose and yet still establish a
164 relation with what is outside relation". As we have seen with respect to language considered as a pure semiotic system, language maintains its linguistic terms in a suspended state of general syntactical (structural) validity beyond or prior to actual denotation, such that "a word acquires its ability to denote a segment of reality only insofar as it is also meaningful in its own not-denoting (that is, as langue as opposed to parole, as a term in its mere lexical consistency, independent of its use in discourse)".26
In law, similarly, "the rule can refer to the individual case only because it is in force, in the sovereign exception, as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference".27 Just as language {langue) presupposes, as potential indication, the actual objects to which it applies in the mode of a "virtual relation", allowing it then actually to apply to an actual situation, so "law presupposes the nonjuridical (for example, mere violence in the form of the state of nature) as that with which it maintains itself in a potential relation in the state of exception". The law, then, operates in the same way as does the pure lexical consistency of a language: both of them can only apply or attain actuality by virtue of their conservation of a virtual potential-to-apply in the absence of any actual application. The sovereign exception is accordingly the form of law which presupposes what lies beyond itself, "the juridical reference in the form of its suspension". Like language, law consists of an indefinite potential application, and the state of exception is the appearance in law of this potential as the pure presupposition of the outside. Just as there is nothing outside pure language—since language potentially
165 includes everything—there is nothing outside law, considered as a state of juridical validity encompassing both the norm and the exception.
A key consequence of legal presupposition, Agamben suggests, is that in presupposing the outside or the non-juridical in the potential application of the state of exception, law must include the "pure and unsanctionable figure of the offense that, in the normal case, brings about the rule's own transgression". In Agamben's example, if the law forbids homicide under its normal rule, in the state of exception someone's being killed by the sovereign cannot be thought of as simply beyond law, that is, "not as natural violence but as sovereign violence in the state of exception".31 Because there is the sovereign exception, in other words, the "outside" (e.g. a killing that appears to be
"natural" violence) must become that to which law will apply through its capture on the
"inside" (e.g. killing as sovereign violence). This capture or annexation occurs through the pure potentiality of application, that is, through the suspension of the rule: the rule retreats in the exception to reveal nothing but the pure force of application in the absence of all normal rules (except for that of presupposition or potential application). It is as if law had to demonstrate or enact the actions it deems illegal only by first committing those same actions by including them within law in the form of the exception. This manoeuvre represents the sovereign exception's "sleight of hand": sovereignty represents the acts that it itself commits as though they were natural acts to be subsequently regulated. It follows that the cessation of violence or the securing of peace under sovereign power can in fact be attained only through a prior enactment of violence.
166 At a first level of analysis, then, we can conclude that Carl Schmitt's theory of
sovereign power is useful for Agamben's purposes because it allows a more precise
articulation of the sacrificial violence of community discussed in the first chapter as
something immemorial and presupposed. Agamben describes the relationship between
sacrificial violence and the paradigm of the Voice in terms quite similar to the way he
thinks about law and language in Homo Sacer. As we saw in the first chapter, the
violence of community is bound up with the prior removal of a natural or animal voice;
by the same token, the ungrounded character of human action is related to its grounding
in a silent Voice of pure intention which also serves as the negative limit of tradition. For
Agamben in Homo Sacer, law (in the form of the sovereign exception) is the ungrounded
action that founds community (the norm). But just as the sacrificial paradigm relates back to a certain conception of language in which the natural voice is always already removed, the exceptional power of the sovereign relates back to the pure presuppositional nature of language; not just any presupposition, but that of the Voice as pure signifying
intention. This is why Agamben claims that language itself in some way "is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language
and that language is always beyond itself. As he continues this thought, "The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named".33 Just as language is the medium that constantly presupposes its objects in order to have "subject matter", law must presuppose
167 the non-juridical over which it is to apply as always within its juris-diction, its capacity to judge and to decide. Both language and law can have this structure of presupposition, and therefore can constitute forms of tradition and can pass down names, only because both language and law are first of all modes of potentiality, both can preserve within themselves a potential to be applied in any actual instance.
Yet it is precisely the potentiality at stake in law and language that yields the complex and paradoxical structure of the exception. Agamben explicates this structure by means of the way the example and exception function as linguistic categories. In linguistic theory the example occupies a strangely paradoxical position, since that which exemplifies is both a member and not a member of the class to which it is said to belong.34 In terms of belonging, the example is included in a class of entities because it partakes of the properties governed by the class in question; but in terms of non- belonging, the example is not just passively subsumed in its class, but as ex-ample, actually demonstrates its belonging by showing or performing the meaning of the category to which it would belong. In this way the example is strangely performative or self-referencing: it in fact provides the paradigm for the very class it is intended to illustrate. As Agamben puts this thought, "for this very reason [of self-reference] the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it".
In its linguistic self-reference, Agamben writes, "the example thus shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning". The example is thus literally
168 paradigmatic in the etymological sense of what is "shown beside" with the resulting
paradox that "a class can contain everything except its own paradigm".37
What is at stake in the paradox of self-reference generated by the example is its
ontological potentiality. The potentiality in question gives rise to the undecidability in
which the example, standing outside its class precisely to the extent it is included within
it, has the power to jeopardize the consistency of any class claiming it as a member. The
example becomes, in other words, a purely multiple singularity standing beyond the
dichotomy of universal and particular; an example is thus a pure name or gesture which
has the power to found, but also to confound, classes. As Agamben nicely puts this in
The Coming Community, the example, insofar as it is exemplary "is what is not defined
by any property, except by being-called". The exemplarity in question here is thus the
power to "communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by
any common property, by any identity. They [the singularities of the example] are
expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself.
It is a short step to showing that the exception functions in a reciprocal but opposite
way to the example, forming a system of logical relations with it. Agamben claims that if
"the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included
in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it". The exception is also an
instance of paradoxical or self-referential showing, but this time shows its belonging "at the center of the class" to which it can never belong.41 The exception forms a kind of permanent residue or indivisible remainder which the excluding class cannot be rid of,
169 because the excluded element is required for the constitution of the class in the first place: to identify itself as a class every class inevitably and involuntarily creates a series of elements that cannot belong, and yet those "negative" elements define the class as thoroughly as do those elements that evidently belong. The exception, Agamben argues,
"is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included".42 Like the example, the exception is therefore a "limit figure" which puts in crisis any possibility of "clearly distinguishing" between inside and outside, belonging or non-belonging.43
Exception and example together form a system of "correlative concepts that are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined".44 The example and exception come together to the extent that "law.. .must first of all create the sphere of its own reference in real life and make that reference regular".45 The situation in which law creates the sphere of its own reference "cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two" that is strictly undecidable.46 Decision is only made possible on the basis of undecidability, at least in the sense that new decisions on the boundaries of fact and law must exceed those already determined or already in place; otherwise decision would be a simple repetition of the already decided, and this would violate the strong notion of sovereignty put forward by Schmitt. Here decision involves, as Agamben claims, "the very relation between law and fact" that occurs when the sovereign, in
170 instituting the exception, makes undecidable all the normal forms of legal application in order to capture the outside as the inside; it is this move that constitutes "the originary form of law".47 However, in terms of the example and the exception, it is entirely unclear if what is captured by the sovereign exception is an example of the law's application or if it is rather what is excluded, that is, the outside of law to which it would apply as a decision. The decision on the exception can thus only occur through recourse to a violent classification: "violence as a primordial juridical fact" annexed by the sovereign in the
48 exception.
Agamben argues that since violence is the primal juridical fact, guilt is the originary figure of those under or exposed to law. "Guilt", Agamben writes, "indicates a being-in- debt", and that represents "precisely the condition of being included through an exclusion, of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one cannot fully assume".49 The law in the form of its potentiality to apply is first of all the imputation of guilt, being-in-debt as an ontological condition of being subject to the law's indefinite potential application. This is why "Guilt refers not to transgression.. .but to the pure force of law, to the law's simple reference to something".50 The sovereign structure of law "has the form of a state of exception in which fact and law are indistinguishable", even though it is such indistinguishableness itself that "must, nevertheless, be decided on".51
Deciding on the state of exception is nothing but a virtual application of law's violence to life, constituting "a limit-figure of life, a threshold in which life is both inside 171 and outside the juridical order", through its being-guilty in advance of law's application.
Thus, life is what law must presuppose as its "outside" through its inclusion on the inside of applicability. Decision in this sense is only possible insofar as life is always already what is presupposed by law and deemed guilty. We will have significantly more to say on the relation between law and life in the sections below.
What comes into view at this stage is the quasi-parasitic position of law with respect to the life it attempts to capture in the sovereign exception through the imposition of guilt. As Agamben declares, "Law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exception: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it". This is perfectly consistent with Schmitt's claim that law "has no existence in itself, but rather has its being in the very life of men".53 Law requires the sovereign exception in order to capture life in its matrix of guilt; this also entails that from the perspective of law, nothing can be allowed to subsist outside its boundaries of potential application if it is to be truly sovereign. For Agamben it follows that the sovereign exception "traces and from time to time renews this threshold of indistinction" between "nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law".54 But if the exception of life in law is always in "the place of an undecidable" this is precisely because it doubles life, becoming indistinguishable from it, in the effort to capture it. If natural life, a figure of which we have seen in the form of infancy, consists not of this or that essence, but first of all in potentiality, or more correctly, impotentiality as the capacity not to pass into actuality, then law on this
172 understanding of the exception must attempt to capture the very impotentiality of life
inside its structure of presupposition and potentiality to apply. But this also suggests that
law is only quasi-parasitical because life and law, having identical structures, partake of
the passive potentiality of human life or existence. But law, as sovereign decision on the
exception, seeks to enclose the very potentiality of life within its zone of applicability,
that is, to divide it into that which is included and that which is excluded, which is to say
included, subject to law without reserve. But in attempting to subject life to itself without
reserve, law must expose all life to potential violence. To do so, it must enclose life
within sovereign exceptionality by making life guilty in advance of any actual decision,
guilt consisting here of being captured and divided through the periodically renewed
applicability of decision Agamben points to as the basic structure of law. But whether
the life that is the referent of the state of exception is bios or zoe , nomos or physis,
product of natural existence or object of sovereign violence, remains systematically
unclear and undecidable.
Agamben notes that the undecidability of the exception therefore describes a
situation of the sovereign ban. The sovereign ban, a term apparently derived from old
German, "designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia
of the sovereign".55 In the double sense of this word, the person who is banned is not
simply "set outside the law and made indifferent to it", but is "exposed and threatened on
the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable".56 This threatening is possible only because abandonment is a figure of potentiality that
173 maintains itself in relation to the life that it abandons; if the sovereign ban consisted merely in the actuality of an application rather than in its suspended potential to apply, it would not be primarily a structure that exposes and threatens. The power of the sovereign is therefore that of the "matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary
"farce of law"", which, exactly like the power of language to signify in general, "holds life in its ban by abandoning it".57 This extreme or limit form of relation turns out to be the "simple positing of relation with the nonrelational", the potential applicability of law to life in the sovereign exception.58 Against this conception of the sovereign exception and abandonment, Agamben urges, it will be necessary to think life "beyond relation" to a sovereign decision, in terms of a potential that exceeds even that of the potential of law to apply.59
This tracking of Agamben's discussion of the exception indicates that it is not entirely the same as Schmitt's. Schmitt wants to maintain a certain "realism" in the face of the potentiality and undecidability he nonetheless maintains is the primary property of the sovereign. The decision on the exception in Schmitt's understanding fails to free itself of the issue of the metaphysics of "the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others" who makes a decision based on a situation arising from existential circumstances.60 Schmitt's decision remains caught in undecidability, since it is not clear if the "hierarchically superior" subject who decides does so because of sheer power
(physis) or by right {nomos). But what is at issue in Agamben's reading of the exception, in emphasizing its undecidable and therefore potential structure, is in fact the exposure of
174 a Benjaminian potentiality beyond the law that, like the infantile emergence of language,
"escapes all conscious willing", and therefore every possibility of application, actualization or decision.61
3.2 The Sacredness of Life, Bare Life and Zoe
In Homo Sacer, after expanding on Schmitt's conception of sovereignty as enacted through the state of exception, and as we have seen, endorsing the latter as the fundamental structure of sovereignty, Agamben turns to Benjamin's essay of 1921,
"Critique of Violence" [Zur Kritik der Gewalt].62 It should immediately be noted here that Benjamin's term Gewalt can also be translated simply as "power" rather than as
"violence" in the narrow sense of physical destruction. For Agamben's purposes, it is the sense of Gewalt as power that it will be crucial to keep in mind, especially insofar as it resonates with impotentiality as a kind of passive "power".
Agamben points out that that what is at stake in Benjamin's essay is "the irreducible link uniting violence and law", and which as such "proves the necessary and, even today, indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty". It is important to recognize the importance of this claim for Agamben's entire argument. As we have already suggested, for Agamben it is not the link between sovereignty and decision that is important, but rather, the link between sovereign violence in the state of exception and the life that it captures in its ban. While making it clear that Benjamin's "Critique" essay was written while the latter was as yet unfamiliar with Schmitt's theory of the exception,
Agamben points out that Benjamin's essay presents the link between violence and law as
175 its key theme. This link, Agamben argues, is made manifest through the presentation of
"a dialectical oscillation between the violence that posits law and the violence that
preserves it. Hence the necessity of a third figure to break the circular dialectic of these
two forms of violence".64 For Benjamin, according to Agamben, the "third figure" at
issue in the essay is "divine violence", whose mode of breaking the circular dialectic, as
Agamben quite correctly states "constitutes the central problem of every interpretation of
the essay".65 According to Agamben Benjamin's essay provides "no positive criterion
for its [viz. divine violence's] identification and even denies the possibility of
recognizing it in the concrete case". Despite this problem, what can be said about
divine violence with certainty is that it "neither posits nor preserves law, but rather "de-
poses" (entsetzf) it". Agamben contends at this point that "The definition of divine
violence becomes easier, in fact, precisely when it is put in relation with the state of
exception", even though the exception was not an element in Benjamin's
considerations. Divine violence can be recognized only in that moment in which the
sovereign ban places in suspension all familiar possibilities of distinguishing "law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law".69
The ability to distinguish between an exceptional form of legality that simply re
establishes law and a form of power that (in Benjamin's words) expiates "without bloodshed, and finally, by the absence of all lawmaking", is certainly far removed from
Schmitt's theoretical intentions.70 For Schmitt, as we have seen, the purpose of the
sovereign ban is precisely that it allows the sovereign to decide. As Agamben notes, for
176 Schmitt "the sovereign is precisely the one who maintains the possibility of deciding on the two [i.e. law and life] to the very degree that he renders them indistinguishable from each other".71 It is crucial for Agamben's purposes, however, that:
As long as the state of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialectic between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even appears simply as the medium in which the passage from the one to the other takes place.
What Agamben proposes here is thus a certain "deepening" or intensification of the state of exception beyond any possibility of conserving the difference between the latter and legal normality: to break the link between law and life, as much as between law-positing and law-preserving violence, the exception and the norm must be made indistinguishable, the exception must become the norm. The operation of divine violence is for Agamben directly counter to the violence pursued by sovereign power, even if the situation and even medium of their action should prove identical. Divine violence or power, manifesting the interests of justice against the imperatives of law, is "situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between exception and rule".73
Rather than offering a definition of divine violence, Benjamin turns toward what
Agamben calls "the bearer of the link between violence and law, which he [Benjamin] calls "bare life" (Mosses Leberi).74 For Benjamin, the figure of bare life has an ambiguous quality because it is at once what is deemed sacred and is simultaneously that over which law-positing violence seeks to maintain its power. Benjamin claims in his
"Critique" essay that the "dissolution of legal violence stems...from the guilt of bare
177 natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that
"expiates" the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law".75 At the same time the bare life that is to expiate its guilt is also the very same made sacred by what Benjamin thinks is a relatively recent dogma: "this idea of man's sacredness gives grounds for reflection that what is here pronounced sacred was, according to ancient mythic thought, the marked bearer of guilt: life itself'.76 As
Agamben goes on to point out, Benjamin's thinking about the recent formation of the dogma of the sacredness of life is validated by the fact that the ancient Greeks (who are the likely referent of the phrase "ancient mythic thought")77, had no notion of life as sacred: "Decisive as it is for the origin of Western politics, the opposition between zoe and bios...contains nothing to make one assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as
78 such". It is even true that, according to Agamben, "Homeric Greek does not even know
7Q a term to designate the living body". Thus, even if zoe, a term corresponding to life in general, was considered "bare" in the Greek world in the sense of "unqualified", leading to its exclusion from the polis, the idea that this general fact of living is also sacred represents both a conceptual and historico-political mutation of the notion of "bareness".
Bare life, in its new configuration as sacred life, the privileged figure of which
Agamben identifies as the homo sacer of Roman law, will now combine the ancient sense of life excluded and unqualified with a notion of life separated because of its specifically sacred character. It is the sacred character of bare life which Agamben claims "is the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with 178 sovereignty". Yet all the same, Agamben continues to follow Benjamin's line of thinking expressed in the "Critique of Violence" essay that it is also within bare life that the link between law and life may be broken, expiated, or expunged. Thus, Agamben writes later on in the book that "In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate to sovereign power, turns into an existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold".81
While the following chapter will examine in detail Agamben's claim that the state of exception has in our times become the rule in the situation of biopolitical modernity, it is important here to notice that bare life is being understood in a double sense: on the one hand it is what remains connected in the most intimate way possible with sovereign, and hence legal violence, and yet it is also at once that on which sovereign violence loses its hold. In losing its hold over bare life by means of the impotentiality of bare life itself, what Benjamin describes as "a new historical epoch" comes into being.82 In this new era,
Agamben suggests, the "biopolitical body" itself must "be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe". If misunderstood, this statement could be taken to mean that life must somehow be reduced to the bare life that sovereign power constitutes as sacred. Yet not only would such an interpretation make Agamben's the most defeatist politics ever conceived, it would also flatly contradict the stated intention to sever the link between life and law. Hence it must be kept in mind that Agamben's formulation, articulating the functional equivalence of zoe and bios, also bears the sense of the duality
179 of potentiality we have seen with respect to law-positing violence on the one hand and
the pure mediality of divine violence that exceeds the terms of law on the other. Zoe is
and is not bare life because bare life is at once the figure of life in its guilty connection to
the sovereign ban, and at the same time, the bare life so constituted remains proximate to
its zoe, to a general impotentiality of life as its pure and open singular mediality. But to
think these two together is to think the way that bare life as zoe, even in its capture and
isolation in a form of life made radically bare, still exceeds that capture, and in a kind of
indifference to it, remains beyond the totality instituted by law-making.
It is this sense of remaining, indifferent to sovereign violence, that zoe becomes a
new image of life, a dialectical image flashing up in the moment of danger, in a historical
moment charged with tension. What remains beyond the extremity of sovereign
violence is equally what becomes legible in the juxtaposition of the then of the division
between bare life and qualified life and the now in which bare life emerges as something
completely abandoned in the sovereign ban. At stake in what remains beyond sovereign
violence is the opportunity to re-cognize a new image of life that was there all along in its
almost banal obviousness, but not understood or recognized for just this reason. In the birth of a new sense of life, human life and its history has a chance to be redeemed, to be
illuminated anew.
For Agamben, the simple fact of living or what the Greeks called zoe already referred to the pure mediality of life irreducible to the bios of the community from which it is excluded. This is because zoe is being thought by Agamben in the same terms in
180 which he has previously understood the pure impartibility of language, as impotentiality remaining beyond relation to what appropriates it; in other words, as the infancy that lies forever just out of reach of the subject of language. This is of course not to say that zoe actively withdraws from relation in the manner of Heideggerian withdrawing/showing: as pure and open mediality it neither conceals, withdraws, or gives anything, but is instead a purely passive potentiality that remains in-different to the actualizations it also makes possible. And yet, it does not remain indifferent in the manner of the profound negativity of the origin; there is nothing "profound" here at all, but instead, can be thought, although never appropriated by (i.e. never be made property nor become proper to) the linguistic subject, even if this subject can speak of life in various ways. As Agamben will put this point in his subsequent book significantly titled The Open: Man and Animal, "in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms [viz. human and animal], something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity".85 This is an image of a reconciled condition between both humanity and nature, but made possible because of a prior reconciliation within humanity made possible through the liquidation of the sovereign violence that positions life in relation to law. Invoking Benjamin's phrase "mastery of the relation between nature and humanity" in his Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street) in The Open, Agamben provides this image of a reconciled life:
What does "mastery of the relation between nature and humanity" mean? That neither must man master nature nor nature man. Nor must both be surpassed in a third term that would represent their dialectical synthesis. Rather, according to the Benjaminian model of a "dialectic at a standstill," 181 what is decisive here is only the "between," the interval or, we might say, the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non- coincidence.86
3.3 The Gigantomachia over the Exception87
Given the prominent place Agamben already gives to Benjamin's discussion of sacred life in Homo Sacer, and the important role it plays in interpreting the book as a whole, it is perhaps not surprising that in Agamben's State of Exception, the third in the Homo
Sacer trilogy, there is an extended discussion of the relationship between Benjamin and
Schmitt. According to Agamben, what is at stake in what he calls the Gigantomachia between these two, is precisely the status of undecidability in the exception. From the discussion in Homo Sacer it should be clear that what is at issue is the whether the link between law and life is to be separated or maintained in the exception. Again, just as he did in Homo Sacer, Agamben points out that "in both modern and ancient doctrine the syntagma force of law refers in the technical sense not to the law but to those decrees
(which, as we indeed say, have the force of law) that the executive power can be authorized to issue in some situations". In these situations what is at stake is a
"separation of "force of law" from the law", a splitting of the law where "on the one hand, the norm is in force but is not applied (it has no "force") and, on the other, acts that do not have the value of law acquire its "force"". In the suspension or gap between law and its force lies the "anomic space" of pure potential application which the law needs to annex to itself at all costs.90 If the law allows such an "anomic gap" to freely exist, it would open a genuine crisis of applicability pertaining to the very possibility of a valid
182 legal order. For Schmitt, as we have seen, the state of exception fills the gap between the normal order in its entirety and its force of applicability by referring beyond itself to the force of law preserved in the sovereign power external to every norm. "In this way",
Agamben writes, "the impossible task of welding norm and reality together, and thereby constituting the normal sphere, is carried out in the form of the exception, that is to say, by presupposing their nexus". This is indeed the limit-form of relation that Agamben has invoked previously through the notion of the sovereign ban; in the ban the state of exception "marks a threshold" in which "logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference".92
With this brief discussion as background to the topic at hand, it will perhaps not come as a surprise to learn that in revisiting the history of Benjamin's infamous intellectual relationship to Schmitt, Agamben reverses the term of the relationship. What has become the standard reading of this relationship is that Benjamin, for reasons many on the left would prefer not to examine too closely, was favourably impressed by
Schmitt's theory of sovereignty as a state of exception or emergency; Benjamin went so far as to send Schmitt an admiring letter in 1930 along with a copy of his newly published Trauerspiel. The concept of sovereignty found in this work, so Benjamin claimed in his letter, was indebted to the Nazi jurist's understanding of sovereign power as the power over the exception.93 As Samuel Weber points out, even if Benjamin did not simply borrow from Schmitt, but altered the theory of the sovereign exception to suite his own purposes, the thought that Benjamin might have been conceptually indebted to
183 Schmitt was enough to occasion the omission of this letter from the first edition of
Benjamin's Collected Writings, edited by Gershem Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno.94
In State of Exception, Agamben revises the account just rehearsed, arguing that not only did Schmitt's influence on Benjamin not begin (as is commonly thought) with
Benjamin's citation of Schmitt's Political Theology in the Trauerspiel of 1928, but that the "influence"~if one can still call it that—in fact runs the other way: that Schmitt's
Political Theology of 1922 was already reacting to Benjamin's "Zwr Kritik der Gewalt" of the previous year.95
To be sure, Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" makes no mention of the sovereign decision; mention is made only of "law-founding" and "law-preserving" violence (the former of which Benjamin eventually refers to simply as "mythic violence"). Agamben already pointed out in Homo Sacer that Benjamin had no knowledge of Schmitt's concept of the sovereign exception when he wrote the "Critique" essay, since Schmitt's Political
Theology was published in 1922, the year after Benjamin's essay appeared.96 As
Agamben argues in his discussion of Benjamin's essay, consistent with his reading of it in Homo Sacer, what is crucial for Benjamin is ensuring "the possibility of a violence... that lies absolutely "outside" (ausserhalb) and "beyond" (Jenseits) the law and that, as such, could shatter the dialectic between lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence". The purpose of invoking the power or violence which Benjamin termed
"pure" or "divine" is, in Agamben's close paraphrase of the essay's text, to "prove the reality of such violence" that "neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it.. .and thus
184 inaugurates a new historical epoch". In Benjamin's terms, it is necessary to demonstrate the possibility that divine power has its basis beyond the legal order and in reality, precisely because the legal order expressly denies that there is anything outside or beyond the law. The messianic-revolutionary quality of this pure violence or power in
Benjamin is precisely that which "the law can never tolerate—what it feels as a threat with which it is impossible to come to terms", not only or even necessarily because "the ends of such a violence are incompatible with law", but because any power outside the law immediately implies the possible de-positioning and subordination of the power to found rule over life to an outside power." Agamben's gloss on Benjamin's essay gets at what for Benjamin is the deeply sinister aspect to legal power, namely, that as the latter puts it, "Mythical violence [equivalent to law-making violence] is bloody power over mere life for its own sake"; this is ultimately why the law must capture the power of the living by enclosing it within the retributive system of guilt and fear, giving rise to the endless cyclical oscillation between law-founding and law-preserving violence.100 What life, once made guilty or captured in the meshes of the law, can thus never assume, on this reading, is its own power, its own potentiality in a speaking being not subordinated to the jurisdiction of the sovereign's decision.
According to Agamben's discussion in State of Exception, Schmitt's Political
Theology reacts to Benjamin's essay by expressly denying everything Benjamin asserts in
"Critique of Violence" about the independence of divine violence by attempting to "lead such a violence back to a juridical context".101 On Agamben's reading, Schmitt's "state
185 of exception is the space in which he tries to capture Benjamin's idea of a pure violence and to inscribe anomie within the very body of the nomos", since, "for Schmitt, there cannot be a pure violence—that is, a violence absolutely outside the law—because in the state of exception it is included in the law through its very exclusion. That is to say, the state of exception is the device by means of which Schmitt responds to Benjamin's affirmation of a wholly anomie human action".102 Hence, on Agamben's reading,
Schmitt's Political Theology becomes a response to Benjamin's critique of lawmaking and law-preserving violence on the basis of the attempt to deny divine power or what
Agamben calls anomie human action. "The sovereign violence in Political Theology responds to the pure violence of Benjamin's essay with the figure of a power that neither makes nor preserves law, but suspends it".103
Agamben's interpretation raises the stakes of Benjamin's subsequent appropriation and displacement of Schmitt's notion of the sovereign exception in the Origin of German
Tragic Drama (Jrauerspiel). The Schmittean theory of sovereignty takes shape "in response to Benjamin's idea of an ultimate undecidability of all legal problems", by affirming "sovereignty as the place of an extreme decision"; but this is countered by
Benjamin, who understands the sovereign's secret weakness to be the impossibility or non-finality of any decision.104 According to Benjamin, when the Baroque sovereign is confronted with a crisis of law analogous to Schmitt's "extreme emergency", the monarch becomes the one who is absolutely deprived of the power of decision. Taking up Samuel Weber's suggestion in his essay that we have cited above, Agamben points
186 out that Benjamin alludes to Schmitt's theory of sovereignty while changing its terminology slightly but definitively.105 This alteration in terminology becomes significant because, as Benjamin puts it in the Trauerspiel study, we witness a crisis that highlights "the indecisiveness of the tyrant. The prince, who is responsible for making the decision to proclaim the state of emergency, reveals, at the first opportunity, that he is almost incapable of making a decision", thereby abdicating what, according to Schmitt, is his most important function.106
This conceptual battle over the decidability of legal problems in legal terms ties directly into Schmitt's discussion in Political Theology of the analogy between theology and sovereign power through both the concepts of secularization, whereby he claims that all significant modern political concepts are but "secularized theological concepts"1 7, and more importantly, through the concept of the miraculous; this last concept in particular is supposed to propose the correspondence between sovereign decision and divine action.108 It might be thought at this level that both Schmitt and Benjamin are proposing concepts of "divine violence" that would be the ultimate source of resolutions to legal problems. Yet such an assessment would have to be tempered with the key proviso that Schmitt wants to maintain the sovereign's power of decision in relation with the legal sphere by means of its analog to a divine activity that perpetuates the existing order of law, whereas Benjamin claims that his notion of divine or truly "sovereign" power not only exceeds all relation to law or the sphere of the legal, but actually puts an end to it, "expiating" or purging its constitutive connection with fate.109 In this context,
187 Benjamin's rewriting of the sovereign exception as the impossibility of sovereign decision, the insolubility of legal problems from within the legal sphere becomes both a critique and a displacement of Schmitt's "miraculous" power of the sovereign to restore the law through its suspension or reduction to a pure force-of-law in order to resolve the crisis of the legal order entirely within the sphere of law.110 Commenting on this conceptual positioning, Agamben writes that Benjamin's displacement of the decision
"shatters the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence, between the monarch and God, that defined the Schmittian theologico-political".111 The sovereign is thus deposed from the position of a miraculous guarantor of earthly order to become a being like any other, one who is therefore unable to claim an exclusive appropriation of the pure or sovereign violence that Benjamin seeks to place beyond the sphere of the nomos, and back into the hands of humanity free of law. Where Schmitt seeks to find in sovereign power a guarantor of order which must be maintained at all costs through the virtual force of law in the exception, Benjamin intends a complete rupture with the legal order at precisely the point where legal power finds itself confronted with anomic or legal undecidability.
From Agamben's perspective, the difference in intentions between Benjamin and
Schmitt must be understood as a critique of Schmitt's position, for whom the suspension of order is always already in the name of a more original order, pressing into service the now secularized but ancient powers of mythic fate in the service of the repetition of the always already established. From Benjamin's perspective, Schmitt's "solution" would
188 simply continue the dialectic between law-founding and law-preserving violence. The possibility of something beyond the power of law, the new historical epoch Benjamin suggests in the "Critique" essay, becomes legible at precisely the point at which, as "On the Concept of History" puts it, "the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule", and where from Agamben's perspective the link between law and life cannot be separated. As Agamben argues,
From Schmitt's perspective, the functioning of the juridical order ultimately rests on an apparatus—the state of exception—whose purpose is to make the norm applicable by temporarily suspending its efficacy. When the exception becomes the rule, the machine can no longer function. In this sense, the undecidability of norm and exception formulated in the eighth thesis puts Schmitt's theory in check. Sovereign decision is no longer capable of performing the task that Political Theology assigned it: the rule, which now coincides with what it lives by, devours itself.1 3
This quotation continues and develops the argument concerning the exception we saw
Agamben propose in Homo Sacer. In Agamben's words, in Benjamin's eighth thesis
"Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here...The attempt by state power to annex anomie through the state of exception is unmasked by Benjamin for what it is: afictio iuris par excellence".114 Instead what we are left with in Benjamin's account—what divine violence really amounts to—is "human action that has shed every relation to law", and that, like the proletarian general strike evoked by Sorel in
Benjamin's "Critique" essay, deposes rather than restores law.115
In State of Exception, after considering the relationship between Benjamin and
Schmitt, Agamben turns his attention to Benjamin's concept of pure means in an attempt to make clearer the notion of a violence purified of law. It is evident that human action 189 that has shed all relationship to law is equivalent to the pure means of language; both pure (divine) violence and pure language are figures of impartibility or mediality freed of their subordination to subjective intention in the dual modalities of linguistic contents and
legal norms. According to Agamben, Benjamin endorses a "relational rather than
substantial conception of purity".116 If so, the notion of violence as pure means Benjamin discusses in the "Critique" essay introduces violence not as something that is to be evaluated "in its relation to something external", in this case its relationship to law and to justice understood as external ends toward whose realization violence would provide the
117 means. According to Agamben, pure violence can only be evaluated on the basis of a distinction internal to the idea of violence itself, that is, as a pure means without regard to the ends served. It is at this level of analysis that Benjamin thinks it is possible to isolate a pure violence or power that instead of serving the ends dictated by law, becomes a
"pure medium", "the figure of a paradoxical "mediality without ends"—a means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of the ends it pursues".118 But as mediality without ends "pure violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law".119
As Agamben points out here, the parallel in Benjamin's thought between the pure means of violence and the pure medium of language is an exact one, since just as pure language does not communicate anything, neither does pure violence serve any external end: as pure means both of these relate only to themselves, the first consisting in pure communicability and the second in a pure "relation to its own mediality".120 In other 190 words, if the mythic violence that serves law as a means "never deposes its own relation with law and thus instates law as power (Macht)", pure violence "exposes and severs the nexus between law and violence", and so "purely acts and manifests" instead of governing or executing.121
As we have seen in the previous section, if bare life is understood to be the mediality of both pure language and pure violence, it is in close proximity to the concepts of infancy and passive potentiality or impotentiality. The pure violence that severs the relationship between violence and law is also pure impotentiality precisely because it exceeds the terms of origin conceived as a metaphysical source or primary cause. That is to say, the way out of law is not to regard pure violence or power diachronically, tracing it back to an original or primordial source of human "agency" which is then subsequently alienated by its connection to the violent ends of law; rather, pure or divine violence, just like the mediality of pure language, is rather an originally creative power that can find itself only in the midst of its dispersion in the present of its already having begun. The metaphysical account of power or potentiality as something original that is subsequently alienated is expressly rejected by Agamben. In State of Exception Agamben argues that
"pure violence (which is the name Benjamin gives to human action that neither makes nor preserves law) is not an originary figure of human action that at a certain point is captured and inscribed within the juridical order.. .It is, rather, only a stake in the conflict over the state of exception, what results from it and, in this way only, is supposed prior to the law".122 The notion of impotentiality not already caught up in a relationship to legal
191 violence is conceivable only through its already being caught up in relations with legal violence, its inseparability from the state of exception itself. If so, it turns out that its potential is what was at stake all along, and that it can be thought or understood differently than through its relationship to law, that is, as a means to break the relationship to law. But what is "decisive" for Agamben and Benjamin alike is that "the criterion of their distinction lies in the dissolution of the relation between violence and law".123
In this context, Agamben argues that the traditional distinction between constituting and constituted power is inadequate to the ontology of the political at stake here, since in no way can it escape the clutches of sovereign power. To understand this discussion properly it is now necessary to return to the section in Homo Sacer where Agamben articulates what he takes the relationship to be between constituting and constituted power. Agamben suggests that if Antonio Negri's idea of the irreducibility of constituting to constituted power provides the strongest possible contemporary case that one cannot be reduced to the other, Negri is still unable to distinguish effectively between constitutive power and sovereign power. 24 This is because, Agamben notes, sovereign power, precisely because it captures pure violence, power, or potentiality, also maintains a relationship to constituting power in the midst of constituted power. This in
Agamben's terms would be as though Benjamin's dialectic between law-making and law- preserving violence were to do without the third term of divine power that deposes the link between violence and life. Where this ontological correspondence between politics
192 and metaphysics coalesces is in the passage from potentiality to actuality. At one point in
Homo Sacer, Agamben revisits his discussion of Aristotle's theorization of potentiality and actuality. Agamben argues that traditional political ontology has failed to conceive of potentiality radically enough, that is, it has continued to view potential as something that has the "option" to pass into actuality or not, no doubt on analogy with a subject who chooses to be passive. Departing from his earlier Heideggerian reading of Aristotle as the thinker of passive potentiality that we examined in the previous chapter, Agamben argues that potentiality subordinated to the actual is essentially the way potential is understood in Aristotle: as the power not to pass over into the act, to maintain itself in an independent and hence even "sovereign" existence, whatever its state of actual being.
Agamben points out that for the tradition following Aristotle, "Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding it or determining it".125 If this is how sovereign potentiality is thought, Agamben argues, we can now understand why it is that in book Theta of Aristotle's Metaphysics the undecidability between actuality and potentiality is never resolved. The tension cannot be resolved simply because "potentiality and actuality are simply the two faces of the sovereign self- grounding of Being. Sovereignty is always double because Being, as potentiality, suspends itself, maintaining itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment) with itself in order to realize itself as absolute actuality".126 The passage from potentiality to actuality
193 is the means by which the politics of sovereign power is constituted as the ontology of potential to pass over into act.
The passage from potentiality to actuality corresponds precisely to the sovereign exception that through its pure force of law produces the actuality of legal norms. The problem that presents itself here in Agamben's thinking is that there is no conceptualization at our disposal for thinking the relation between potentiality and actuality in a form other than that of the sovereign relation, a relation that in the previous chapter Heidegger argued remained entirely within the domain of metaphysics. For
Agamben, that "constituting power never exhausts itself in constituted power is not enough: sovereign power can also, as such, maintain itself indefinitely, without ever passing over into actuality"; but this indefinite maintenance is not incompatible with a metaphysical doctrine of pure agency or voluntary self-suspension. It is for this reason that Agamben writes, "one must think the existence of potentiality without any relation to
Being in the form of actuality" if one is to truly leave metaphysics behind.
As long as potentiality is thought through its subordination to actuality, in politics some conception of sovereign power is inevitable. In Homo Sacer it is such a situation in which sovereign power maintains itself in the form of its own suspension that Agamben argues is the situation of contemporary politics today. Agamben discusses this with reference to Kaka's parable "Before the Law", in which the law maintains itself in the figure of a door that, precisely because already open, does not permit entry. As Agamben comments here, "The man from the country is delivered over to the potentiality of law
194 because law demands nothing of him and commands nothing other than its own openness. According to the schema of the sovereign exception, law applies to him in no longer applying, and holds him in its ban in abandoning him outside itself'.129 In this regard, the empty form of law bears comparison with Kant's articulation of the moral law, which, in having no determinate content, subsists as a pure form of being-in-force without signification, about which Agamben comments that "The limit and also the strength of the Kantian ethics lie precisely in having left the form of law in force as an empty principle" commanding nothing but respect [Achtung].130 This feature of the empty form of law as a figure of the sovereign exception is also discussed by Agamben with reference to an exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin about "two different interpretations [that] confront each other" over what would constitute the fulfillment of the law in Kafka's work. Scholem claims that Kafka presents the law of tradition as a scripture that has lost its key, and thus "sees in this life the maintenance of the pure form of law beyond its own content—a being in force without significance"; this for Scholem is the pure Nothing of revelation, equivalent to the negativity of the origin we have considered previously. For Benjamin according to
Agamben, by contrast "the state of exception turned into rule signals law's fulfillment and its becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule". The key contrast, according to Agamben, is that "Benjamin proposes a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing [of revelation] and lets no form of law remain in force beyond its own content".
195 The essential difference between the state of exception, which keeps the law in force without content, and which thus maintains the potentiality of law in a pure relation with the actual life held in its ban, and a life free from the formal but empty nothing of the force of law, is that potentiality is thought without relation to its actualizations, that is,
"as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted...in a transitus de potentia ad actum".134 In other words, using the vocabulary of mediality applied to Heidegger's sense of passive potential beyond the metaphysical distinction between potential and act, potentiality must be thought of as a pure means removed from or outside of every posited end, every actualization. This does not mean that potentiality never passes into the actual or that language would never give rise to speech, but that potentiality remains in-different to the divisions and differences to which it gives rise and in which it is also included: in this sense it would remain impotential in the midst of the actualizations it "allows" to occur. As Agamben suggests, this would be to think "the poltico-social lactam no longer in the form of relation".135 The radicality of Benjamin's thought is precisely that he sees the pure mediality of language and violence, and their connection to the social, in precisely these terms.
The form of potential we have been considering here is, as we have noted several times now, that of bare life considered as a pure mediality, a pure openness that cannot be expropriated by law. Thought in the terms of constitutive and constituting power, such life, infancy or impotential, would be the basis on which sovereign power proceeds to constitute the social and political order, while being unable to grasp bare or naked or
196 simply existing life in its essence, quite simply because it has none: it is always already simply there in excess of anything simply available. In a way that recalls Heidegger's sense of the withdrawal of origin, and yet not as a form of withdrawing or negativity, simple or naked life, in its open singularity, constitutes the ground of the social and political while always managing to elude or exceed it. In the form of infancy, it even gives rise to speaking subjects, subjects of language, while remaining stubbornly unavailable for any kind of final appropriation, maintaining itself as an impotential beyond all its appropriations. It is this withholding without withdraw, this final remainder that stays obstinately there in its dual available unavailability, on which sovereign power depends, and which forces the sovereign's continual vigilance, its permanent force-of-law or potentiality without application.
Now that we have examined the logic of the state of exception at some length as it appears in Agamben's appropriation of both Schmitt and Benjamin, it is time to turn our attention toward the actual historical content of Agamben's analysis of the sovereign ban or exception. What we will see is that, as mentioned previously, a dialectical image is constituted between archaic and modern sovereignty in which an image of simple, open or infant life can be made visible or legible beyond any of its sovereign appropriations.
197 Notes:
' Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8 2 Ibid, 1. As Agamben famously claims here, "The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word "life." They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group". 3 Agamben, State of Exception, 59-60. 4 Agamben, Homo Sacer,Ibid. 5 Ibid, 6. 6 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462. 7 Ibid, 6. 8 There are of course critics such as William Rasch who understand this attempt of Agamben's perfectly well but who regard it as hopelessly Utopian. See Rasch, "From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty", in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Calarco and DeCaroli eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2007: 92-108. I will have a few comments about Rasch's criticisms of Agamben in the conclusion to this work. 9 See the introductory chapter of this dissertation for a fuller discussion of this, in particular note 9 on page 6. 10 A key opening moment in this interest on the part of leftist intellectuals is The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe, ed. (London: Verso), 1999. Since then the secondary literature on Schmitt has become truly voluminous, representing all shades of the political spectrum. 11 Agamben, State of Exception, 8. 12 Ibid, 11. 13 Ibid, 35. 14 Ibid, 38. 15 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press), 1985 (1922): 5. 16 Ibid, 7. 17 Ibid, 6. 18 Ibid, 7. 19 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17-18. 20 Ibid, 18. 21 Ibid, 19. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid, 20. 25 Ibid, 19. 26 Ibid, 20. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid, 20-21. 29 Ibid, 21. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid, 22. 35 Ibid. 198 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid, 22. 38 Agamben, The Coming Community, 10. The notion of being-called is inseparable from the instance of a subject of language who so calls. In this sense there can be no example without a subject of language who names. This is once again an instance of Agamben's use of Benjamin's theory of language as consisting of pure names as ontological operators that inaugurate the existence of classes but which are themselves part of no class. With the idea of potentiality tied to both inauguration and undecidability, there is an implicit critique of the Derridean notion of undecidability here: potentiality is a structure allowing the interpretation of undecidability as something to be understood, and thus resolved, rather than as a dilemma of the contingent that is not thought through. 39 Ibid, 10-11. 40 HomoSacer, 22. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid, 25; original de-emphasised. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid, 26, original emphasis. 46 Ibid, 18. 47 Ibid, 26. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid, 27. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Schmitt quoted in Agamben, Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid, 28. 56 Ibid. In this passage Agamben credits Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Abandoned Being" with providing the concept of ban at issue here. See Nancy, "Abandoned Being", The Birth to Presence, trans. B. Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1993: 36-47. The relevant passage in Nancy's essay runs "to be banished does not amount to coming under a provision of the law, but rather to coming under the entirely of law. Turned over to the absolute of the law, the banished one is thereby abandoned completely outside its jurisdiction" (p. 44). Agamben would only want to add to this statement that the absolute of the law is not law as norm but as sovereign exception or ban in which there takes place a complete exposure of the banned one to the entirety of the force of law without reserve (i.e. without the reserve of the normal). 57 Ibid, 29. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 26. 61 Ibid, 28. 62 Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1996: 236-252. 63 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 63. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid, 63-64. This claim is debatable. It seems to me that Benjamin provides at least two instances that might be considered instances of divine violence (or power, a semantic point that is relevant in the cases at issue here): Benjamin cites the proletarian general strike as a pure means that aims at the overthrow of the entire capitalist situation of work, ("Critique of Violence", 245-46), and suggests that education 199 (understood in a very different way than it is currently) is also a pure means in the sense that it aims entirely at the transformation of humanity rather than at maintaining existing social forms: "This divine power is not only attested by religious tradition but is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations" ("Critique of Violence", 250). 67 Ibid, 64; Agamben adds, "Hence its [i.e. divine violence's] capacity to lend itself to the most dangerous equivocations (which is proven by the scrutiny which Derrida, in his interpretation of the essay, guards against it, approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi "Final Solution". 68 Ibid, 64. 69 Ibid. 70 Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", 250. 71 Homo Sacer, 64. 72 Ibid, emphasis added. 73 Ibid, 65. 74 Ibid. 75 Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", 250, passage slightly altered to accord with Agamben's translation. 76 Ibid, 251. 77 In his essay, Benjamin uses several examples of mythic or law-positing violence taken from Greek myth, the most prominent of which is the myth of the killing of Niobe's children as retribution for her hubris against the gods. 78 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 66. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid, 67. 81 Ibid, 153. 82 Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", 252. 83 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. 841 will have more to say about Agamben's concept of the remnant in the next two chapters. For now it is enough to note that the term "remnant" plays a central role in both Remnants of Auschwitz, and the subsequent Time that Remains. 85 Agamben, The Open: On Man and Animal, 83. 86 Ibid. 87 This heading is a paraphrase of Agamben's chapter title "Gigantomachia concerning a Void" in State of Exception, 52. 88 Ibid, 38. 89 Ibid., 38. 90 Ibid., 39. 91 Ibid., 40. 92 Ibid. 93 Samuel Weber (1992), "Taking Exception to the Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt", Diacritics, 22: 3-4, 5-18. 94 Ibid. 95 On this point see State of Exception, 52-53. 96Agamben, Homo Sacer, 64. While Agamben's conclusion is correct, there is a curious oversight in his statement that "it is likely that in 1920, while he was working on the "Critique," that he had not yet read Schmitt's Political Theology" (ibid). If Schmitt's book did not appear until 1922, then it was not only unlikely but a certainty that Benjamin had not read it at the time of composing his essay. 97 Agamben, State of Exception, 53.
200 98 Ibid. Benjamin's text runs, "On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, anew historical epoch is founded", "Critique of Violence", 252. 99 Agamben, State of Exception, 53. 100 Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", 250. 101 Agamben, State of Exception, 54. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 65; Samuel Weber "Taking Exception to the Decision": Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt", Diacritics, 22: 3-4, 5-18. 106 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 71, also quoted by Agamben, State of Exception, 56. 107 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 108 Ibid. 109 Benjamin writes in "Critique of Violence" that "if violence, violence crowned by fate, is the origin of law, then it may be readily supposed that where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence", 242. While Benjamin is discussing capital punishment in this passage, it would not be hard to extend this statement about the power over life and deathto the state of exception as well, especially given the previous discussion of Agamben's claim that the example and the exception in fact trade places and become indistinguishable. 10Agamben, State of Exception, 56-57. 11 Ibid. 12 Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 392. 13 Agamben, State of Exception, 58. 14 Ibid, 59. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid, 61. 17 Ibid. 18 Agamben, State of Exception, 62. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 60. 23 Ibid, 62-63. 24 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 43-44. 25 Ibid, 46. 26 Ibid, 47. 27 Citing Gerard Mairet, Agamben suggests that "It has already been noted that a principle of potentiality is inherent in every definition of sovereignty", one in which potentiality is conceived, in the words of Mairet quoted by Agamben, that "potentiality already exists before it is exercised", Ibid, 47-48. 128 Ibid, 47. 129 Ibid, 50. 130 Ibid, 52. 131 Ibid, 53. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134Ibid, 62. 135 Ibid, 60.
201 Chapter Four: The Camp as Dialectical Image of Biopolitics
As the previous two chapters have argued at length, Agamben's work is deeply indebted to the conceptual framework provided by Benjamin's idea of the legibility of the past through its dialectical constellation with the present. If the nature of this debt has been articulated adequately, it should be possible to read Agamben's history of Western biopolitics as a dialectical image, as the juxtaposition between the origin of biopolitics in the division between its initial politicisation in the Greek distinction between zoe and bios and its historical legibility in the Nazi concentration camps. In this light, Agamben's claim toward the end of Homo Sacer, that "the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity", should not be read as an evolutionary statement.1 The camp in Agamben's treatment is not the culmination of a teleological movement that mysteriously amplifies itself or develops causally over time, but is rather an image that brushes history against the grain through juxtaposition, very much in the way Benjamin describes his technique of reading in the "Concept of
History".2 As a dialectical image, Agamben's reading of history seeks to juxtapose archaic practices of sovereign power with their modern counterparts in order to present the possibility, as we have seen him unfold it in previous chapters, of overcoming sovereign power by revealing a power beyond law. In this sense, Agamben is attempting to bring sovereign power to its end or completion from a vantage-point in the present where its significance can be properly understood, and yet where the content of this
"proper" is nothing but the impropriety of the historically contingent, a figure of what
202 might be lived differently as a new form-of-life. As Agamben himself puts this point, examining the modern state through the identity/difference of its origin reveals "a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic that one encounters in the most diverse spheres". What is required at this point in the discussion in order to make the dialectics of history plain is a reading of the historico-political content Agamben presents from his increasingly Benjaminian perspective. This emphasis on historic- political content, in my view, is what prevents Agamben's reading of the image of sovereign violence from both its archaic and modern vantage-points from becoming a straightforwardly Heideggerian vision of epochal history where the contemporary situation is juxtaposed to its archaic origin. Neither the archaic nor the modern are determined instances of an original "instance" that is ultimately concealed. As a dialectical image, however, it is important to explicate both the archaic image of sovereign power as well as the moment where the past becomes legible in the present, revealing thereby a moment at which the past might be reclaimed. This immediately presents problems for any form of "realist" historicism, since for the latter, as Benjamin argues, history is a process of linear development determined by an "additive" or causal series of discreet elements, "events" constituted "like beads on a rosary".4
While the next chapter will elucidate the figure of the Muselmann in relation to the camp as the actual focal point of the dialectical image, this chapter will set the stage for it by providing an account of archaic sovereignty in Agamben's work, then moving on to his discussion of the modern problematic of sovereignty as a displaced transposition and
203 repetition of the archaic. Before such a step can be articulated, however, it is useful to see the shift in Agamben's analysis in which the political (i.e. the sovereign exception) will replace the ambivalence of the sacred featured in Agamben's work on language that we have previously canvassed. Here too Agamben follows Benjamin's lead in suggesting that the link between sacredness and life is first established in the political sphere, or better, that the political sphere is constituted by means of an exception that sacralises life in a zone between the religious and the profane; neither profane nor religious, the political is the realm that forms by excepting itself from both, while therefore maintaining itself in proximity to both.
This analysis will proceed in three parts. In the first part, I will examine Agamben's discussion of biopolitics in its link to sovereign power set out in Homo Sacer through the discussion of its Greek "pre-history" and then in its formation in archaic Roman law. As mentioned, it will be important to show the shift in emphasis between the religious and the political in Agamben's account of these phenomena. In a second part, I will explicate
Agamben's account of modernity in detail, showing how it both differs from, while maintaining continuity with, the archaic sovereignty of the political as life made sacred.
4.1 Beyond the Sacred: Politics and its Prehistory in Homo Sacer
As we have previously noted, Agamben argues that Western politics takes shape as biopolitics beginning with the division, in the ancient Greek world, between the mere fact of living (zoe) and the qualified life of the polis (bios). It should be noted that Greek politics is not yet sovereign politics. There is not yet a politics of the exception in the
204 Greek world because the distinction between zoe and bios is relatively clear and stable.
Despite this stability, Agamben makes it clear that Greek society provides the basis for the politicisation of life that will later take the form of the sovereign ban. It is in political discourse, and indeed in the philosophical discourse on political life found in Aristotle, that the explicit separation between zoe and bios is justified or legitimated. The political sphere takes form in the division between the political and the non-political, and this division corresponds, Agamben argues, between a more basic division between life in general and the qualified life of the citizen. The division between zoe and bios effectively makes the citizen into one who separates and opposes himself to his own bare life, and this in turn constitutes a state of exception (even in the absence of a conception of sovereignty).5
According to Agamben, Aristotle's Politics clearly illustrates this division by way of the claim that while "the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life" it nevertheless continues "for the sake of the good life", where the good life is obviously a qualified form of life distinct from the bare needs of life.6 Despite admitting the link between the bare needs of life and the political community in his text, Aristotle quickly dissociates the two by means of what will later become a classic of scholastic logic, asserting that "the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part".7 Deftly reversing the initial priority of the needs of life, Aristotle maintains that the good and qualified life of the city is in reality prior to the needs of life, providing the latter's proper end or function. Because for
205 Aristotle the whole is prior to the part, so that qualified life is superior to life's unqualified existence (the former is the telos of the latter), rational speech is the end or function of speech in general and the natural voice in particular. As Agamben points out,
Aristotle "situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language"; according to Aristotle, because humans are endowed with rational speech, "To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city". Here the relationship between the living being and language effectively parallels the relationship between bare life and the polis. As Agamben argues, "The link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of man as
"the living being who has language" seeks in the relation between phone and logos".9 If this relation between speech and language on the one hand, and bare life and politics on the other, obtains, then Western politics originates as biopolitics, since it is "as if politics were the place in which life had to transform itself into good life and...what had to be politicized were always already bare life".10 The foundation of Western politics in the ancient polis is already a modality of the exception in which generic life is included in the human community only through its exclusion, along with the exclusion of all those forms of life deemed to exist merely for the sake of the needs of life. As Agamben points out,
"simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined— as merely reproductive life—to the sphere of the oikos".'' If this politics is not yet sovereign it is perhaps because those lives that are excluded from the polis are entirely
206 predictable from the vantage-point of the traditional patriarchal social order: women, slaves, children, and barbarians (i.e. non-citizen males). Here there is no need to decide on the state of exception because in the division between zoe and bios, phone and logos, it is in fact always already decided who is included and who is excluded, perhaps because the representatives of these categories are thought to be decided "by nature".
The emergence of a paradigm of sovereignty in Agamben's account of Western politics coincides with the Roman world. Once again Agamben's discussion of social form is intimately tied to language. The indistinction of the Latin term "vita", which refers neither to zoe nor to bios and carries the lexical ambiguity of a single term, both marks and reflects a shift in the paradigm of governance in which a sovereign authority is empowered to decide on the boundary between physis and nomos, nature and culture.
This lexical ambiguity "originally appears in Roman law merely as the counterpart of a power threatening death".13 Accordingly Agamben discusses the key instance in the
Roman world of such unconditional power over life and death, that of the sacred man— which thus can be identified as a true archaic form of one entirely subject to political sovereignty. Agamben then goes on to discuss the unlimited right of death of the Pater over his male children as a kind of sovereign gateway to the Roman public sphere of politics, one, he seems to think, in whose shadow we are still living.
Agamben begins his well-known discussion of the sacred man with the observation that the particular quality of sacredness attending him is that of being marked by a double exclusion or exception with respect to the spheres of the religious and the profane.
207 Agamben quotes a text of Pompeius Festus declaring that regarding the sacred man, "It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide".14 After discussing at length the problem of making sense of this category of
archaic Roman law, Agamben finally notes that it seems impossible to make sense of the
category of the sacred man "as long as we remain inside either the ius divinum or the ius humanum"}5 As Agamben goes on to argue several pages later, the sacredness of homo sacer seems to consist precisely in his exclusion from both the spheres of religious law and simultaneously those of profane law. The sacred man could be killed without his killing being considered a homicide under Roman law, even as the sacred man could not be sacrificed according to religious ritual. "If this is true", Agamben maintains, "then sacratio takes the form of a double exception, both from the ius humanum and the ius divinum, both from the sphere of the profane and from that of the religious".16 The key to understanding the notion of sacredness at stake here is its proximity to the state of exception. For Agamben sacredness "presents more than a mere analogy with the structure of the sovereign exception".17 If the sovereign exception applies to the normal case in no longer applying to it, in withdrawing from it, "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability and is included in the community in the form of being able
1 R to be killed. Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life". In being subtracted equally from human and divine law, "this violence" or simple ability to be killed, to which the sacred man is exposed, "opens a sphere of human action that is
208 neither the sphere of sacrum facere nor that of profane action", a sphere that Agamben argues presents us with the primordial form of political action.19
Advancing a hypothesis that draws together the various elements he has been considering, those of sovereignty, politics, and life in the ancient world, Agamben argues that ''''homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted".20 The political sphere is constituted in a recognizably sovereign form by way of a double boundary through which the religious is included within the profane and the profane enters the sphere of the religious; the boundary of the political demarcates a zone of indistinction between homicide and sacrifice, and correspondingly, between the spheres of profane and religious laws and regulations. Being-excepted demarcates the specificity of the political sphere as a sphere distinct from both profane and sacred forms of law, while simultaneously demarcating the sphere of the sacred. The originally political activity of sovereign power is the capturing of life within the sovereign ban, and it is such capture that makes life sacred: "The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred—that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed—and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty".21
Agamben goes on to argue that the sovereign power over life and death effectively acts as the gateway to the political sphere. This relationship is shown in the Pater's
"unconditional authority" over the lives of his sons, which includes the authority to kill
209 them virtually at will. Agamben notes that the father's right or power of life and death over male children exists apart from the traditional legal right to dispose of the lives of those within the domestic sphere of the domus, instead following "immediately and solely from the father-son relation" as a kind of boundary between the domestic and public spheres.23 Agamben points out that "in the instant in which the father recognizes the son in raising him from the ground, he acquires the power of life and death over him".24 The power of the father over the life of his sons is obviously connected to the latter's birth, exposing them to death from the outset of life and defining the social existence of the son through his capacity to be killed. It is in the exposure to death,
Agamben argues, that the life of the son is transformed from "simple natural life" into
"life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life)".25 In the politicization of simple natural life enacted through the father's decision, the boundary between the domestic and public spheres is established. The relationship between father and son is therefore already at the limit or threshold of the natural and the political, the father presiding over the location of the boundary. It follows that entry into the public sphere is tied to this properly sovereign decision as well, since "every male citizen (who can as such participate in public life) immediately finds himself in a state of virtually being able to be killed, and is in some way sacer with respect to his father", especially since, according to Roman law, "a citizen could not be put to death without trial".26 The power over life and death exercised by the Roman Pater is already a sovereign exception or indistinction by which the sphere of the political is constituted, and each citizen that enters it submits to a constant
210 exposure to death. "It is as if, Agamben comments, "male citizens had to pay for their participation in political life with an unconditional subjection to a power of death, as if life were able to enter the city only in the double exception of being killed and yet not sacrificed". To assume one's proper place in the public sphere of the Roman city, to participate in political life, one must live under the shadow of violent death. In this relationship between father and son, situated permanently on the boundary between physis and nomos, is revealed an "original political element" in which "the magistrate's imperium is nothing but the father's vitae necisque potestas extended to all citizens".28
Not without a sense of dramatic irony Agamben notes that according to his analysis
"[t]he hagiographic epithet "father of the people,"...again acquires its originary, sinister meaning".29
It will be noted that in his account of the connection between sovereign power and the sacred, Agamben appears to reverse his claim in Language and Death that the category of the sacred was a specifically religious category, typified by ambivalence, by the sacred object or person taking on qualities of both veneration and horror. In Homo
Sacer, by contrast, sacredness has to do with the status of the bare life of the sacred person as doubly excepted from profane law and religious ritual alike. Agamben devotes an entire section in Homo Sacer to an attempted demonstration that when it comes to sacred life, the sacredness in question is a political, rather than a religious, category, and that its status cannot be explained through a reference to the ambivalence of the sacred.
Whatever the value of Agamben's critique of the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred, it
211 links his discussion of sacred life to Benjamin's discussion of the idea of the sacredness
of life in the latter's "Critique of Violence" essay. Hence according to Agamben, "If we
give the name bare life or sacred life to the life that constitutes the first content of
sovereign power, then we may also arrive at an answer to the Benjaminian query
concerning "the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life"".31 In his "Critique of
Violence" essay, Benjamin answers his own query by speculating that "what is here [in
the modern dogma of the sacredness of life] pronounced sacred was, according to ancient
mythic thought, the marked bearer of guilt: life itself'.32 Agamben clearly follows this train of thought in identifying homo sacer correlatively with sovereign power as the life that is captured in the sovereign ban and subject to the unlimited threat of death: "the
sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and
-JO
homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns".
As Hussain and Ptacek point out in their quite excellent review of Homo Sacer, the
object of the move from the religious to the political (and hence to the sovereign),
represents a significant shift of emphasis from Agamben's earlier discussion of the
sacrificial paradigm in Language and Death.34 In Language, while discussing the
sacrificial paradigm, Agamben had included the homo sacer as an instance of the
religious conception of sacrifice, to which applies an original ambivalence.35 Yet
Agamben goes on to reject precisely that association of the sacred with the religious, and
instead articulates the sacredness of the homo sacer as strictly bound up with the power
of the sovereign, which in turn is a specifically political power, a power that is bound up 212 with the inaugural or (in Benjaminian terms) law-making dimension of political violence.
Following Hussain and Ptacek's analysis, for Agamben in Homo Sacer, sacredness in the
West at a certain point becomes bound up with sovereign power, and this explains its sense of being sacred as such—because all are homines sacri with respect to the sovereign—rather than being made sacred through the performance of a religious or sacrificial ritual. As was noted previously, according to Agamben the ancient Greeks had no notion of the sacredness of life as such, even if they certainly included life within religious practices: "even in those societies that, like classical Greece, celebrated animal sacrifices and occasionally immolated human victims, life in itself was not considered sacred". In the societies of ancient Greece and others like them, Agamben argues, the sacredness of life depended upon "a series of rituals whose aim was to separate life from
TO its profane context", and thus annex it to the sphere of the religious. But in the case of the sovereign ban, to the extent that all who dwell within the city do so only by first becoming sacred lives, that is, by being subjected to the sovereign's power over life and death, no religious ritual need be performed. This seems to be why Agamben regards the political sphere of sovereignty and its relationship to life to be distinct from the model of the ambivalence of the sacred associated with the religious sphere, and accordingly why he attempts to cast homo sacer as a political rather than a religious figure.
Now, as we have also noted, the positioning of sacredness as a specifically political rather than religious phenomenon corresponds to Benjamin's thought that the sacredness of life as such parallels the ancient mythical subjection of bare natural life to the violent 213 powers of law-making and law-preserving. The conclusion that might be drawn from this
substitution of the political for the religious is that if Agamben was (at the time of writing
Language and Death) content to regard the origin of political society as something
immemorial, lost in the obscurity of a concealed or withdrawn foundation, he is as of the
writing of Homo Sacer content no longer. Instead, he opts for the substitution of an
immemorial act one that can be historically located, one that from the vantage-point of
the present might make sense of the West's recent political history. If so, what is at stake
in this shift from the religious to the political, from the ambiguity of the sacred to the
sacredness of life as the ur-form of politics, is a shift away from an emphasis on the
Heideggerian concealing of origin and toward a Benjaminian understanding of specific
history, of history that can become legible through its constellation into a "then" and a
"now". Rather than the sacrifice of the present to the immemorial past, the move to the political represents an attempt at constellating the present and past at the same time that it
illustrates the shift in Agamben's thinking toward Benjamin's conception of history.
If this theory is correct, then it will be possible to find parallels for sacred life in
Agamben's account of modern political forms of life. These are provided in a detailed
set of arguments about the change—but also the continuity—that came about in the shift
from the ancien regime to the modern form of polity, the nation-state. But at the same
time, Agamben will argue that this shift presents distinct problems of its own, namely,
that the obscuring of the link between zoe and bios will necessitate a greater reliance on
sovereign power to continually redraw the boundaries of the political community, put in
214 crisis by the inaugural split between life as such and properly qualified life. It is to this
account we will now turn at some length.
4.2 Biopolitics and the Modern Sovereign
In his account of the modern political community, Agamben argues that the modern state
unwittingly re-establishes and greatly intensifies the recourse to the sovereign decision
initially located on the boundary of the Roman public sphere. Agamben suggests as
much by claiming that "The same bare life that in the ancien regime was politically
Neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (at least
apparently) clearly distinguished as zoe from political life (bios) now [in modernity] fully
enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the
state's legitimacy and sovereignty".39 The modern state, in other words, will be founded
on the necessity of deciding, a situation that will make all life tendentiously sacred.
Part of the intensification of sovereign power can be attributed to the dynamism of
modern society in overturning the relatively stable and customary forms that
communities took prior to modernity. These forms provided a kind of stability or even predictability for the application of the exception and the possibilities of decision taken within it.40 One consequence of the destruction of traditional forms of social ordering was the need to find a new principle for the foundation of political power beyond the traditional forms bequeathed by the ancien regime. In the formation of modern nations and states, Agamben argues, bare life itself becomes the bearer and foundation of political right, and ultimately of sovereignty itself.
215 A first pass at accounting for the modern order is to be found in Agamben's interpretation of the Writ of Habeas Corpus of 1679. According to Agamben's reading, the Writ does not name the already qualified life of the citizen as the bearer of rights, but instead, the citizen's mere fact of living becomes the foundation of sovereign right.
Agamben cites the Writ as suggesting that what becomes subject to law and is the bearer of rights is simply the citizen's corpus, "not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zoe—the bare, anonymous life that is as such taken into the sovereign ban".41 Although
Agamben does not elaborate on this claim, one might speculate that the nascent positing of inalienable rights to security of the person, against the absolutist monarchies of divine right, was located in the desire to found these rights on something transcending the traditional rights of the citizen of the town; under the monarchy the citizen's status as a bearer of rights ultimately depended on the very sovereign power being resisted. To found inalienable rights on the supposed sacredness of life itself must have seemed like a way to establish them beyond the reach of the traditional social institutions which were at the time the object of contestation and even open rebellion, locating them in a new and apparently pre-social version of natural right, i.e. in life itself.42 Whatever the specific historical reasons, Agamben suggests, the result was an inevitable and direct politicization of the sheer fact of living, since the single notion of "life" refers at once to the fact of living as well as the "incarnation" of that fact in the qualified lives of the citizenry. While attempting to establish itself on entirely new foundations, modern power revives precisely the exposure to death that characterized the public sphere of
216 ancient Rome, where the right to enter the city was paid for by a constant subjection to sovereign power's right of death.43
It would seem that Agamben's reading of Habeas Corpus supplies an extremely thin basis on which to claim that the bare life of the citizen becomes the new subject of politics, and indeed this would be so if it were the only or primary evidence Agamben supplies. But Agamben's major piece of evidence for the modern conflation of bare life and qualified life occurs in the explicitly political declarations that the citizenry as a whole—the people themselves—are to become the bearers of the new democratic sovereignty. Agamben cites the most famous of these declarations, the French
Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, to show that "it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights".44 The fact of birth nominates the bearer of rights to be at the same time a citizen, a member of the people occupying a native soil. It is this feature of doubling the living person with the legal entity of citizen which means that "the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are
"preserved"".45 Thus, while the citizen becomes the embodiment of a right proclaimed to
"naturally" precede any legal status, a right that invests a life which as such is invested with inalienable rights on which the status of the citizen is held to depend, the one applies only insofar as it is transferred to and preserved in the other. If the acien regime was largely content to leave birth and citizenship unconnected, since each was thought to belong to two distinct orders, the modern national state, founded on the sovereignty of the
217 citizens taken as a whole, requires that the two moments be "irrevocably united in the body of the "sovereign-subject" so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted".46 The biopolitical stage of modernity is therefore set when the gap between birth and citizenship, mere life and qualified life, becomes both irreducibly conflated and yet comprises a momentary vanishing-point of difference between the folding of the first into the second.
Once having identified the citizen's life as the bearer of sovereign and inalienable rights, because of the biopolitical dimension it both contains and hides, "citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty".47 A key consequence of this divided ground of the citizen in modern biopolitics, one comprising the Achilles heel of the entire system, is the "constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside", since, as the hidden ground of the citizen's right, life itself becomes "the foundation of sovereignty", and natural, "nonpolitical life.. .is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn".48 Agamben cites several examples as evidence of this need constantly to redraw the line between bare life and qualified life. As he notes, immediately after the
French Revolution, it was a matter of great urgency to distinguish between those who were to enjoy active (political) rights from those who could claim only passive rights to protection. Agamben maintains that, as "has often been noted by historians of the French
Revolution...at the very moment in which native rights were declared to be inalienable and indefeasible, the rights of man in general were divided into active rights and passive
218 rights". Agamben cites Sieyes's declaration in his Preliminaires de la constitution that neither women, children, or foreigners - and in general "those who would not at all contribute to the public establishment" - should be allowed "active influence on public matters". Rather than simply expressing a hypocritical inconsistency between a stated egalitarianism and a continuation of various traditional (patriarchal) privileges, this situation already demonstrates a corresponding biopolitical fracture between the sovereign People, as the collective assembly of all citizens, and the "people" as "the members of the lower classes", those "whom wisdom counsels excluding from political power", and who are generally thought unfit to participate in sovereignty.51 The fracturing of the political this portends is according to Agamben reflected in all modern
European languages, providing evidence of "an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept "people" in Western politics".52 The sovereign people that is to be the foundation of sovereign right in modernity turns out to contain "not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles...an inclusion that claims to be total...[and] an exclusion that is clearly hopeless".
This split sets the stage for an intractable problem that has haunted modern societies and their political reflection in the national state. Modernity shows its continuity as much as its difference with older forms of Western politics because the split inherent to the sovereign people continues the ancient split between bios and zoe. Yet in a modern context that claims to overcome such divisions in a total inclusion or unified national body, this split is also clearly unacceptable. Agamben points out that:
219 In Rome, the internal division of the people was juridically sanctioned by the clear division between populus and plebs, each of which had its own institutions and magistrates, just as in the Middle Ages the distinction between the popolo minuto and the popolo grasso correspond to a precise ordering of various arts and trades. But starting with the French Revolution, when it becomes the sole depository of sovereignty, the people is transformed into an embarrassing presence, and misery and exclusion appear for the first time as an altogether intolerable scandal.54
A consequence of the modern self-divided people can be detected in the different sides of
the modern political spectrum, (capitalism as much as socialism), in the need to resolve
or overcome this division, to constitute (or reconstitute) the people as a single and all-
inclusive entity; this is a project that Agamben simply claims is "in the last analysis futile
but which has been partially realized in all industrialized countries".55 Agamben
identifies two strategies which govern the attempt to "eliminate radically the people that
is excluded", and which correspond (at least roughly) to the political strategies of the right and the left.56 On the right side of the spectrum, the people "is what always already
is and yet must, nevertheless, be realized; it is the pure source of every identity but must,
however, continually be redefined and purified through exclusion, language, blood, and
land"; while on the left side of the political spectrum lies the conception of the people
that "is by essence lacking to itself and that whose realization therefore coincides with its
own abolition; it is what must, together with its opposite, negate itself in order to be".57
More basic than the division between friend and enemy that Schmitt wants to place at the heart of political community, Agamben suggests, there lies instead "an incessant civil war that divides it more radically than every conflict and, at the same time, keeps it united and
constitutes it more securely than any identity".58 The sovereign social and political 220 machine of modern democracy and the national state functions precisely to the extent that—and indeed substantially because—there is division and separation, and therefore continuous conflict within the people constituting the nation.
It is within this situation of internal division and conflict within the people, a situation which is in turn occasioned by the location of modern democratic sovereignty at the ambiguous nexus between the citizen's simultaneous corporeal and political existence, that Agamben situates the role of the sovereign as the one who defines who is included in and who is excluded from the nation. Thus, Agamben remarks, it is only with the rise of the modern national state in Europe that the question of ethnicity becomes an essentially permanent, rather than intermittent, political problem. The issue of what constituted the French or the German character, previously "one theme among others discussed in philosophical anthropologies", became with the modern national state
"essentially political, to the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question "Who and what is German?" (and also, therefore, "Who and what is not
German?") coincides immediately with the highest political task".59 In this light, Nazism and fascism (and indeed Stalinism also) take on their proper significance in modernity as attempts to redefine "the relations between man and citizen, and become[s] fully intelligible only when situated—no matter how paradoxical it may seem—in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights".
As the historical link between totalitarian states and national sovereignty may suggest, Agamben argues that changes in the relationship between the three defining
221 characteristics of the modern national state system (those of territory, nativity, and sovereign legal jurisdiction) were responsible for the eventual emergence of the concentration camp as a political principle of order following the decline of the naturalness of birth and territory. The camp, in other words, emerges when
the political system of the modern nation-state—founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state), which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)—enters into a period of permanent crisis and the state decides to undertake the management of the biological life of the nation directly as its own task.61
Pursuant to this claim, Agamben suggests that the ius publicum Europaeum that resulted from the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, rested on the continued plausibility of the
"natural" link between nativity, birth in a given territory, and national citizenship underwritten by state jurisdiction over that territory. However, the alignment between birth and nation under the auspices of the new system of sovereign states was inevitably destroyed by those very "reciprocal limitations and rules" that characterized the inter state system.62 The problem as Agamben presents it seems to be that there is a fundamental misfit between the notion of a native population inhabiting a traditional territory and an overarching sovereign political jurisdiction, such that the constitutive fiction of equivalence between birth and nation, one which still could form the basis of the 1789 declaration, "had already lost its mechanical force and power of self-regulation by the time of the First World War".63
Although Agamben does not go into historical detail here (and this certainly would have made his case stronger), he does claim that the requirements of the modern state 222 system are incompatible with "the localization and ordering of the old nomos" of the pre- modern era which presupposed some kind of traditional fit between a territory and a population, one that could be pressed into service to establish the modern concept of the nation.64
The actions of sovereign states in their rivalrous power-politics during the extended period of European expansion, as well as various attempts to keep a rough equality between them, was bound to result in the changing of national boundaries and hence a displacement of birth, territory, and nation. Agamben draws particular attention to the refugee crisis after the First World War as symptomatic of a process that had begun earlier and had resulted in many millions of people being displaced from their traditional
"homelands" in Europe, particularly in the East. In response to this instability of territorial boundaries and its attendant dislocation of birth and nation, European states— even prior to the Great War—brought in juridical measures to regulate populations within their borders which, despite falling under their jurisdiction, were not considered desirable as citizens. According to Agamben, the introduction of legal measures allowing for mass denaturalization was significant in that by separating birth from national belonging, denationalization also brought this link directly into the sovereign space of exception and decision:
The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took place in France in 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origin; in 1922, Belgium followed the French example and revoked the naturalization of citizens who had committed "antinational" acts during the war; in 1926, the fascist regime issues an analogous law with respect
223 to citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy of Italian citizenship"; in 1933 it was Austria's turn.65
Perhaps inadvertently, but nonetheless inevitably, denationalization and the appearance of millions of refugees brought into the open the previously hidden biopolitical foundation of the modern nation-state, precisely insofar as the disjunction between nation and state could no longer be mediated by birth. In Agamben's view, this fracturing of the trinity of birth, nation, and state was brought to a head with "the Nuremburg laws... [which] brought this process [of denationalization] to the most extreme point of its development, introducing the principle according to which citizenship was something of which one had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question".66
Agamben's analysis of the modern nation state - by his own acknowledgement - owes much to the earlier work of Hannah Arendt, but with an explicitly biopolitical emphasis. Even before the culminating gesture of the Nazis, the European nation state had already embarked on the project of "discriminating" between "a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value", and as a consequence, the "rights of man" are increasingly "separated from and used outside of the context of citizenship" for the alleged purpose of protecting those refugees displaced by the politics of denationalization.67 The ironic result is that the refugee becomes a form of bare life "that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity".68 The problem with the notion of human rights as something attached to life as such, is that, as Arendt pointed out quite cogently, divorced 224 from membership in the national state, they become little more than an abstraction.
According to Arendt, the modern vision of rights, in which "Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal", issued in the difficulty that these rights "reckoned with an "abstract" human being who seemed to exist nowhere."69 The resulting problem for Arendt was that "The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation" in which "the people, and not the individual, was the image of man".70 With mass denationalizations and the spectre of millions of displaced persons without a home country responsible for making good their supposedly inalienable rights, the refugees discovered that "no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them".71 But the plight of the refugee also showed quite clearly that the system of inalienable human rights is embarrassingly unable to function once people appear outside the political community of the nation and its protections, illustrating that human rights are worth very little outside the system of national states whose constitutions are founded upon them.
What Agamben adds to Arendt's account is the specifically biopolitical dimension of the refugee (and eventually the concentration camp inmate) as a new figure of bare life in modernity. As Agamben claims, the very existence of refugees breaks "the continuity between man and citizen...they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis".73 In other words, human rights are an institution intrinsic to the qualified life of the city, of political association, outside of which they can have no possible meaning; as
Arendt already put this point, "The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived
225 of...equality before the law", a doctrine "designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever", reduced therefore to "the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human".74 While
Arendt's analysis, far-reaching as it is, remains within the terms of the inside/outside division of the political community, in Agamben's terms the refugee "causes the secret presupposition of the political domain—bare life—to appear for an instant within that domain".75 As its presupposition, the bare life of the refugee is not truly or simply outside the political community, but is instead included in the political order in the mode of being excluded, of being sacer, not subject to sacrifice (as a ritual regulated by the city), but as one whose life may be extinguished with impunity since it belongs to humanity only in not belonging. The situation of not belonging to humanity corresponds to the sovereign exception in which the human being is removed from the normal regulation of the juridical order so as to become the object of a sovereign decision. This aspect of Agamben's account clearly draws a parallel between the refugee and the homo sacer of ancient Roman society. Agamben's sense that the condition of statelessness is itself a product of sovereignty's claim to have final jurisdiction over life is important because it verifies that jurisdiction involves the creation of a state of exception beyond the boundaries of the political community and the juridical order. This shows in turn that the dislocation of birth and nation is fundamentally a dislocation pertaining to the state, that is, of the sovereign's existence as a dislocating localization. If to be stateless is also to be rightless, to be removed from the juridical order and the terms of human political
226 association, statelessness is also a modern version of being a homo sacer in the sense that this removal comes as a result of being placed within the sovereign exception.
It is in this context that Agamben's claim that the camp represents "the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order" of the modern state system must be understood. Agamben argues that with the camp, "The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order".77 There are several features of this claim that are worth considering more closely. First, the breakdown of the automaticity of inscribing or transcribing birth into nation, visible most clearly in the situation of the refugee in relation to the normal order of legality, has become more or less permanent. In response to this situation of regulatory crisis, one that increasingly gives the lie to the supposed naturalness of belonging to the nation, the exceptional measures introduced to deal with this misalignment themselves become permanent features of the state order; in this sense, the "camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to—and so
78 broken—the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land". Secondly, if it is true that the feature which breaks the automatic transcription of birth into citizenship is the misalignment between state jurisdiction and traditional patrimony or territory (land), then the camp cannot be considered a simple device of renewed localization, even if it takes on what Agamben calls a stable spatial arrangement. Instead, because the camp appears precisely as a device to regulate territorial dislocation, the 227 camp itself consists of a "dislocating localization" exceeding all "determinate space" governed by legal mechanisms of regulation, and hence, jurisdiction.79 In other words, if the normal order of law presupposes a territory of application, a jurisdiction, the camp, understood as a mechanism for regulating that to which normal law cannot apply, must itself exceed the jurisdictional presupposition of legality. The camp is thus by definition an extra-legal entity to which the normal rules of law do not apply, least of all, it turns out, the protections afforded to persons under law. Third, because the camp responds to a crisis of the nation-state that is more or less permanent—although we must keep in mind that this crisis is occasioned by the genesis of the nation-state itself—the camp becomes a permanent feature of the modern system. What this means from the perspective of the normal legal order is that the camp's existence, while falling outside the law, is nonetheless "realized normally", that is, "what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself in its production by sovereign power as a normal feature of political rule.80 Installing the camp as a permanent feature of the order exposes "the inner structure of the ban that characterizes [the sovereign's] power", a power that ultimately consists not just in "recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety)", but instead producing "the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception".81 The sovereign decision institutes the camp as a permanent and thus
"normal" feature of a territory over which law has no jurisdiction, even though the territory occupied by the camp is located within the very territory regulated by normal law, as an exception to it. On the threshold between norm and exception, and hence
228 reducible to neither one, the existence of the camp is a literal instantiation of the sovereign claim to be at once inside and outside of the juridical order.
It is this last idea of the position of the camp as inside and outside, both normal and exceptional, which allows Agamben to situate bare life within it. If the camp is neither lawful nor unlawful, what occurs within its boundaries occupies a threshold space between the legal and the natural or merely factual. "The camp", Agamben writes, comprises "a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable" and where "every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense".82 Agamben reinterprets Arendt's claim that in the camps everything becomes possible to indicate the situation in which law and fact are indistinguishable and "in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense".83 This exceptional space, realized in the camp by removing every political-legal protection afforded the human being removes the latter from the space of the constituted political community and renders that life radically bare, placing them in a situation in which "power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation".84 At the same time, if the camps produce bare life by suspending every legally sanctioned protection, and so constitute a space inhabited by life that is "naked" with respect to law, such life cannot be considered a simple natural fact. In being fully subject to power without legal mediation, the "bare life into which the camp's inhabitants were transformed is not, however, an extra-political, natural fact that law must limit itself to confirming or recognizing".85 Rather, the camp inhabitant is fully transformed into the
229 bare life that Agamben argues constitutes the biopolitical basis of modernity but which is concealed beneath the myth that nativity is immediately nation. Just as the refugee, transformed from a being with inalienable rights into a human being who is "purely" human, is not any kind of natural fact, but is instead constituted as a wholly political creature, so the camp inhabitant, fully exposed in the sovereign ban, is similarly constituted as a kind of "zero-degree" political entity through which sovereign power constitutes the boundary of the political community. But this circumstance of extreme political action on the part of sovereign power is only possible because the latter
"operates in the absolute indistinction of fact and law", and thus where a pure ur-political action, a pure violence, rather than natural necessity, determines what it is to be a human being.86 The camp inhabitant, like the refugee, acts like a temporal rebus allowing a glimpse of the founding biopolitical event of the modern sovereign in suspension or isolation, prevented from turning into the qualified life of the citizen. Yet this temporal rebus goes back further still, allowing us to re-read the paradigm of homo sacer as the life that can be killed but not sacrificed as something still with us in the late modern world, something we are still living.
Just as Agamben believes that Nazi Germany brought the process of delinking nativity and nation to a head with the Nuremburg laws and the requirement that every citizen must be "worthy", in biopolitical terms, of being counted as a citizen, he argues that it is the Nazi concentration camp that provides the paradigm case of the modern creation of bare life in the sovereign ban. Two features in particular about the Nazi Reich
230 seem to stand out for Agamben: the first has to do with the state of exception created by
the Nazi seizure of power, while the second has to do with the particular features of the
Nazi camps that carried out the Final Solution in their connection with the regime's
political-juridical structure. With respect to the first point, Agamben notes that Article 48
of the Weimar constitution allowed the president to suspend those portions of the
constitution guaranteeing personal liberties and to declare a state of exception or siege for
as long as necessary to restore order. In including a power of suspension or exception in
the constitution also enshrining the alleged inalienable freedoms and rights of the
citizenry, the Weimar constitution was hardly unique or even unusual; as Agamben points out elsewhere, the constitutions of every major European state contained similar provisions. Even if the Weimar governments between 1919 and 1924 "declared the
state of exception many times, sometimes prolonging it for up to five months", neither they, nor the Nazi regime which suspended the constitution in 1933, were doing anything particularly unusual or aberrant vis-a-vis their neighbors.88 Yet what was unique in the
Nazi case, however, was that:
No sooner did Hitler take power.. .than, on February 28 [1933], he proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never repealed, so that from a juridical standpoint the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the [normal] political system.
231 In the terms of the discussion above concerning the biopolitical nature of the state of
exception in relation to the normal rule of law, it is clear that what makes the Nazi case
so disturbing is not simply that it suspended personal liberties during the entirety of its existence, but that such suspension—which qualifies it as a "totalitarian" regime if ever there was one—was simply utilizing provisions already available and often in use in
liberal democratic societies. The only substantive difference between the two appears to be that while the liberal-democratic suspension of the constitution is content to allow external circumstances to determine what constitutes a threat to the continued existence of the legal order, the Nazi or totalitarian state takes matters into its own hands and declares that such a threat is permanent. It is this latter move which Nazi jurists clearly understood to be the basis of the regime, describing its difference from those "normal" or more limited suspensions of the constitution in terms of a "willed exception for the sake of the establishment of the National Socialist State" in which its biopolitical enemies were to be eliminated.
Closely connected to the juridical circumstance of the "willed exception" is the formation of the camps. It is significant here that the stated purpose of the decree with which Hitler suspended the Weimar constitution was the "protection of the people and the state" [Verordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat].91 This stated purpose recalls the earlier so-called Schutzhaft or "protective custody" laws, versions of which date back to the Prussian state of the mid-1800s, and which allowed for people to be taken into custody "independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of
232 the state". These laws, which in truly Orwellian fashion were eventually linked to
Article 48 of the Weimar constitution suspending personal liberties, were used on a number of occasions to round up groups of people and intern them (however temporarily) in concentration camps; for instance, the Social Democratic government of 1923, on the basis of the Schutzhaft, "interned thousands of communist militants" and "also created the Konzentrationslager fur Auslander at Cottbus-Sielow, which housed mainly Eastern
European refugees". From this perspective, Agamben notes, "The "protection" of freedom that is at issue in Schutzhaft is, ironically, protection against the suspension of law that characterizes the emergency". No longer a temporary device to be used only for the duration of the declared state of emergency (as it was under the Weimar order and earlier), under the Nazis Schutzhaft becomes "separated from the state of exception on which it had been based and is left in force in the normal situation".95
According to Agamben, this situation of exceptional measures remaining in force in the normal situation is what allows the camp to occupy "the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule".96 When concentration camps were set up to house political prisoners in 1933 after the seizure of power, Schutzhaft was utilized in order to put their administration in the hands of the SS, placing them completely outside penal regulation. In fact, Agamben argues, the complete independence of the concentration camps from any form of legal oversight was "constantly reaffirmed" throughout the duration of the Third Reich.97 Jurists of the regime (including Carl
Schmitt) argued that, as the legal ordinance governing the concentration camps, the
233 Schutzhaft declaration found its "primary and immediate source of law in the Fiihrer's command" bypassing any "juridical foundation in existing institutions and laws".98 To reinforce this idea Agamben quotes the chilling statement by the Gestapo chief Diels, who claimed that in their establishment "Neither an order nor an instruction exists for the origin of the camps: they were not instituted; one day they were there".99 During the entirety of the Third Reich, almost from the initial seizure of power right up to the end of the war, several camps were in continuous operation: what varied was only the size of the populations interned and the uses to which the camps were put (they were not extermination camps right from the beginning).
The two features of the National Socialist regime that Agamben draws attention to, the normalized state of exception in the form of the permanent suspension of the constitution, along with the use of Schutzhaft provisions allowing for unlimited extra legal detention, were what specifically allowed the Nazi concentration camps to become, in Agamben's words, "the place where the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized".100 Yet the fact of such realization suggests a third aspect, namely, the specifically biopolitical aspect of what went on in the camps. We have already noted that it was a tenet of the Fuhrerprinzip that Hitler's decree was immediately considered law, pure executive authority that bypasses and erases the division between executive and legislative modes of governing. It is not hard to see that this principle is consistent with the permanent state of exception, the state of exception as everyday rule (in both senses of the word), and thus that the Fiihrer himself partakes of
234 the indistinguishableness between law and fact we have already seen to characterize the camp and its inhabitants. The word of the Fuhrer is not "a factual situation that is then transformed into a rule, but is rather itself rule insofar as it is living voice".101 We should recall from our previous discussion of Agamben's writings on language the import of the notion of the "living voice" in its resonation with the removed voice of the living animal, in which the human word is already a biopolitical decision displacing the animal voice.
The point is not only that the notion of the "living voice" of the Fuhrer is a piece of mythology or mystification (which it surely is), but also that it suggests the hidden presence of the biopolitical trope of the removed and silenced voice of the living animal as a figure of the displacement of the non-human. Very precisely, then, the word of the
Fuhrer as "living law"—because "living voice"—corresponds to the biopolitical production of the human where the order bringing the camps into existence as permanent state of exception is simultaneously a mystical and entirely groundless decision on the biopolitical body "in its twofold appearance as Jewish body and German body, as life unworthy of being lived and as full life".102 The ungrounded decision of the sovereign
(in this case the Fuhrer) refers back to an "agent", an ultimate principle of subjectivity that parallels precisely the mythical paradigm that equates Voice (here "living voice") with pure subjective intention and with the removal of everything not intentional. In this situation, Hitler's command is itself part of the state of exception that authorizes the creation of the spaces of exception that are the camps; the command is "at once rule and the criterion of its own applicability".103 Hence both "the production of a rule and its
235 application" are hopelessly conflated, a situation that, as already mentioned, means that any division of powers characteristic of liberal states becomes impossible.104 But more seriously still, if the production of a rule is indistinguishable from its application, then the political and the non-political also become hopelessly entangled, with the result that in a quite ominous sense, everything becomes political, including that which is not or should not be political, the most minute aspects or qualities of life. If every word of the Fuhrer is at once law, every word is entirely political, especially insofar as it is not political: the
Fuhrer is therefore an entirely biopolitical being whose zoe has passed completely into bios and vice versa.105
In a corresponding fashion, the camp becomes "the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them".106 In the Nazi concentration camps, Agamben maintains:
What confronts the guard or the camp official is not an extrajuridical fact (an individual biologically belonging to the Jewish race) to which he must apply the discrimination of the National Socialist rule. On the contrary, every gesture, every event in the camp...enacts the decision on bare life by which the German biopolitical body is made actual. The separation of the Jewish body is the immediate production of the specifically German body, just as its production is the application of the rule.107
Another way of saying this is that in the camps there is no difference between the normal and the exceptional; the exceptional, that is, has become absolutely normal, completely indistinguishable from the norm. The reason the concentration camps can easily become the vehicles for the Final Solution, the absolute conditio inhumana, is because they
236 constitute an environment in which the exceptional has become completely normalized:
to paraphrase Arendt's dictum, in the camps everything is permitted only because
everything has become possible.108
The inability to distinguish fact from law is also very much of a piece with the
National Socialist biopolitical project to constitute a pure Volk by converting the political
category of the people entirely into the biological category of population. In this sense
the entire Nazi regime was focused on the production of a national biopolitical body.
Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower and biopolitics in connection with National
Socialism, Agamben argues that (as Foucault had already pointed out), this regime
dedicated to fostering and promoting the life and health of its citizens was at the same time dedicated like virtually no other to the unlimited right to put any of its members to death. In the case of National Socialism, Agamben maintains, this is accomplished through "bringing to light a population in the very bosom of a people, that is, in transforming an essentially political body into an essentially biological body".109 But
such transformation takes place only under the sovereign ban, so that it is not a question of recognizing biological "facts", or of applying pre-existing rules to them. Instead, as all
of the various initiatives for eliminating the physically or mentally ill from the population testify, separating "pure" Aryans from "undesirable" elements, and finally, in designating
German Jews as a special threat to the Volk, there is created a circuit in which biological
fact and political activity constantly change places. In conceiving of the people as a
biological population, it is clear that biological "concepts are not treated as external (if
237 binding) criteria of a sovereign decision: they are, rather, as such immediately
political".1 Because the people are transformed into a population through the state of
exception, "the biological given is as such immediately political, and the political is as
such immediately the biological given".111 In this situation, the "seeming contradiction
according to which a natural given tends to present itself as apolitical task''' finds its limit
in the camps. That is to say, if the politicization of life takes place via the introduction
of "biopolitical caesuras" into the population, and which divide forms of life into
different categories of racial propriety, the camp appears as their terminal point:
"Biopolitical caesuras are essentially mobile", and because they are essentially political,
"in each case they isolate a further zone in the biological continuum, a zone which
corresponds to a process of increasing.. .degradation. Thus the non-Aryan passes into the
Jew, the Jew into the deportee...the deportee into the prisoner (Haftling), until
biopolitical caesuras reach their final limit in the camp".113 At the opposite but
symmetrical pole to the Fuhrer there is the prisoner of the camp, who becomes
"something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular
bearer or subject", a modern, and more frightening homo sacer, life reduced to its pure
exposure to death.114
While Agamben believes that Nazi Germany pushed the biopolitical foundation of
the modern state to its most explicit point of visibility, he does not think that the basic problem of how birth or life is inscribed in the nation-state has by any means been
resolved. In fact, he argues, it is possible to recognize in the extreme form taken by the
238 Nazi regime that not only is the state of exception still with us, but that its epigone, the camp, still haunts contemporary societies, continuing to constitute the paradigm in which we live. Because of this, Agamben claims that it is the camp, rather than the city, that in modernity comprises "the new biopolitical nomos of the planet".115 The biopolitical paradigm that brings into being situations of exception is still in force as long as there are states which claim to act on the population in the name of a politically constituted people, since for Agamben, where there is a people there must also be bare life, and hence the fracture that allows the latter's conversion into population as object of biopolitical administration. This is why Agamben insists that "if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception", then "we will then have to admit to be facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes that are committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have".116 In both Homo Sacer and in his essay "What is a Camp?"
Agamben mentions the zones d'attente in French international airports where people requesting refugee status can be held for several days. According to him, such places must be thought of as camps, since in them "the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign".
While this might suggest to some that Agamben is simply trading on the extremity of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis to make a formal structure of exception much more
239 ominous than it is in fact, it should be kept in mind that Agamben is substantially correct in noting that the situation in which the use of emergency powers are a virtual commonplace in most liberal-democratic states constitutes an unofficial paradigm of government. Increasingly, discretionary power is concentrated in the hands of executive agencies who apply emergency provisions superseding the provisions of normal law. It can be plausibly added to such situations that the routine use of administrative or executive powers tends to corrode apace the ethics of genuine democratic or ethical accountability. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Agamben argues that apologists for the use of emergency provisions in order to "protect democracy" from internal threat—in the cold war as in the "War on Terror"—are incapable of articulating how these measures might actually do so, since they justify the restriction of democratic freedoms in the name of democracy itself. Although there have been numerous proponents and apologists for special executive powers in the service of "preserving democracy" (Agamben presents a short chronology of these in State of Exception), the vicious circle presented above has not been taken particularly seriously by many liberal- democrats, who seem to believe that the kinds of extreme measures taken by Nazi
Germany are highly unlikely to occur in a liberal society, thanks to the rule of law. Yet the spectre of terrorism and the responses to it on the part of the Western nations that have emerged especially since the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, give renewed cause for concern. As Agamben points out, the "military order" issued by U.S.
President Bush on November 13, 2001 has the following by now well-known properties:
240 Bush's order...radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply "detainees," they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.119
President Bush's military order is not the only serious intervention in the so-called
"War on Terror" to erase the legal status of individuals and place them in an exceptional state. The Patriot Act (passed by the U.S. Senate on October 13, 2001) permits serious violations of constitutional legal protections and rights against both citizens and non- citizens alike, including the power to take anyone into custody without charge who is deemed a threat to national security. Following suit, Canada and many other liberal- democracies have brought in similar kinds of measures. However, as Jean-Claude Paye points out in his book The Global War on Liberty, many of these so-called emergency measures, while specifically occasioned by the asserted threat of an Islamic terror network such as Al Qaeda, were actually in various stages of implementation before such attacks occurred.121 Paradoxically, yet entirely consistently with what Agamben describes as the emergency paradigm of government, Paye points out that "these measures are justified by an emergency, but actually are part of a long-term war against terrorism" that enables states to justify the curtailing of civil rights of their populations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.122 Under these conditions, including the prospect of protracted conflict "against terror", the civilian populations of liberal-democratic states
241 (to say nothing of the populations of the invaded countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq),
are likely to be subjected to ongoing militarization and the erosion of traditional liberal-
democratic rights. So while nothing has happened in the liberal-democratic states on the
scale of the state of exception enacted by the Nazi regime, the difference is one of degree
rather than one of kind. As Agamben remarks concerning Bush's military order, "The
only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the
Nazi Lager who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity".123 Given this
situation of a more or less permanent "war on terror" on the part of the Western liberal
states, there is nothing to suggest that the attempted diminishing of fundamental liberties
might not itself become equally permanent, at least in the absence of another form of power outside of the sovereign state prepared to struggle against it. It should be noted here that even though there appears to be a great difference between the present situation
and the biopolitical paradigm of Nazi race politics, in modern Western politics, depriving
a person of their legal identity is at the same time to cast them outside the city, to
imprison them, whether intentionally or not, in a zone where the line between fact and
law melts away. In this zone those without legal identity are reduced to a bare exposure
to decision in which the latter is part of the zone where anything can happen, even if it
happens not to.124 Thus, Agamben would argue that any instance of the state of
exception is necessarily tied to the production of a biopolitical body, that is, to sacred life that can be killed without celebrating a sacrifice and without committing homicide. If
indeed we are entering an era in which the emergency dominates politics, there is also a
242 slide toward a situation where the normal legal situation is also in jeopardy, where
production of the biopolitical body is likely to be continually with us. Yet it is not
feasible simply to re-assert the normalcy of the rule of law, since it is precisely such a
rule that according to Agamben has always depended on the sovereign exception in
which a power without law takes on the latter's force.
It is worthwhile recapping this discussion. Agamben argues that the modern regime
of biopolitics recapitulates in historically new forms an ancient form of the sovereign
ban. In ancient Rome life became sacred because it was subject to a sovereign power, a
political power beyond both religious and profane authority that decided on the boundary
between natural life and qualified life by exposing life to a threat of death. In modern
circumstances, the nation state is similarly based upon a life sacred or bare from the
moment of birth. While this state system worked well as long as territorial boundaries
and state jurisdiction seemed to coincide, their increasing lack of coincidence
foregrounds the implicit split between natural and qualified life that the political realm—
in the figure of the sovereign—is called upon to resolve. The stateless refugee who is deprived of citizenship and whose status as a mere human being seems distinctly unable to offer protection, as well as the person stripped of citizenship and taken into "protective custody" or imprisoned in camps, offers a glimpse of the ways that the modern system of
states constitutes life as sacred in its own way. In this way the Nazi regime, with its permanent state of exception and its concentration camps, offers the most extreme
instantiation of the paradigm of sacred life or life exposed to death, and at the same time
243 of the most extreme attempt to "resolve" the biopolitical fracture between life and citizen presented by the modern nation-state system.125 To this extent the camp—defined as a contradictory zone of normalized or regularized exception—replaces the city as the privileged instance of the operation of sovereign power.
As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, Agamben is attempting to present his readers with a Benjaminian dialectical image of sacred life suspended between a "then" and a "now". It is only through its reference to the ancient paradigm of homo sacer, as the political paradigm that parallels the removal of the natural voice, through which, according to Agamben, the full import of the biopolitics of the camps can be registered in our modernity. Unlike analysts who see in the concentration camp a mere set of discreet empirical circumstances or a local and extreme historical aberration, Agamben wants to suggest that if the camps are viewed dialectically, a biopolitical paradigm traversing the history of the West becomes legible. For him, it is only by looking at things in this way might it be possible to map out an ur-history of sovereign power and sacred life so that a different relationship to human agency or power might be realized, one that, as previous chapters have argued, resides in seeing human life as grounded in a pure mediality, that is, grounded in a form of life not enclosed in a subjective intention without voice. The purpose of such an analysis is to show that life in the West is permitted to dwell in the city only on pain of being subject to a decision on its worth insofar as it is capable of being distinguished from mere natural life. The Western paradigm of citizenship is flawed to the degree that it presupposes the "pagan" idea of life subject to fate, and that to
244 participate in the city it must be capable of submitting to the threat of death. Implicitly,
this scheme suggests that the political community is oriented toward other such
communities by ties of hostility, a set of assumptions made explicit in Schmitt's
conception of the political. Like Benjamin in the "Critique of Violence" essay, it is
Agamben's desire to destroy this paradigm by means of a messianic programme of
redeeming and fundamentally changing our sense of what it is to be a living being, to try
and think a form of life not established by its exposure to death. The task of fully
explicating Agamben's messianic project of redeeming life from its sacredness will have to wait until the next chapter, where I will examine Agamben's interpretation of bare life
and witnessing in the figures of the Muselman and the witness.
245 Notes:
'Agamben, Homo Sacer, 174. 2 Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", Thesis VII, 392. 3 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. 4 Benjamin reproaches what he calls the "additive" procedure of historicism for assembling "a mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time", and in this way doing without "theoretical armature"; elsewhere in the same essay he likens historicism's understanding of historical events with "beads on a rosary" ("On the Concept of History", Thesis XVII and XVIII (A), 396-397). 5 The use of the masculine pronoun is deliberate since citizens in the ancient world were always male. 6 Aristotle, Politics, 1252b, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 30. 7 Ibid, 1253a (20). 8 Ibid, also cited in Homo Sacer, 8. 9Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid, 2. 12 Ibid, 87. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, 71. 15 Ibid, 74. 16 Ibid, 82. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid, 83. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid, 88. 25 Ibid, original emphasized. 26 Ibid, 89. 27 Ibid, 90. Peter Fitzpatrick sees in Agamben's use of phrases such as "as if and "virtually" an equivocation about the previous indication of certainty expressed in the claim of the father's "absolute and unconditional" authority over the son. According to Fitzpatrick, "the power [of the father over the son] was not absolute and unconditional. It was defined, and confined, by law". See Fitzpatrick, "Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the insistence of Law", in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 49-73; 55. In answer to Fitzpatrick, it is possible to remark that just as modern constitutions grant emergency powers without specifying their actual use, the fact of law's reference to a capacity to kill does not mean that such a capacity is "defined and confined" by law, any more than the particular agents of the state in an emergency situation find their actions constrained by legal ordinance. As we have seen, Agamben is quite aware that exceptional circumstances are not simply beyond law altogether, although they do exceed law's capacity to regulate normally. His qualifications in this instance could indicate awareness that these instances of power of life and death were not outside law altogether, while nonetheless constituting exceptions to it, as seems to be indicated by his acknowledgement that Roman law normally regarded the killing of a citizen to be homicide. 28Agamben, Homo Sacer, 89-90. 29 Ibid, 89. 30 Agamben discusses this on pages 75-80 of Homo Sacer. 31 Ibid, 83; the line quoted by Agamben is found in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" essay, 251. 246 32 Benjamin, "Critique of Violence", 251. 33 Homo Sacer, 84. 34 Nasser Hussain and Melissa Ptacek, "Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred", Law and Society Review. Vol. 34, No.2,2000, 495-515; 502. 35 Agamben had written in Langauge and Death that "the sacred is necessarily an ambiguous and circular concept". In a clear reference to homo sacer as an example of the ambiguousness or ambivalence of the sacred, Agamben had suggested that "He who has violated the law, in particular by homicide, is excluded from the community, exiled, and abandoned to himself, so that killing him would not be a crime", Language and Death, 105. 36 Hussain and Ptacek, 506 37 Ibid, 66 38 Ibid 39 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 127. 40 In support of this proposition it is possible to cite Agamben's claim in The Open that "traditional historical potentialities...have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy", in the wake of which, "the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption... of the very animality of man" (pp. 76-77). It would be easy to show that the assumption of their animality by human beings corresponds to Agamben's claim that the exception has become dislodged from its historical place and becomes coextensive with the social itself. 41 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 124 42 State of nature theories fit very nicely into this scheme, since what takes place in the natural state precedes the social compact and is thus both natural and pre-social. 43 Peter Fitzpatrick has argued that Agamben's account of the Writ is flawed, even "close to fanciful" ("Bare Sovereignty" in Norris, 55). More to the point, Fitzpatrick argues that "The writ's injunction to have the body before the court, to bring it within the purview of judicial review, referred to a particular person specified within the law, to a singular subject within the legal jurisdiction of the court and not just to a politically infused organic lump" (Ibid, 56). This criticism weakens Agamben's account to the extent that Habeas Corpus serves as his model for bare or sacred life in the modern West. As I discuss, however, Habeas Corpus is not Agamben's main piece of evidence for the persistence of bare life in modernity. Rather, it is the phenomenon of modern citizenship, in which indeed an "organic lump" (to use Fitzpatrick's term) is granted citizen rights entirely on the basis of birth in a specified territory, that forms the crux of Agamben's account of modern bare life. It is strange that Fitzpatrick does not mention Agamben's account of this in the course of an attempt to deconstruct any posting of an exception that is not always already a repetition of previous legal forms. 44 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 127. It might seem here that Agamben is presupposing the continuity between bare life exposed to death in the ancient (Roman) world and the bare life of the modern citizen by simply equating birth and bare life. It could be argued against Agamben that the moment of birth includes the nascent human person in a variety of dimensions of social life, and Agamben does not specifically show that the life of the newborn is bare with respect to sovereign power, that sovereign power regards the newborn as "life exposed to death". But from Agamben's perspective, borrowing on Arendt's account of the relationship between citizenship and nationhood, there is a notional separation, however fleeting, between life as such (i.e. life considered as zoe) and the qualified life of the citizen. It is for this reason that citizenship has to be conferred on the newborn as a kind of legal fiction doubling the infant's entry into the social. The separation between natural and social life is recognized in a number of social rituals, such as christening, which are necessary to mark the entry of the living being into the social or the community. In Agamben's terms this fleeting moment exposes something lost in the societies whose languages reflect but a single term for "life": that this life is itself divided into zoe and bios, and that even if it is vanishingly tiny, society identifies a transition between the two, and thus acknowledges their separation. It is only because there is a notional separation between life as such and qualified life that it becomes possible to take 247 citizenship away from those whose birth seems to have entitled them to it, and anyone in such straits finds that their inalienable human rights seems to matter little or not at all; this last point will be considered below and represents Arendt's contribution to Agamben's discussion. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid, 128. 47 Ibid, 129. 48 Ibid, 131. 49 Ibid, 130. 50 Quoted in Agamben at Ibid. 51 Ibid, 176-177. 52 Ibid, 177. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid, 179. 55 Ibid, 179. As an aside, I think it is important to recognize that Agamben is not simply rejecting the idea that there can ever be an inclusive unity. On the contrary, Agamben's attempt to articulate a new political horizon based on the notion (as we have seen) of a form-of-life in which zoe and bios cannot be separated from each other already suggests such a possible unity. Agamben's comment in this context should, I would submit, be taken simply as the claim that such unity remains a futile project to the extent it remains caught in the (metaphysical) horizon of Western biopolitics, rather than as a kind of neo-conservative claim that the division between the poor and the rich are simply natural givens. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid, 178. Agamben points out that Marx's analysis of class conflict is certainly not without a biopolitical element, since class conflict "is nothing other than the civil war that divides every people and that will come to an end only when, in the classless society or the messianic kingdom, People and people will coincide and there will no longer be, strictly speaking, any people". Agamben's account here is quite plausible insofar as economic division also seems to correspond to biopolitical division, not only within the sphere of the pubic economy proper, but first of all within the division of labour between the domestic (private) and public spheres. Of course, from a Marxist perspective what Agamben is describing as a biopolitical fracture is first of all due to an economic fracture occasioned by the division of labour. 58 Ibid, 178. 59 Ibid, 130. 60 Ibid. 61 Agamben, "What is a Camp?" in Means Without End, 43. 62 Homo Sacer, 38. 63 Ibid, 132. 64 Ibid, 38. 65 Ibid, 132. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid, 133. 68 Ibid. 69 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc.), 1968: 291. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid, 292. 72 Ibid, 293. 73 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 131. 74 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295,297. 75 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 131. 76 Ibid, 175. "Ibid. 248 78 Ibid, 175-76. 79 Ibid, 175, original emphasis. 80 Ibid, 170, original emphasis. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid, original de-emphasized. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid, 171. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. In his State of Exception Agamben suggests that because of the widespread inclusion and use of emergency or "full powers" legislation in Western democratic states between the first and second World Wars (when the crisis of nativity discussed in Homo Sacer was felt most acutely), it is apt to call the exception a "paradigm of government"; see especially pages 7-10. 88 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 168. 89 Agamben, State of Exception, 2. 90 This last line is a quotation of Werner Spohr, whom Agamben describes as "a jurist close to the regime" in Homo Sacer, 168. 91 Cited in Ibid. 92 Ibid, 167. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid, 169-69, original de-emphasized. 97 Ibid, 169. 98 Ibid. 9 Quoted in Homo Sacer, 169. 100 Ibid, 166. 101 Ibid, 173. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid, 184. 106 Ibid, 173. 107 Ibid, 174. 108 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 440. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 84; see Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended; Lectures at the College De France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador), 2003. Foucault argues in the final lecture in this series (the one Agamben cites), that in a regime of biopower dedicated to fostering life, the ancient sovereign power of inflicting death must proceed in a new way. In a regime of biopower, for which the Nazis seem also for Foucault to mark a kind of extreme point, the political people is converted into a biological population by means of racism. Racism, according to Foucault, "is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population" (255). But the fragmentation or introduction of caesuras within a biological population is also a way of continuing by very different means the relations of enmity between groups of people. Intead of seeing the (biological) "enemies who have to be done away with" in political terms, as "adversaries in the political sense of the term", those who must be killed in the name of the health of the biological population (i.e. the inferior race), are "threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of 249 the species or race" (256). The reason the Nazi Reich appears as an extreme for Foucault (as for Agamben) is that it explicitly and consciously understands the doctrines of political war (the elimination of political adversaries) in the terms of the doctrines of population management or "improvement" one finds in regimes of biopower. In this sense, then, the upshot of Foucault's analysis, which Agamben brings out in Remnants of Auschwitz, is that the old form of the political people, under the Nazi regime of biopower, is entirely converted into the biological category of population by means of biopolitical ceasurae. Where Agamben differs from Foucault, of course, is in seeing the new regimes of biopower as the reconstitution of an ancient sovereign power to open the space of the political by dividing or selecting life by means of exposure to death in the state of exception. 110 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 146. 111 Ibid, 148, original de-emphasized. 1,2 Ibid. 113 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 84-85. 114 Ibid, 85. 115 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 176. 116 Agamben, "What is a Camp?" 40-41. 117 Ibid, 42, emphasis added; a similar comment can be found in Homo Sacer on page 175. 118 Agamben, State of Exception, 8. 1,9 Ibid, 4-5. 120 Ibid, 4. 121 Jean-Claude Paye, The Global War on Liberty, Telos Press, 2007; Paye notes that "the speed with which these various laws [substantially curtailing civil freedoms] were adopted is striking. This can be understood more easily if it is kept in mind that these changes had been anticipated well before the attacks. In the European Union, of the eleven proposals brought in immediately after the attacks, six had already been considered before September 11, and four others had been in preparation" (pages 1-2). Paye goes on to argue that "the fact that most of these acts assume the form of law indicates that the ruling authorities are committed for the long term, seeking a new legitimacy and consent of the people to the dismantling of their constitutional guarantees" (2). Thus, although these new security measures do not involve the outright declaration of a state of emergency suspending the constitution in its entirety, they do legally permit broad discretionary powers equivalent to a state of exception as replacements to previous laws more in line with constitutional guarantees. However, it must be added that unlike a complete suspension of the constitution, these laws do permit legislative and court challenges, although this is certainly no guarantee that they will be repealed, and instead attempt to shift that overall legal environment toward de facto state of emergency powers. 122 Ibid, 2. 123 Agamben, State of Exception, 4. 124 For example, the biopolitical dimension in the present crisis is illustrated by the profoundly racialized situation of the majority of those detained: their ethnicity becomes the basis for the suspicion of being a terrorist, and thus to their detention. Yet one's ethnicity is not a pre-established fact, to which a given rule automatically applies, since the rule itself decides on its application, decides, that is, if a given person is "suspicious" according to the facts of the situation it deems relevant. Similarly, once taken into custody, a person becomes beyond guilt or innocence because the rule, having decided on a fact, turns that fact into the basis for a rule which is nothing but application, that is, nothing but acting on the basis of the previously constituted fact. Obviously the situation is entirely circular, but seemingly automatic once the emergency measure allows for the constitution of the facts to which it will then apply as a rule. 125 Based on Agamben's claims about the "left" forms of attempting to resolve the modern biopolitical fracture—which he does not investigate—it might be possible to conduct a parallel examination of the Stalinist gulag system as a process for bringing the unitary People into existence by eliminating its
250 opposite. If so, the Soviet prison-camp system would appear equal to the Nazi concentration camps as the most extreme instances of the modern nation-state biopolitical paradigm. 126 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1996.
251 Chapter 5: Indivisible Life: Testimony and the Remnant
The previous chapter advanced the view that Agamben's juxtaposition of the ancient figure of homo sacer with the modern figure of the refugee and the concentration-camp inmate suggested that Agamben is presenting his readers with a dialectical image. In this
image, "then" takes on significance in relation to "now", and both become legible in a new way. In chapter three, I argued at length that the purpose of Agamben's engagement
with Schmitt's state of exception was ultimately for purposes of contrasting the latter's
view of sovereign power, always in service to law, with Benjamin's attempt to reveal a
form of human power decoupled from law. This chapter seeks to bring these two lines of thought together. It should be recalled that for Agamben, as for Benjamin, the key to the
nexus of law and violence is its connection to "sacred life". The previous chapter has
helped to show why this might be the case: if the citizen enters the city only by first being
exposed to a sovereign right over the life that is to give content to that citizenship's very
form, then it is such exposure that initially gives law jurisdiction over the life that is not
already imbued with rights. This jurisdiction, in the absence of right which initially
prepares the ground for that right, is the sacredness of life, life without rights but already
subject to the pure force of law. According to Agamben, the fatal destruction of the
European public or state order, culminating in the state's "management" of the link to be
established between citizen and life, exposes the continuity between this order and the
homo sacer of ancient sovereignty as an emblem of the structure of the political in the
West. In the West, in both ancient and modern times, life is subject to the sovereign's
252 decision, that is, to the sovereign's "existential" authority to separate life as such from life qualified to enter the city and to bear the rights of citizenship.
Despite Agamben's equivocation over the boundaries of the political versus the religious, it is quite apparent that the political in Agamben's view—even if it is separated from a religious sense of the sacred—as long as it is connected to sovereign power, remains a sacrificial paradigm. As we have seen, just as the establishment of the
speaking subject in the West demands the opposition between the latter's pure intention to signify and a natural or animal voice of mere indication, the establishment of the
qualified life of the citizen demands its opposition to unqualified or merely existent life.
In this opposition, as in all opposition, the two opposed terms reciprocally depend upon
one another. This is why Agamben turns his attention, not to the qualified life of the modern citizen of the city or the state, but to the bare life to which the rights of the citizen
are opposed, to the life of the refugee or the prisoner of the camp. It is in Agamben's
book Remnants of Auschwitz that the focal point of his investigation thus appears in the
bare life of the Muselmann, the camp inhabitant that even compared to other prisoners,
has been radically dehumanized. If the camp is the place where the link between bare life
and qualified life is made, it represents the extreme point of sovereign power over life in
modernity and in the West more generally. By the same token, if the decision on bare
life is what the opposition between bare life and qualified life depends upon, it follows
that to examine the full extremity of this decision on those most completely excluded
from qualified life is to reveal the full extent of sovereign power over life. If it should
253 turn out that there remains something of life beyond the sovereign's power over it, and if this something should turn out not to be radically excluded or opposed to the qualified life of the citizen, (i.e. the subject of language), then the opposition on which rests the entire project of sovereign biopower founders. In foundering, in becoming ruined, the opposition reveals the outline of something else beyond the rule of sovereign biopower, something that allows for a messianic re-articulation of life. We have already noted what this would consist of: a situation in which the speaking subject grasps or appropriates its own status as the mediality of language, as the pure communicability of life. The pre- subjective communicability of language as such opens the potential of speech which it is then possible for a subject to occupy, but no longer in the form of an opposition to its other, to bare life as disqualified by the sovereign. The subject would thereby become the witness to life as pure potentiality or mediality in which forms of life, rather than being opposed and separated, might be regarded as testifying to the undivided freedom of life as such, a life liberated from sovereign power and the need to decide.
It is thus not surprising that it is in Remnants of Auschwitz more than in any other work that Agamben draws together the various strands of thematic analysis pursued across his writings to date. That Agamben draws extensively on his previous work on language, potentiality, biopolitics, and the relationship between the exception and the decision, should alert his readers to the significance of this text, a significance, I would suggest, that forms both the starting-point for subsequent articulations of his thought found in The Time that Remains, while simultaneously referring back to his earliest work.
254 If the Nazi concentration camps instantiate, to use Foucault's terms that Agamben borrows, an instance in which citizens are rendered completely into objects of biopolitical population management, it follows that the most abject form of life constituted by the conditions of the camp, the so-called Muselmann, becomes exemplary of the reach of
Nazi biopolitics, and hence of sovereign power more generally. But this ground of abject and de-subjectified life is contested, for at the same time the Muselmann, in ceasing to unambiguously inhabit the domain of the human, is revealed as the bearer of a potentiality beyond the reach of sovereign power. In the most extreme instance of exposure to sovereign power or violence can be found an instance of life that is simultaneously beyond the reach of sovereign power; yet this life is no longer simply opposed to sovereign power but becomes both the latter's absolute limit and the condition of its decision. In other words, it is because the Muselmann exists simultaneously within the "absolute indistinction of fact and law" characteristic of biopolitical sovereignty that
"Mute and absolutely alone, he [the Muselmann] has passed into another world without memory and without grief, showing the contours of a form of life beyond the reach of sovereign power over life.1 Agamben's effort in going to the extreme limit of humanity, in his treatment of the Muselmann, attempts to show that "a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself confronted with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law, and it is precisely this indiscernibility that threatens the lex animata of the camp".
255 From the perspective of the post-sovereign politics Agamben presents, the remnant of life that takes the form of the dehumanized camp inhabitant is integrally connected with language, and hence with the capacity to testify to the attempt of sovereign power to isolate a biological substratum through the infliction of suffering. If sovereign power
seeks to create a being that is substantially equivalent to the removed voice of the living being by reducing those it considers enemies to the status of bare life, the fact of testimony, despite its overt weakness and even inadequacy in the face of barbarity denies
such an eventuality. For Agamben, the very impossibility of speaking as a subject is paradoxically what allows testimony to happen, and it is in the hinge or joint between
these two conditions where the potentiality to pass between them is located. If the
potentiality of life and its testimony can be found even in this desperate strait of the
human condition, and if such potentiality is preserved beyond sovereign power, then
Agamben has exposed the root of an ethical orientation that speaks clearly against the
sovereign's historic predilection to separate life from its forms, to bring this counter-
speaking to historical awareness in the flash that juxtaposes ancient and modern instances
of sovereign power. In this sense Agamben's gesture is double in that the purpose of
Remnants of Auschwitz is to testify to the irreducible significance of testimony, to show
not only the limitation of metaphysical concepts of life and political order, but to begin to
chart the path beyond them, however incomplete and even aporetic that path might
appear.
256 My argument in this chapter will proceed in several stages. First, it will be necessary to show that Agamben's focus on the Muselmanner of the camps is part of his overall
critique of biopolitical sovereignty, showing that when human beings are turned into bare
life a zone of life is exposed that is substantially beyond the kinds of morality that focus
on the will and the ethics of "heroic" subjectivity, that take the subject to be the judge of
all life, of the human and inhuman alike. Second, it will be important to consider
Agamben's discussion of language in Remnants, both in relation to subjectivity and to its
possibility in witnessing to the extreme inhumanity of the camps from the paradoxical
perspective of those who have been rendered Voiceless (if not voiceless). In a third
section, I shall consider the possibility of testimony which Agamben articulates with
respect to human bare life, showing how this notion links up with his work (both
previously and subsequently) to demonstrate the limit of sovereign power. Fourth, I will
build on the exposure of the limit of sovereign power to turn to the messianic dimension
of Agamben's work, both as it is outlined in Remnants, but especially as the messianic is
articulated in The Time that Remains and other work. Finally, from the position of
Agamben's unfolded philosophical trajectory, it will be useful to deal with Norris'
criticism that Agamben cannot propose another politics which does not continue the
sovereign decision, showing that it overlooks completely the messianic dimension of
Agamben's thought.
257 5.1 The Human and the Muselmann
As we have already noted, according to Agamben, the production of bare life in the concentration camps exhibits the core of the Nazi biopolitical strategy intent on converting a political people entirely into a biopolitical population. In this sense, the camps become the device by which the biopolitical machine of sovereignty becomes at the same time an anthropological machine for deciding upon the boundaries of the human and the inhuman. Consistent with these claims, already detailed in Homo Sacer,
Agamben argues in Remnants that what Auschwitz and the other camps reveal is a strategy of sovereign power where the political impasse of the European politics of citizenship—especially the crisis of the fit between birth and nation—reaches its extreme manifestation; the Nazi recourse to an exceptional biopolitical "solution" in the gray zone between fact and law is a logical outcome of that crisis. The continuity between the crisis of citizenship and the concentration camp is expressed in the consistency with which all those who entered the camps were stripped of all citizenship, reduced to legally and politically unclassified beings subject only to the arbitrary (even if highly regulated) administration of the SS. But because legal indistinction corresponds to the zone of indistinction between law and fact, legal indistinction also corresponds in this instance to a radical dehumanization in which the line between human and inhuman is not regarded as an external fact that must be respected: as we have seen with respect to Agamben's recourse to Arendt's account of totalitarianism, to become merely human is to verge on the passage to the inhuman, to face reduction to the seemingly pure identity of a
258 biopolitical substance. From this perspective, European Jews occupied a signally unique position. They were consistently and entirely converted by the Final Solution into a biopolitical population slated for extermination, thus occupying entirely the category of bare life or natural voice that is opposed to the properly (if equally biopolitical) qualified life of the German citizen. As Agamben argues, the Jews of Europe found themselves cast as the epitome of Hitler's "extreme biopolitical concept" in which the political problem of territory requires "a volklosser Raum, a space empty of people".4 The eradication of the Jews that would constitute the space empty of people corresponds first to their complete reduction to a purely biopolitical substance devoid of the humanity capable of bearing citizenship, beyond which lies only death. The project of converting a people into a population meets with a kind of absolute limit to the "biopolitical caesuras" which we discussed at the end of the last chapter. In this regard it is useful to go back and quote at greater length a passage already examined previously:
Biopolitical caesuras are essentially mobile, and in each case they isolate a further zone in the biological continuum, a zone which corresponds to a process of increasing Entwiirdigung and degradation. Thus the non-Aryan passes into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee..., the deportee into the prisoner (Haftling), until biopolitical caesuras reach their final limit in the camp. This limit is the Muselmann. At the point in which the Haftling becomes a Muselmann, the biopolitics of racism so to speak transcends race, penetrating into a threshold in which it is no longer possible to establish caesuras.5
The significance of Agamben's focus on the Muselmann is that in the conditions which constitute the latter, "we witness the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject".6 If the aim of Nazi
259 biopolitics is the establishment of a space free of people, then the existence of the
Muselmann brings this logic to the extreme of its realization in the existence of a purely anonymous life. The Muselmdnner are not just byproducts of the camp, but their existence is logically "the driving force of the camp understood as a biopolitical machine that, once established in a determinate geographical space, transforms it into an absolute biopolitical space", that is, a territory absent of human subjects who might remain the bearers of a possible political affiliation or citizenship.7 In other words, the Muselmann constitutes the "invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty...the Muselmann is nothing other than the volMosser Raum, the space empty of people at the center of the camp that, in separating all life from itself, marks the point in which the citizen
o passes.. .into a bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life".
Given the place of the Muselmdnner in Agamben's account of sovereign biopolitics, it should come as no surprise that he focuses much attention on establishing that the
Muslemann is a being to whom the normal characteristics of subjectivity do not apply.
Drawing extensively on Primo Levi's account of imprisonment in Auschwitz, and to a lesser extent on the accounts of other survivors, Agamben argues that it is impossible to consider the existence of the Muselmann without running into a series of paradoxes and contradictions. First among these is the fact that, according to Levi, "the Muselmdnner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass" whose "life is short, but their number is endless"; and yet, despite Levi's designation of them as the camp's
"backbone", comprising an endless number, they figure only very marginally in survivor 260 accounts of the camps. Agamben cites a number of survivor accounts to this effect.
This statement by Jean Amery is representative: the Muselmann "was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. As hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations".10 Ryn and Klodzinski, in one of the first studies that seek to document the Muselmanner in the camps quote the testimony of one of the survivors who has this to say: "No one felt compassion for the Muslim, and no one felt sympathy for him either. The other inmates, who continually feared for their lives, did not judge him worthy of being looked at". l Consistent with this need to avoid looking at the Muselmann is the idea that Agamben attributes to Elias Canetti according to which "a heap of dead bodies is an ancient spectacle, one which has often satisfied the powerful. But the sight of Muselmanner is an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes".12
This seemingly paradoxical situation, in which the central phenomenon of the camp, the existence of the Muselmann, is the very feature that no one wishes to see, is susceptible to a variety of explanations. Agamben argues that when it comes to the specific need to avoid seeing the Muselmann on the part of the prisoner who has so far escaped a similar condition of effacement, avoidance is more or less a simple matter of survival. The being who "no one wants to see at any cost" is at the same time "the "core" of the camp, the fatal threshold that all prisoners are constantly about to cross".13
Because of the prisoners' essential proximity to the Muselmann, he is "universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in [the Muselmann's]
261 disfigured face". Since the Muselmann is by all accounts a sure candidate for selection to be sent to the gas chambers, because those who become too sick or weak to work are invariably selected, "the prisoner's most pressing concern was to hide his sickness and his exhaustion, to constantly cover over the Muselmann who at every moment was emerging in him".15 Agamben suggests that for this reason, while all the survivors spoke of the Muselmdnner as a "central experience", very little about them is actually contained in the historical accounts of the Nazi genocide.16 Given that the Muselmann is the core of the camp, expressible through the image of the camp as a whirlpool circling around the empty centre of the Muselmann, Agamben argues that we fail to understand the nature of the Nazi atrocities if we see in the camps only a means of death. Instead and more horrible is the idea that Auschwitz and the other camps were the site of a kind of social, political, and even anthropological experiment, "beyond life and death" or at least on its borders, in which the human being is transformed into something non- or no longer human, or at least where the radical separation of the human and the non-human is
attempted. This experiment is what makes it necessary, if the significance of the camps
are to be understood, to "first understand who or what the Muselmann is", requiring us to
1 ft
turn against the reflex to turn away.
Setting aside for the moment the problem of how such understanding can be
acquired, Agamben claims that one of the great impediments to it is—precisely because it
is born out of the imperative to survive—the standpoint of "morality" articulated by
many of the survivors. As understandable or even inevitable as it might be to "interpret 262 this limit experience in moral terms", Agamben argues that we cannot understand the phenomenon of the Muselmann as long as the issue is reduced to "a question of trying to preserve dignity and self-respect".19 According to the testimony of Bettelheim, for
instance, survival was a matter of identifying for oneself a point of view that was one's
own, and which would never be given up "even if it meant risking and losing one's
9A
life". Given that in the camps almost nothing was left to the individual beyond the
grinding necessities of daily survival, Bettelheim turns this personal viewpoint into the most minimal of distances taken between the individual and what they were forced to do by the circumstances of the camp. The entire purpose of retaining the personal point of view of minimal subjectivity is to prevent oneself from becoming a Muselmann: "To
survive as a man not as a walking corpse, as a debased and degraded but still human
being".21 However, for Bettelheim, as for many survivors, clinging to one's subjectivity
in the environment of the camps necessitated that those whose subjectivity had been lost
be interpreted as radically and irreducibly other, beyond the pale of humanity, and most
importantly, as the site of a moral failure in the form of a renunciation of an essential
dignity and freedom belonging to a subject. Thus, "For Bettelheim, the Muselmann is
therefore the one who has abdicated his inalienable freedom and has consequently lost all 99 traces of affective life and humanity".
According to Agamben, the "sole goal of this paradigm is to allow at any cost for the
distinction of what, in the camps, has become indistinguishable: the human and the
inhuman", the subject and the bare life on which it depends.23 From this perspective, the
263 problem with the strategy of othering the Muselmann is that, as Agamben points out, it effectively transforms the Muselmann into "an improbable and monstrous biological machine, lacking not only all moral conscience, but even sensibility and nervous stimuli".24 Thus Bettelheim, in seeking to draw a sharp contrast between the Muselmann and that of the normal human being, contends that "Prisoners entered the moslem (sic) stage when emotion could no longer be evoked in them.. .Other prisoners tried to be nice to them when they could, to give them food and so forth, but they could no longer respond to the emotional attitude that was behind someone's giving them food".25 As
Agamben notes, however, the attempt to drive a wedge between the Muslemann and the other prisoners leads to a falsified testimony, since it is widely acknowledged by the survivors that no one tried to help the Muselmann, both because they were regarded as being beyond help and because doing so would decrease one's own chances of survival.
Another problem with the strategy of staking out a kind of opposition between the
Muselmann and the human being that Agamben points out in Bettelheim's testimony is that it leads to "such a criterion of moral distinction between human and non-human as to deprive the witness not only of all pity, but also of lucidity", as when Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, is described by Bettelheim as being merely a "well fed and well clothed" Muselmann who has lost all humanity.
Despite the understandable attempt to secure a foothold in the realm of subjective humanity under such conditions, Agamben suggests that any morality that opposes the human to the inhuman—the morality of an essential human dignity—not only further
264 dehumanizes the most abject of the camp prisoners, but is also singularly unable to
account for the significance of such abjection. The problem here is that the horrifying
logic of the Nazi camps which produced the Muselmanner as a matter of course, as an
experience that became "normal" in those conditions, is also reflected in the morality of dignity that opposes the Muselmann to the human. As Agamben quite stringently puts this thought, "Simply to deny the Muselmann's humanity would be to accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture".27 Or, as he puts it more expansively, "if there is a zone of the human in which these concepts [of dignity] make no sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, for no ethics can claim to exclude part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see".28 But this statement already suggests that the human (subject) and the inhuman (bare life) cannot in fact be separated, that the
first depends irrevocably on the other. Opposed to this view is the morality of dignity which is predicated on a sovereign subject who decides on the limit between the
subjective and the merely living. But obviously such a morality makes no sense in a
situation in which most people would inevitably pass beyond that limit as an express
outcome of their situation. This is not to say, of course, that a situation capable of
destroying human subjectivity takes on any normative validity as a kind of monstrous
counter-morality, but rather that the fact that it is capable of existing in fact exposes an
existential and ethical terrain in which the ethics of subjective freedom reaches an
impasse. In these conditions, such an ethics is faced with a choice: it must either deny
265 the humanity of those who pass beyond the limit of subjective sovereignty or admit that its own foundational instance is not sovereign.
Agamben's thesis that Auschwitz calls into question any ethics based on a sovereign
subject is also what leads him to reject—or at least to modify—the widespread view that what constituted the particular crime of the extermination camps was their trivialization
of death through the application of industrial techniques. This latter idea, in Agamben's
view, does not go far enough: it is not just that the difference between death and
"liquidation" was erased that is at issue, but that each prisoner in the camp "whether he
was drowned or survived, bore everything he could bear—even what he would not have
wanted to or should not have had to bear".29 This suffering which people in the camps
were forced to bear far exceeded anything that anyone (any subject) could be capable of
bearing, to the point where "this exhaustion of the possible...nevertheless has nothing
"human" about it" in subjective terms.30 Agamben is of course not denying that there is a
crucial difference between the human subject and the bare life of the dehumanized, but
that this difference is misunderstood where it becomes the ground of an opposition
between them. To oppose the human to the bare life of the inhuman being is to turn the
human being as a subject into a metaphysical entity through which an essence is to be
grasped on the basis of an actually existing being, the "properly human". But the
instance of the Muselmann shows that despite the difference between the human and the
inhuman, each is immanent to, or co-extensive with, the other, such that "Human power
borders on the inhuman: the human also endures the non-human".31 Hence the specific
266 horror of the camps was not (just) the trivialization of human death, but rather consisted in bringing to light a zone in which the very notion of human subjectivity is fundamentally eclipsed and displaced by the bare life that is contained within the human being. From this perspective, if the camps made the distinction between death and simple
biological cessation incomprehensible, this was possible only because they first
obliterated the line between the human and the inhuman, exposing the inhuman within
the human and vice versa. In such conditions, Agamben argues, the ethics of dignity
finds itself out of place because it cannot from within its metaphysical idea of humanity think the enormity of the horrifying capacity to suffer which eventually erases the
boundaries of the "proper" between what is human and what is not.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Agamben argues that the ethics of dignity can ultimately be
traced back to its origins in legality and sovereign power. He argues that the theory of
dignity originally stems from the Roman Republic, referring not to the dignity of an
individual, but of the dignity an individual life takes on when assuming public office;
dignity is that which belongs to the office by virtue of its service to the republic, and only
subsequently bestows the individual occupying that office with its aura. Since there are
many offices, however, there are correspondingly many "dignities". But, Agamben
argues, it is in the middle ages that a theory of dignity is formulated by jurists of canon
law; Dignity in this medieval theory is held to be co-extensive with the sovereign ruler,
modeled on the sovereignty of God, and so takes on its familiar monotheistic aspect. So
influential has this theory been that it forms one of the key planks in the theory of modern
267 sovereignty, namely, "the perpetual character of political power. Dignity is emancipated from its bearer and becomes a fictitious person, a kind of mystical body that accompanies the royal body of the magistrate or emperor". This claim is consistent with Agamben's reading of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, according to which, just as there can be no power outside of God, neither can there be power beyond the sovereign's jurisdiction, a claim necessitating the attempt on Schmitt's part to annex the state of lawlessness to the force of law characteristic of the sovereign ban. Correspondingly, Agamben claims,
"When the term "dignity" is introduced into treatises of moral philosophy, the model developed by legal theory is simply followed, point by point, in order to be interiorized".34 In this way, modern moral philosophy seeks to free "the bearing of the individual from the possession of a duty. A "dignified" person is now a person who, while lacking a public dignity, behaves in all matters as if he had one".35 In everyday speech the notion of preserving one's dignity has the implication of acting in a manner consistent with an absent public dignity even where one does not have one, for instance, in one's private life. According to Agamben, the Nazi term Entwiirdigung, used to describe Jews or others whose citizenship had been stripped away by the Nuremburg laws, carries the connotation of one who is "deprived of dignity" or worth. Thus, for the Nazis, "the Jew is a human being who has been deprived of all Wurde, all dignity: he is merely a human—and for this reason, non-human".37
For Agamben, then, the theory of sovereign power explicated in Homo Sacer and
State of Exception finds its correlate in Remnants'1 critique of the ethics of dignity.
268 Where legal theory attempts to articulated the perpetuity of sovereign power, its inclusiveness even over that which it excludes or which is other to it, moral theory in the form of an ethics of dignity repeats the gesture, claiming that those who lose their dignity have in effect lost their humanity. In such a scheme, it is the prerogative of those whose dignity is never in question to decide on the line that divides the human from the
inhuman, in the process disavowing the link that connects them.
In Agamben's account, the Nazis once again reveal themselves to take the logic of
dignity to its extreme point. He points out that what is striking about the SS is their
singular lack of capacity to think through human suffering, not in the sense that they did not think about suffering, since clearly almost everything they did showed that they thought of little else—but while disavowing the point of view of the sufferer who was
already designated inhuman (and thus denying their own capacity to suffer in their
understanding of what it meant to inflict it). According to Agamben, the Nazis showed
that they were almost entirely incapable of grasping the fact that it was their own
infliction of suffering that exposed the limits of the human, pushing the boundaries of the
human toward the territory of inhumanity. For the SS, following the lead of the
Nuremberg (and other) laws that striped the Jew of his or her dignity or worth as a citizen
prior to deportation to the camps, the line between human and inhuman was always
already "there" as "natural" or unproduced, so that the biopolitical "proof of an intrinsic
lack of human dignity, of not "really" being human from the start, is provided by the
eventual emergence of the Muselmann from out of the human being or subject. This is
269 why, Agamben argues, "the executioners, while torturing and killing, remained "honest men"", "they remained "humans"; they did not experience the inhuman" as a possibility intrinsic to all human beings that their very activity knowingly and yet unknowingly brought out. In this contradictory way of thinking, the SS were systematically unwilling to conceive of their actions as evil or inhuman in an ethical sense. This inability to see the limit of the human as lodged within the universal human capacity to suffer—the inability to see bare life as such—to the point of inhumanity accounts for the fact that "the SS showed themselves to be almost without exception incapable of bearing witness", unable to grasp that the "properly human" in general is a function of the
"improperly human" in general, and not that only some humans (those who are inhuman to start with) are uniquely capable of being deprived of their humanity. If "the victims bore witness to their having become inhuman, to having borne everything they could bear", the Nazis, on the other hand, "did not bear what they nevertheless could have borne", even to the point of affirming the chilling doctrine that the most heinous actions were taken out of complete and inevitable necessity, as if ordained by a contradictory fate in which the proper and allegedly freely sovereign subject could do nothing other than follow orders blindly.40 Thus, Agamben suggests, if the "extreme figure of this extreme potentiality to suffer is the Muselmann, then one understands why the SS could not see the Muselmann, let alone bear witness to him".41
Once the ethics of dignity is rejected as inadequate, as a metaphysical trope contained in the idea of sovereign power, the disturbing significance of Auschwitz
270 emerges: that "humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman, that their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything".42 The idea that the sovereign subject is the autarkic ground of ethics is overturned by Auschwitz through the revelation of the survivors that "Human power borders on the inhuman; the human also endures the non- human".43 For exactly this reason, Auschwitz "marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm", because in the camps "The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent".44 It is not so much the radicalization or even degradation of death occasioned by the fabrication of corpses that is so horrible about the survivors' testimony for Agamben, but instead the news that "there is still life in the most extreme degradation", and that this still living degradation extends further than was thought possible, to the point of the implosion and ruin of all subjectively-grounded normativity that operates through an opposition to bare life or a removed voice.45
The collapse of the ethics of dignity is what from Agamben's perspective makes
Primo Levi's testimony particularly valuable, because "Levi begins to witness only after dehumanization has been achieved, only once it no longer makes any sense to speak of dignity".46 Levi acknowledges that in the condition of the camps, remaining "dignified" not only no longer makes any practical sense, but that in the camps it is indecent to remain decent or dignified. According to Levi, not only were those who had a genuinely superior moral sense outside the camps at a distinct disadvantage within them, but the
271 survivors were "also "worse" in comparison with the anonymous mass of the drowned, those whose death cannot be called death".47 In other words, Levi's testimony forms the focal point for Agamben's discussion in Remnants precisely because for him the point of testimony is to witness to those who had lost all possibility of dignity or moral strength, namely, the Muselmdnner, those who had "already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves".48 Levi's testimony is not primarily intended on behalf of those who survived, or even for those who perished while maintaining a grip on their sense of subjectivity; instead, witnessing for Levi only makes sense if it is on behalf of those whose subjectivity was completely destroyed by the camps, those who became unable to observe, remember, and express themselves, who became bare life. These people, Levi claims, are the complete witnesses in the sense that they were party to the worst destruction capable of being visited on a human being, and to this extent, they are the ones whose "experience" really takes in what the camps were about: the production of bare life; they are those, in other words, who form the remnant of speaking humanity within and beyond the speaking human subject. Thus, erecting moral barriers that serve as tacit ontological and ethical barriers between the still-human prisoner and the Muselmann would itself be indecent. Echoing Levi's sense of purpose in witnessing to Auschwitz, Agamben maintains that "This is the specific ethical aporia of Auschwitz: it is the site in which it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not".49
272 5.2 The Human and the Inhuman
If testimony is not simply the relaying of the experiences of this or that person but fundamentally involves the revelation that the subject borders and depends on the bare life that is always there before words, that is, before the subject comes to speech, how is testimony to the full truth of the camps possible? Such a question gives rise to a logical problem: if the complete witnesses, the Muselmdnner, are precisely those who cannot testify to their experience of the extremes to which they were subjected, and yet they are the ones who alone experienced the full extent of the camps's power to separate human from inhuman, the would-be witness to this full significance is placed in an impossible situation of needing to say what is unsayable. Among the survivors, Levi is explicitly aware of this predicament. According to Agamben, Levi recognizes that testimony in this case "lies essentially in what it lacks", that even if it could speak "fully", it could only address a lack of experience, a blindness.50 Agamben sums up this dilemma as follows, liberally paraphrasing Levi's words from If This is a Man:
The "true" witnesses, the "complete witnesses," are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. They are those who "touched bottom": the Muslims, the drowned. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony. And yet to speak here of a proxy makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be transmitted.51
273 If this understanding of testimony is accepted, the witness understands that they "bear witness in the name of an impossibility of bearing witness".
It is this impossibility of witness or testimony to the complete witnesses that opens up larger questions concerning the subject and its relationship to what cannot be assumed, that occupies much of the theoretical content of Remnants in a chapter entitled "Shame, or on the Subject". Agamben begins his discussion here with the familiar problem of
survivor guilt, which he claims has been widely interpreted as shame in the face of
survival. Perhaps because their survival seemed arbitrary, nothing short of miraculous, many of the survivors of the Nazi death camps feel an immense sense of shame at having
survived. Various explanations are given by the survivors themselves and by others to explain this feeling. A main theme in such testimony is that that one survived where so many others perished is enough to induce an intolerable sense of guilt. Yet the exact
source of guilt in this situation is hard to pin down. If guilt refers to a sense of individual responsibility for acts, then things become very murky indeed, since by all accounts the
line separating what the prisoner "did do and what he could feel responsible for" was
such that "he cannot assume responsibility for any of his actions" in an environment of total domination in which, as Levi points out, those who could not live with such a lack
of moral responsibility were the first to perish. If so, the feeling of guilt becomes
strangely generic because it "adheres in the survivor's condition as such and not in what
he or she as an individual did or failed to do"; but this suggests to Agamben a close
274 proximity between such guilt and "the common tendency to assume a generic collective guilt whenever an ethical problem cannot be mastered".54
In this connection Agamben invokes the apparent willingness of individuals in institutions such as the German Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches to admit to a kind of generic guilt for their various levels of complicity with the Nazis, while simultaneously refusing to admit to specific acts of wrongdoing that could (and should) be assumed. The problem of the generic assumption of guilt, Agamben argues, remains too close to the ethics of dignity discussed above in supposing that guilt is something voluntarily assumed by a sovereign subject, becoming in these cases a kind of device to protect one's dignity; admitting to making an error in judgment is much less offensive to the sense of dignity of the subject than is assuming guilt for specific acts done or left undone. Rejecting the idea that generic guilt has any real explanatory value for the intense feeling of guilt experienced by the survivor, since the latter bears little relation to generic guilt or to the guilt of specific acts of wrongdoing, Agamben suggests an alternate account. In this account, what is taken for guilt is in reality a powerful sense of shame.
Drawing on an early text by Levinas (De I'evasion) that provides a phenomenological analysis of shame, Agamben maintains that in shame one has an awareness of being unable to take distance from what one would most like to avoid associating with or acknowledging as one's own. In shame, then, "the unrestrainable impulse to flee from oneself is confronted by an equally certain impossibility of
275 evasion". Involuntary physical nudity before others (in both Levinas' discussion and in
Agamben's gloss on it) appears as shame's paradigm case: in such a situation, we wish at all costs to disavow our own nakedness before the gaze of the other (and hence our own) even though it is equally certain that we cannot do so. Shame is the realization of being chained to oneself, that is, to one's existence, without possibility of escape. Expanding on this idea provided by Levinas, Agamben claims that to be "ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates from our own intimacy", our appearing to ourselves through the one opposite us.56 When confronted by the intimacy or interiority of what cannot be assumed, "the "I" is thus overcome by its own passivity, its ownmost sensibility"; here the subject is party to a movement of desubjectification with which it is unavoidably connected.57 Shame, according to Agamben, is the affect that transpires within this "double movement" of subjective defacement and simultaneous presence, where the subject is paradoxically present and absent, a "witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject".58 Thus it is that shame, the tangible "flush" on the face of a subject, bears witness to a "complex movement of auto-affection" wherein the subject is revealed or presented to itself "such that activity and passivity can never be separated, revealing themselves to be distinct in their impossible coincidence in a self that is inescapable precisely to the extent that it is robbed of identity.59
The shame of the survivors, Agamben now suggests, takes the form it does because survival reveals the human subject's proximity to itself as non-subject, as inhuman or as
276 bare life, as the dissolution and simultaneous witnessing of such dissolution by the subject in the face of that which cannot be escaped, assumed or borne. To support this thought, Agamben recounts the situation in which Levi and some fellow survivors encounter the advancing Russian soldiers:
They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know...60
Shame, as the dominant emotion thrust upon both liberators and prisoners alike, in this situation becomes the index of the subject's passivity before itself, its own simultaneous desubjectification and resubj edification in which there can be no self-identity. The subject of survival is a witness at its own desubjectification, transcending itself by means of its own passivity toward another subject that it also is or is destined to become. The shame experienced by the prisoners is the shame of witnessing their own dehumanization or desubjectification, their own passive proximity to their internally inscribed limit. The passivity at stake here unhinges the subject, denying any sense of sovereignty or self- mastery, since such passivity is prior to any act of will, any taking up of a position. The shameful subject knows how little mastery is left to it, is aware, despite its best efforts, of the extent to which it already bears more than it can bear. In this sense the shame-filled survivor is already in proximity to the Muselmann, to the complete witness who can no longer testify to or be present at their own subjective defacement, showing that such proximity is a matter of degree rather than of kind. 277 This experience of shame, as a passive proximity before what cannot be assumed but only witnessed, leads into Agamben's discussion of the relation between the linguistic subject and the living entity. If subjectivity fundamentally consists of shame, of passivity before what cannot be assumed, then this relation of passivity can also be understood to obtain between the linguistic subject and the bare existence of the living being. In order to grasp this relation, Agamben returns to some of his earliest work on linguistics.
Agamben notes that from the perspective of structural linguistics, there can be no passage between the discreet orders of langue and parole. There is nothing in langue per se, as a virtual register of already extant conceptual resources, which might permit the production of speech in a determinate instance, to allow for the formation of discreet semantic instances; and by the same token, parole as the actual instance of discourse cannot be related back to the potentiality of langue. The existence of shifters, as we have seen in
chapter one, initially appears to provide a solution because "every language has at its
disposal a series of signs...destined to allow the individual to appropriate language in
order to use it". -1 But as we have also noticed, the simple existence of shifters does not
by itself resolve the problem of the passage from langue to parole, since the event of
speech occurring through the appropriation of shifters does not refer back to a substantial
"I" which might serve as the preexisting mediation of one level by the other. This is
because, as Agamben points out, the shifters relate to the speaking subject "only through
reference to the event of discourse in which they are used". As an event of enunciation,
the "I", the cardinal shifter of self-presence, takes its existence only in and through the
278 coming of language to speech, the folding of language back on itself in order for its anonymous generality to be focused. This focusing or specification of language is the subject. Thus, rather than accounting for the passage from the plane of virtual reference to actual speech through the subject, the latter is constituted in this very passage.
It follows from the last point that enunciation does not reference the content of communication but to the taking place or the communicability of language in speech;
"Enunciation thus refers not to the text of what is stated, but to its taking place; the individual can put language into act only on condition of identifying himself with the very event of saying, and not with what is said in it". Following Benjamin, Agamben is locating the communicability of language, rather than its content, as the key to understanding the subject. There can be a speaking subject, in other words, only because language is divided between langue sad parole, and the subject is what arises in the disjunction between the two mutually exclusive elements. There can be difference between language and speech only because the two are united in their pure communicability; but just as certainly, there can be such unity only because of this difference. Language is thus a structure in which unity and difference are coextensive.
Yet Agamben's discussion of the linguistic subject also entails this: the subject is the site of a strange inability to speak that refers to the division between the subject of language and that concrete individual's corporeal life, even as it is this site that allows the two levels to communicate. Here it is necessary to ask in diachronic terms what occasions the formation of a subject, of an "I", or speech on the plane of language.
279 Agamben notes that the transition from language to speech or discourse by way of the subject takes part in the same movement of subjectification and desubjectification characterizing shame. To enter language, "the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation".64 But in so doing, in becoming fully identified with the "I" of the discursive utterance, the subject finds itself with nothing to say: "The subject of enunciation is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone. But, for this very reason, once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak" but instead is spoken by discourse.65 Quite paradoxically, the subject of discourse cannot say anything because what gets taken over in enunciation is the always already of the
"glossolalic potentiality" of language which cannot be mastered by the subject precisely because this subject is constituted by the instance of discourse rather than what is said by its means. Since the speaking subject is an entity born of the divided act of speaking, the content of what it says cannot consist of a uniquely authored utterance of the living entity.66 Seemingly futile, the moment of enunciation, far from permitting the integral presence-to-self of speaking and living, is precisely their separation-point where
"subjectification and desubjectification coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent" because perfectly separated by the two parallel "orders" of speaking and living.67 Thus it is that "the one who speaks is not the individual, but language; but this means nothing other than that an impossibility of speaking has, in an unknown way, come to speech".
280 As Agamben goes on to suggest, the poetic utterance is no stranger to this seemingly bizarre impossibility of speaking—Rimbaud's famous dictum that "I is another" first among them—through which the poet undergoes the "responsibility and shame" of an inspiration that is borne but cannot be accounted for, assumed or mastered.69 In the positions of speaking and living there is an irreducible hiatus between the subject of language and the living being's pre-linguistic sensate awareness (as Agamben's discussion of Rousseau's recovery from his accident in chapter one shows). This is because "the living being who has made himself absolutely present to himself in the act of enunciation, in saying "I," pushes his own lived experiences back into a limitless past and can no longer coincide with them".70 From the diachronic perspective in which a linguistic subject begins regularly to take up the "I", and so accumulates instances of repeated access to the potentiality of language, the direct openness of the pre-linguistic living being is irretrievably lost, and the attainment of "the pure presence of discourse irreparably divides the self-presence of sensations and experiences in the very moment in which it refers them to a unitary center".71 Alluding to Freud's theory of the production of the unconscious through the splitting of the subject, Agamben points out that this inevitable disjunction between speaking and living experiences explains why
"subjectification, the production of consciousness in the event of discourse, is often a trauma of which human beings are not easily cured".72 Far from serving as a firm transcending foundation for experience, subjectivity proves to be a "fragile text" that
281 "incessantly crumbles and erases itself, bringing to light the disjunction on which it is erected" between living and speaking.73
It would be entirely insufficient if Agamben were to leave a pure and simple aporia in the place between speaking and living, although there is a certain way in which he does just this. The aporia or gap between living and speaking is nothing like a metaphysical location, a stable place formed by the hollow or disjuncture of two stable terms, but is instead the event or communication of an "intimacy" between the two disjoined series, one of living, the other of speaking. As Agamben insists, "It is certainly true that the two series flow alongside one another in what one could call absolute intimacy. But is intimacy not precisely the name that we give to a proximity that also remains distant, to a promiscuity that never becomes identity?"74 The alternating series of desubjectification and resubjectification that transpire in the intimacy between living and speaking can never reach identity; and yet each event in its transpiring survives the other, steps in to substitute for the other. Agamben explains that the concept of survival contains an ambiguity which refers both to that which survives as well as that which is survived. Drawing on a number of examples from Roman and early Christian sources,
Agamben suggests that it is perfectly legitimate in the reflexive sense of "to survive" to speak of "a life that lives by surviving itself'.75 This living on by surviving itself is the sense that Agamben has in mind in his discussion of the speaking being who survives the living being, and vice versa, in and through their intimate oscillation that makes up the human being. The human being is not a substantial entity but rather human existence
282 indefinitely transcends itself toward the intimacy of its immanence. Agamben argues that
"in human beings, life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life".
In terms of the problem of witnessing that provided our initial point of departure, survival has these two senses: "in the first sense, it refers to the Muselmann...; it therefore signifies the inhuman capacity to survive the human. In the second sense, it refers to the survivor; it designates the human being's capacity to survive the Muselmann,
11 the nonhuman". But Agamben hastens to add a third sense of survival as well, one that is the "most ambiguous sense of the thesis". According to it, "the human being is the inhuman; the one whose humanity is completely destroyed is the one who is truly human".79 If the Muselmann is the complete witness, Agamben points out that the two
senses of the claim to survival seem to converge there, as though it were a kind of third term or hinge between them. From this perspective, the Muselmann as complete witness to the destruction of the human is at the same time the most completely human; the extent
of full dehumanization semantically converges with full humanity. Such semantic
convergence indicates to Agamben that it is "not truly possible to destroy the human, that
something always remains". This remainder is the witness to the division within the
human, "not because somewhere there is a human essence to be destroyed or saved, but
because the place of the human is divided".81 The human being does not exist as such on
either side of the gap between living and speaking, but can only be located within the
aporia of division itself, "in the missing articulation between the living being and 283 logos". It is possible to bear witness to the destruction of the human being only because the human being also survives this destruction as what remains after such destruction.
The shame experienced by the survivor is not shame for acts committed (or not
committed): it is shame in the face of occupying in turn each side of the divide between
speaking and living, of the human and the inhuman as part of an inescapable human
condition. The survivor recognizes—however unwillingly or shamefully—that "the
human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being", that as human
beings they have not just survived the inhuman, but that they are for this very reason
themselves always already inhuman; in Agamben's words, "The human being is thus
always beyond or before the human, the central threshold through which pass currents of
the human and the inhuman". Testimony to this fact takes place precisely within the
gap between the two, and is thus always an experience of what remains, of the remnant of
the human within the inhuman and the inhuman within the human. As Thomas Carl
Wall points out, this is exactly why the survivors' testimony has the quality of choking on
words, of choking "on the very nonrelation or disarticulation between sociality and the
bare life to which they had been witnesses". The survivors of the camps were faced in
particular with the difficulty of saying "I", of entering and appropriating speech from out
of the anonymity of the bare life they had experienced on a daily basis in the camps. But
it was just as difficult for them to cope with the anonymity of language itself, with the
fact that language can say anything, indifferently. The power of testimony, then, inheres
not in the content of what is said but in its appearing or taking place, in the fact that the
284 survivor, upon entering language, makes language into something non-indifferent, taking away its serene anonymity. Speech "is the event of non-indifference to the indifference of language. The unspeakability of the speakable is the thing that always matters".85
What appears in testimony is a homologous or intimate relationship between the serene anonymity or unattributedness of the sheer fact of living, of zoe, and the serene anonymity of language. The subject is what appears between these two terms, breaking open their indifferent multiplicity. The subject of testimony's difficult stumbling and choking over words is the impossibility ever to reduce this anonymous multiplicity to anything like a singular identity. But the anonymous multiplicity borne by the fact of living is already the origin of the limitlessness of speech, the limitlessness of ways of being or qualified forms of life. Wall puts it well when he writes that "The social multiplicity of ways of life is not a distribution of the singularity of bare life but is an effect of, or trace of, the primordial potential of the plethora of life always already to be inscribed as multiple".86 In the case of the witness to Auschwitz the very painfulness of address bears witness to the horrible truth of something prior to that address, something barely survivable or articulable. What precedes the Voice is always a voice, an indication toward what cannot as such be made present in speech and yet on which the truth of speech depends. As Agamben writes early on in Remnants, "what is borne witness to cannot already be language or writing. It can only be something to which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that arises from the lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the non-language to which language answers".
285 5.3 Testimony, Biopolitics, and the Potentiality of the Remnant
The central thesis organizing Agamben's discussion of survivor testimony is that the
"human being is the being that is lacking to itself and that consists solely in this lack and in the errancy it opens". If there were a stable, self-identical human essence on either side of the speaking/living divide, then either there would be signification without end— but without (semantic) significance—or there would be a simple fact of living whose vocal expressions would consists of a finite and stable repertoire. But if the human being is constituted by this lacking to itself, then the human being is neither (only) the speaking subject nor just the living being, but is instead "a potential being", a being with the capacity—rather than simply the ability—to be its own lack, of filling in for or occupying the site of its own passivity with respect to itself; the human being is the being who is forever consigned to providing for itself the supplement that it lacks.89 The gap or aporia between living and speaking cannot be filled or resolved by anything actual because the gap is itself nothing actual: what takes place in the gap between the two series is a kind of transcendental contingency or multiplicity, or, as it might also be expressed, a form of freedom.
As this idea immediately implies, and as Agamben has already established, the human being is other than the subject. If the human being is a potential being rather than
(merely) an actual physical or metaphysical entity, the subject, far from being constitutive of the human being, is but one of its products or possibilities. In a dense but important
286 passage of Remnants, Agamben foregrounds his reading of Aristotelian potentiality in terms of the privation of the actual, as an excess of potentiality over being. As we have seen before, what is particularly interesting about Aristotle's concept of the potential, and also what links it to Heidegger's understanding of the passivity of (what gives) being, is that the passage from potential-being to actual-being does not entail the destruction of potentiality. Potentiality is not a category of the same ontological register as actual things that can be opposed to them such that if there is something actual, it is therefore no longer potential. On the contrary, if potentiality can at once be and not be, then we are confronted with something eluding categorical logic, a "concept" (if it is not precisely a question of something pre-conceptual), which operates according to a logic of both/and instead of on the basis of either/or; while there is a disjunction within the potential (it cannot (not) be), it is an inclusive instead of an exclusive one. Hence, when Agamben formulates the concept of potentiality in terms of an impotentiality to do or be, he is claiming that the passage from potential to act retains its potentiality even in the fully realized act, or perhaps better, that no act is fully realized, that there is survival rather than identity. Potentiality is what is capable of surviving its actualization.
If the human being is potential being, this immediately implies that human being is capable of being other than it is or has become, that the human being that is other than the subject is not exhausted by its actuality or what it has become—or in the case we are considering, has been forced to become. This is another way of saying that human being consists in freedom, but not in the metaphysical sense of the subjective freedom of choice
287 or decision made possible from the perspective of the speaking being. In place of the metaphysics of subjective freedom, Agamben is claiming that it is in the bare existence of the human that its freedom resides, and that this freedom is not simply coincident with the subject. In fact, from this perspective the speaking subject can only be described as contingent, since it is what might or might not emerge from the freedom or potentiality of the human being, as we have seen above, what may or may not be possible to come to speech. Such contingency "is not one modality among others, alongside possibility, impossibility, and necessity: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the way in which a potentiality exists as such".90 In fact, as noted above, the human subject is what is produced by the mere life of the human being, one of the latter's modalities or possible configurations of existence. Agamben writes, "The categories of modality are not founded on the subject, as Kant maintains, nor are they derived from it; rather, the subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact".91 But this suggests immediately that, as Agamben puts it, subjectivity "in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak". Agamben continues this thought as follows:
Testimony is a potentiality that becomes actual through an impotentiality of speech; it is, moreover, an impossibility that gives itself existence through a possibility of speaking. These two moments cannot be identified either with a subject or with a consciousness; yet they cannot be divided into two incommunicable substances. Their inseparable intimacy 93 is testimony.
288 In this sense, all subjectivity bears witness or testifies to that which it cannot fully assume, and which, providing the subject with its content, is mute and cannot speak. It is this speaking to and for an impossibility of speaking that stamps subjectivity with a fundamental passivity or dependency, an impossibility of grounding its own being, of being the subjectum. Only because subjectivity is always lacking to itself does it have any possibility of speaking for those who were rendered unable to speak, testifying in the place of those who were made to suffer to the limit of their capacity to exist in the mode of a subject.
From this claim about the subject Agamben goes on to "redefine the categories of modality"; possibility, impossibility, contingency and necessity become important not just as "innocuous logical or epistemological categories that concern the structure of propositions", but as "ontological operators, that is, the devastating weapons used in the biopolitical struggle for Being".94 Because the human being is divided, because "Being gives itself in modalities", the categories of modality are above all biopolitical and ontological categories through which "a decision is made each time on the human and the inhuman", and where the "field of this battle is subjectivity".95 Agamben understands these categories as follows with respect to the subject:
Possibility (to be able to be) and contingency (to be able not to be) are the operators of subjectification, the point in which something possible passes into existence, giving itself through a relation to an impossibility. Impossibility, as negation of possibility (not [to be able]), and necessity as negation of contingency (not [to be able not to be]) are the operators of desubjectification, of the destruction and destitution of the subject.96
289 The modalities of possibility and contingency "constitute Being in its subjectivity... as a world that is always my world, since it is in my world that impossibility exists and touches the real". By the same token, necessity and impossibility "define Being in its wholeness and solidity, pure substantiality without subject...a world that is never my world since possibility does not exist in it".98
Agamben hastens to add at this point that these modalities are not options facing a constituted subject which it could choose as a task to assume or reject. To this extent we are beyond the understanding of Dasein proposed by early Heidegger, according to whom possibilities always belong to a being-there still understood in largely subjective terms.
But for Agamben these modalities or ontological operators form the conditions of possibility of the subject, so that the subject becomes "a field of forces always already traversed by the incandescent and historically determined currents of potentiality and impotentiality". Biopolitics appears here as the historical task of deciding on the subject, of the attempt either to foster or to disallow the emergence of the subject from out of the human being. Auschwitz, as the extreme biopolitical instance, "represents the historical point in which these processes [of possibility and impossibility] collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real".100 Auschwitz, as the existence of the impossible, is a biopolitical experiment attempting to eliminate contingency, a place of absolute necessity where "the catastrophe of the subject" occurs through the determined destruction "of the place of contingency", of the possibility that allows the subject to be.101 For Agamben, what took place in the Nazi concentration
290 camps reveals the secret ambition of modern biopower that is still with us, the constitution of "a mutable and virtually infinite survival" that is completely at the
' 1 (V7 disposal of sovereign power or of the sovereign decision. It is this power to make the living being survive in an indefinite condition which characterizes not only Nazi biopolitics, but also the biopolitics of the state of exception more generally. The situation in which life is included only as ex-cepted reveals the way that the protean multiplicity of existence or life as such is mobilized and ordered by sovereignty. This is why Agamben consistently claims throughout Homo Sacer that sovereign power is not just about the decision, but about the production of the exception on which that decision is to be based.
It is sovereign power's "supreme ambition" in its modem form to enact "in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human".103 The purpose of such separation or survival is, as we have
seen, to enable the decision on bare life that "allows for the attribution of demographic,
ethnic, national, and political identity".1 4
If this conception appears strange, if it is hard to see how the Muselmann might possibly be the bearer of any of the identities Agamben lists, it would be useful to keep in
mind that the Muselmann confirms in Nazi ideology the identity of those who are
unworthy of life, those who were deemed unable to hang onto their humanity or to face
death as "properly" human. But Agamben's analysis also retains its plausibility when
applied to situations that are somewhat less extreme and closer to our own time. If we
think of the purpose of indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay, or of the label "enemy 291 combatant", for instance, we are confronted with a strategy of the sovereign ban that by technical, geographical, and extra-legal means has isolated the life of the prisoners, separating their subjectivity (which is also reduced to a bare minimum of possible exercise and expression), from the indefinite maintenance of their biological existence cut off from the rest of the world. The strategy of power seems to be twofold: first, the maintenance of this separation for as long as desired, and secondly, because of the isolation and effective separation of biological from subjective life, the attribution to the prisoners of whatever identity is most ethnically, nationalistically, religiously, or politically advantageous to the sovereign; in quite literal terms, this is the production of terrorist identities from out of the bare life of the "enemy combatant".105
Agamben is prepared to take this analysis further, declaring that because the Nazi camps were the most extreme biopolitical space yet realized, making the impossible exist as real, they are capable of exposing the essence of sovereign power as such, posed in a dialectical image between the archaic and modern victims of sovereign power. The bare survival of the Muselmann, Agamben tells us, "not only shows the efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret cipher, so to speak its arcanum"}06 If, as Agamben suggests, arcanum is derived from area, "jewel casket or coffer", the arcanum is the hidden essence residing beneath the visible surface or face.107 In terms of sovereign power, if the visible face purports to establish order, to provide "security" or the rule of law, even to provide for the ethnic nation, then its arcana is its true purpose: the isolation of and exercise of power over bare life. In the Nazi camps, however, "survival is the point in
292 which the two faces coincide, in which the arcana imperii comes to light as such. In the
Muselmann, biopower sought to produce its final secret: a survival separated from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance".108
Sovereign power's ultimate political task, the subordination of the sheer existence of life to itself, enabling it to fix the boundary-line of the community and to decide on
inclusion/exclusion, is displayed fully in the Nazi reduction of people to population. This
claim of Agamben's brings together the various theoretical strands drawn on throughout his work. From a Heideggerian perspective, the Muselmann as a biopolitical substance
completely at the disposal of the sovereign decision fully realizes the project of "standing reserve" as the last instance of metaphysics. The arrangement of all beings, including human being, as a kind of natural resource to be utilized, that is, whose being is to be
attributed on the basis of its value for an evaluating (sovereign) subject, is clearly on
display in Nazi biopolitics. It is this more than anything else that is responsible for the
indistinction that must be created between fact and right, and that proves to be the
necessary condition for the sovereign's decision on the exception, that is, the decision on the value or being of life.109 Agamben's claim here also draws upon Schmitt's idea that
the normal situation must be understood in light of the extreme situation, that it is the
latter that interprets the former. The most extreme manifestation of sovereign power in
the state of exception is precisely the one in which the essence of sovereign power can
come to light, where the sovereign appears in full. But we should not overlook the extent
to which this last Schmittian claim also resonates with Benjamin's thesis in the Critique
293 of Violence essay according to which sovereign power takes part in the ancient and fatal act of manifesting sheer power over life. Beyond whatever overt purposes sovereignty
seems to have, for Benjamin, sovereign power's law-founding violence consists in a pure
excess with respect to all its historical configurations, its manifestation of the sheer
domination over life.
Whatever these different convergences portend, what is clear in all three strands is
that sovereign power is at the limit of its power in the production of bare life;
simultaneously, this limit is the limit of sovereign power, the limit of the metaphysical
subject, and the limit of fate. In a sense, sovereignty is both at its most powerful, but at
the same time at its weakest in the state of exception precisely because it can only
achieve this power by exhausting all of its potential, by going to the extreme boundary or
limit of its capacity. Sovereign power, as both the last and the first metaphysical power,
unconscious of the nature of the fate it carries, does not partake of the passive power of
impotentiality that for Agamben is at issue in human being, remaining blind to the
significance of the contingency it nonetheless seeks to eliminate as "valueless".
It is at this limit of sovereign power, in which the latter strives to create a bare
survival reduced entirely to anonymity, where testimony goes beyond sovereign power
because testimony reveals itself capable of its own impotentiality. As Agamben argues,
"With its every word, testimony refutes precisely this isolation of survival from life. The
witness attests to the fact that there can be testimony because there is an inseparable
division and non-coincidence between the inhuman and the human, the living being and
294 the speaking being, the Muselmann and the survivor".110 The survivor is able to speak for the complete witness, the Muselmann, and thus become the complete witness to the diabolical nature of sovereign power, because the survivor is a subject in the sense assigned to this term by Agamben, that is, as someone who speaks in place of another.
Only because the human and the inhuman are split are they infinitely relatable, can one stand in for the other; the subject of testimony and of survival, as the subjedification of a desubjectification, is the one who is always already speaking in place of another whose
"experiences" cannot be assumed within language. But this does not suggest an inability as mere privation: it is "because there is a witness only where there has been desubjectification, that the Muselmann is the complete witness and that the survivor and the Muselmann cannot be split apart".111 Here the "ontological operators" of modality discussed above take on their full significance as the taking place of testimony at the extreme situation or in the state of exception. Transcending sovereign biopower's ambition to produce an absolutely necessary space, the existence of testimony testifies to the survival beyond survival of potentiality or contingency, of "possibility put to the test of a subject".112
The Nazis committed their atrocities on the supposition that the unprecedented and horrible nature of those acts would assure that survivor testimony would never be believed. However, Agamben argues that if testimony directs itself, as Levi's does, to the complete witnesses, the Muselmdnner, denial is refuted in principle. Agamben writes that "If the witness bears witness for the Muselmann, if he succeeds in bringing to speech
295 an impossibility of speech—if the Muselmann is thus constituted as the whole witness— then the denial of Auschwitz is refuted in its very foundation".113 This is above all because "In the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such".114 As we have noted earlier, if there is something irrefutable about survivor testimony, it "depends not on a factual truth, a conformity between something said and a fact or between memory and what happened, but rather on the immemorial relation between the unsayable and the sayable, between the outside and the inside of language", on the unspeakable nonetheless coming to speech.115
In a recognizably Heideggerian way, Agamben is after the "existential-ontological" grounds of subjectivity and testimony, rather than seeking to provide testimony with unimpeachable epistemological or empirical certainty, categories he no doubt would associate with the requirements of legality. The reason that the "existential-ontological" grounds must be bracketed (or at least placed in scare quotes), is that they are inadequate to the extent that they suggest that it is in fact a question of grounding. Agamben is explicit about this, writing that the "fact that the subject of testimony.. .is a remnant is not to be understood in the sense that the subject...is a substratum, deposit, or sediment left behind as a kind of background or foundation by historical processes".116 It is not a matter of excavating in order to locate a foundation, a final condition of possibility, since
such "a conception would once again repeat the dialectic of grounding by which one thing—in our case, bare life—must be separated and effaced for human life to be
296 assigned to subjects as a property". The question of the subject at stake in the existence of testimony is not therefore a question of "a telos that is the grounding of the human being, the becoming human of the inhuman".118 In place of the return of a humanism of this sort, along with its attendant danger, namely the illusion of a
"completed humanity...reconciled in a realized identity", Agamben posits instead "a remnant", as the new relation to be established between the human and the inhuman.119
The remnant in this sense is without foundation, because at its "center lies an irreducible disjunction in which each term, stepping forth in the place of a remnant, can bear witness". Obviously, to be without foundation in this sense is not the same as the nihilistic denial of foundation according to which humanity is "condemned to meaninglessness or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting".121 The witness, with its testimony, neither establishes a new end or a new foundation for humanity. As "truly historical", however, the witness as remnant "is not what redeems time in the direction of a future or even the past; it is, rather, what fulfills time in the excess of a medium".122
The remnant which testifies to its lack of an end or foundation in the irreducible disjunction that constitutes it is thus the pure excess of what Agamben calls impotentiality, the medium or pure means whereby the human is capable of surviving the human beyond all humanistic ideals or historically imposed (sovereign) finality. It is this remnant which cannot be isolated by sovereign power in the state of exception, that is, the remnant is what eludes the sovereign decision in its attempt to found the law.
297 In many respects, Agamben believes, testimony is in a position analogous to a speaker who resurrects a dead language. Such resurrection is only possible to the extent that the speaking subject speaks in the place of an impossibility of speaking, as a remnant of now-extinguished linguistic community. When a language dies, it becomes pure archive, pure already said, a virtual reservoir of meaning without speakers; what makes a
language dead is that "it is impossible to assign the position of a subject" within it.123 To
speak or write in a dead language, then, is to allow "a language to survive the subjects who spoke it, producing it as an undecidable medium - or testimony - that stands between a living language and a dead language".124 Speaking or writing in a dead
language opens the doors of the archive enough to allow something to emerge that must
be positioned undecidably between the poles of linguistic innovation and preservation.
By the same token, Agamben explains, "to bear witness is to place oneself in one's own
language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language
as if it were dead...outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been
said".125 If testimony or witness always hovers somewhere between original articulation
or gesticulation, and representation, it is because testimony occupies a very similar
linguistic place as does poetry. To poeticize or to witness—and there is obviously a
sense in which these acts can be said to converge—is to "found language as what
remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or the impossibility, of speaking".126
The remnant that is testimony must be understood in terms of "what cannot be
archived", because it is "the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to
298 his incapacity to speak. In this language, a language that survives the subjects who spoke
it coincides with a speaker who remains beyond it". The liminality between the
archive and the author's speech "bears witness to a time in which human beings did not yet speak; and so the testimony of human beings bears witness to a time in which they
were not yet human", to their immemorial but irreducible infancy. Testimony, in other
words, reaches "all the way back" to the origin of human speech, and in its utterance
brings into the open of the present day not the bare repetition of speech's archaic
empirical emergence in history, but language as pure medium of communicable
expression, the "infantile" gesture that opens up being and world each time for the first
time. The gesture of language at once recalls the origin at the moment or in the
movement that reconstitutes it; in this sense alone it might be said to repeat the origin of
human language, provided one first denies the strictly diachronic notion of origin which
this formulation also implies.
We might expand on these ideas by turning to Agamben's essay "Bartleby, or On
Contingency" from 1993, written several years before the publication of Remnants. In
this wide-ranging essay on Bartleby, Agamben discusses impotentiality in terms of what
he calls "decreation".129 Launching a devastating attack on Leibniz's notion in the
Theodicy that God chooses the "best" world from the infinity of potential worlds,
Agamben points out that "the pyramid of possible worlds represents the divine intellect",
in which "God's mind is the. ..Egyptian mausoleum that, until the end of time, guards the
image of what was not, but could have been".130 But according to Agamben,
299 It is difficult to imagine something more pharisaic than this demiurge [i.e. Leibniz's God], who contemplates all uncreated possible worlds to take delight in his own single choice. For to do so, he must close his own ears to the incessant lamentation that, throughout the infinite chambers of this Baroque inferno of potentiality, arises from everything that could have been but was not, from everything that could have been otherwise but had to be sacrificed for the present world to be as it is.
It is interesting to note that the perspective of the Leibnizian demiurge is the inverse of Benjamin's Angel of On The Concept of History: where the demiurge sees the infinite loss of potentiality as an index of the perfection of the present world, the Angel can only regard the growing pile of actual debris that accumulates in front of it from the perspective of redemption, that is, from the perspective of what could have been otherwise, what could have been different. A comparison of this kind is what Agamben seems to have in mind when on the page following the quote above he invokes
Benjamin's understanding of remembrance as redemption in the latter's Convolute N of the Arcades: "Benjamin once expressed the task of redemption that he assigned to memory in the form of a theological experience of the past". Such experience, according to Agamben, "restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again".133 Agamben compares this Benjaminian theory of remembrance with Bartleby's stubbornly-repeated "I would prefer not to" as a cipher for potentiality that resolutely keeps its distance from the actual. Thus, for Agamben ""I would prefer not to" is the restitutio in integrum of possibility, which keeps possibility suspended between
300 occurrence and nonoccurrence, between the capacity to be and the capacity not to be".
Remembrance—for from this perspective Bartleby's line constitutes the remembrance of potentiality in accomplished reality—in Agamben's terms is the restoration of contingency, and thus of incompletion and impotentiality, to what has happened, to what has become by turns necessary or impossible.
This notion of the restoration of contingency is the sense given by Agamben to decreation. Pointing out that some critics have likened Bartleby to a "Christ figure",
Agamben suggests that "if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not".135 But saving what was not from the power of what was or is entails the fulfillment of creation only toward its decreation: "The creation that is now fulfilled is neither a re-creation nor an eternal repetition; it is rather, a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned to their original unity in
•I T if the mind of God". The decreation enacted by remembrance of the contingent moves
"the actual world...back to its right not to be", even as "all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence".137
To return to the discussion of testimony and the remnant, in this context decreation is the remembrance that saves the potentiality of life from the ruins of its destitution and ruin in the camps. The pure means of language as that potential allowing speech to take place by means of an impossibility of speaking becomes in testimony the gesture that recalls the world to its impotentiality, restoring it to its proper contingency. In testimony the fate of the Muselmann, in which the impossibility of being human is made actual, is 301 reversed by the restoration of contingency: the Muselmann becomes not only the complete witness in Levi's sense, but also the one who is truly human precisely through a potential not to be human that turns out to be what is essentially human. Testimony, it is true, does not restore the Muslemann to life, but it does restore a more integral sense of humanity, if, as Agamben insists, witnessing witnesses on the basis of its impossibility.
What is impossible from the perspective of testimony is that the inhuman, the one who was made to bear more than the human being can bear, can finally be excluded from humanity. Agamben is thus outmaneuvering sovereign power precisely by including the very thing sovereign power seeks to exclude in order to establish its version of the properly human. In this way, he presents the law that in the exception draws infinitely close to life in order to capture it within a life that becomes entirely inseparable from law, making the latter's pretentions to decide on life evaporate. Even though sovereign power tacitly includes, via the state of exception, what it also wants to exclude, such power also remains blind to this fact, or at least to its significance for humanity. Sovereign power depends upon the very bareness of living that it also cannot stand, that it wants to isolate only for purposes of transmuting it into particular forms of life. But in bringing the impossibility of excluding a part of humanity into the idea of humanity, Agamben is simultaneously confronting sovereign power with what it seeks to deny, that is, that the fact of living or bare life is not a thing that can be gotten rid of, but is rather an inexhaustible potentiality which all politics and all ontology presupposes. From this perspective, it is apparent that humanity cannot be founded or fixed because humanity is
302 foundationally incomplete in its merely existing life: humanity is the species whose essence is always lacking, and whose earliest experiences of this lack constitute the dream of one day being able to bring itself to a kind of completion in a fully realized form. Sovereignty is the machine whereby this completion is to be brought about, through which the human community is to be founded and completed, where the human is to be given its proper ends. Yet as we have just seen, sovereignty is incapable of grasping what it subordinates because its origin already depends upon the irreducible givenness or multiplicity of multiply and factically existing life. Sovereignty, like metaphysics, therefore fundamentally depends upon the deficit of its origin.
If this is true, the redemptive intention of Agamben's project comes quite clearly into focus. The only way to redeem humanity, to rescue it from the clutches of an endlessly repeated cycle of sovereign foundations, is to recall, as both Benjamin and Bartleby seek to do in their own ways, humanity in the midst of its actuality as originally potential- being, that is, in terms of zoe grasped in its pure or inexhaustible plurality or self- difference. As with Benjamin's attempts to save the suffering of the past, remembrance brings the origin to its completion precisely by showing that there was nothing (actual) to be realized, that because the origin is essentially non-actual but an activity, its impotentiality cannot be lost provided it is recognized in those moments where it
displays, where it flashes up in the moment of recognizability.138 Agamben is thus
seeking to give to testimony the status of a Benjamiman dialectical image. For
Agamben, Auschwitz is the "moment of danger" par excellence in which survivor
303 testimony "flashes up" and fleetingly illuminates a possible form of humanity existing beyond the limits of sovereign power. It is in this moment of illumination in which a dialectical image is formed between the immemorial power of the sovereign ban and a humanity freed from its grasp, liberated from the crushing weight of the necessity of actualization.
5.4 The Messianicity of the Remnant
What is at issue in the remnant as witness is that which remains, and which allows humanity as a whole to be reconstituted, but not, obviously, as something like a completed or ideal object. It is thus not surprising that Agamben ends Remnants with a discussion of the Messianic, a discussion which is considerably expanded in his book The
Time that Remains, based on a series of lectures given in 1998 and 1999 on Paul's Letters to the Romans on the concept of the Messianic. In Remnants Agamben locates the status of the remnant in a messianic etiology according to which "the remnant appears as a redemptive machine allowing for the salvation of the very whole whose division and loss it had signified".140 If this is so, the situation of the messianic remnant fully coincides with the "aporia of testimony".141
Just as the remnant of Israel signifies neither the whole people nor a part of the people but, rather, the non-coincidence of the whole and the part, and just as messianic time is neither historical time nor eternity, but, rather, the disjunction that divides them, so the remnants of Auschwitz— the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.142
As implied by the notion of the remnant, Agamben is concerned with the gap that exists in all objective, chronological representations of time in terms of the Messianic remnant. 304 To the extent that human beings are linguistic beings, all of their representations of time depend upon "an additional time with regard to chronological time" and this is what prevents humans from "perfectly coinciding with the time out of which [they] could make images and representations".143 As a time "ulterior" to chronological time, messianic time is not "a supplementary time added on from outside to chronological time.
Rather, it is something like a time within time—not ulterior but interior—which only measures my disconnection with regard to it".144 As a breach of the subject's awareness
of. chronological time, the constitutive time through which chronological time becomes
an image for a subject, and which Agamben calls "operational time", is continually
"pressing within the chronological time, working and transforming it from within".145
Operational time is the time "between" chronological moments that, as Agamben puts it,
"is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us".146 This time that is left is
nothing other than the time of the remnant, of the remnants of chronological time in
which "we take hold of and achieve our representations of time, is the time that we
ourselves are, and for this very reason, is the only real time". 47 A first parallel with the
discussion of testimony can be observed here. The witness emerges between the human
and the inhuman and is able to testify only because it occupies the gap within
chronological time, the gap between living and speaking; in the same way, the time of
testimony is discontinuous with respect to chronological time, just as testimony is
discontinuous with respect to the archive.
305 The status of this operational or messianic time becomes even sharper in Agamben's subsequent exposition of the relation between kairos and chronos. Chronos, chronological time, as we have seen, is merely the endless succession of instants, of the ceaseless accumulation of "nows" that We have seen Benjamin characterize in terms of homogenous empty time. Agamben understands chronos in terms of "our representations of chronological time, as the time in which we are, [that] separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent spectators", the time in which we represent or objectify ourselves. Kairos on the other hand, which Agamben notes is sometimes translated badly as "occasion", thus suggesting the notion of an event that occurs beyond time, is usually opposed to Chronos as though it were a qualitatively other mode of temporality.
But just as with operational time, Kairos "does not have another time at its disposal; in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos"}49 Agamben points out that this understanding of the relationship between kairos and chronos in terms of an interlacing of times, instead of an opposition between them, is common to both certain rabbinical literature and to Paul's doctrine of salvation. In the "rabbinic apologue", "the messianic world is not another world, but the secular world itself, with a slight adjustment, a meager difference. But this ever so slight difference, which results from my having grasped my disjointedness with regard to chronological time, is, in every way, a decisive one".150 In Paul's understanding of salvation, Jesus, the Messiah who has already come, has not yet come again for the second time. In Pauline doctrine, there is a curious disjunctive tension
306 between an already achieved salvation and a "not yet" of its fulfillment or parousia.
Yet according to Agamben this tension also pervades a certain strand of Judaic thinking as well, since life spent waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, like the Second Coming, is a life spent in deferral of the event of parousia.
However, Agamben reinterprets Paul's use of the term parousia on precisely this
issue of deferral in order to change its sense. According to Agamben, parousia "does not
mean the "second coming" of Jesus, a second messianic event that would follow and
subsume the first". Just as operational or messianic time is not another kind of time
external to homogenous time, the temporality at issue in parousia is simply the
"presence" of these times "next to" or adjacent to one another, but without the externality
of partes extra partes}52 As Agamben has made this point with respect to the intimacy
between the human and the inhuman, speaking and living, the sense of this "next to"
indicates not a relationship of exteriority but of irreducibility that is contained in
. coincidence: "Paul uses this term [parousia] to highlight the innermost uni-dual structure
of the messianic event, inasmuch as it is comprised of two heterogeneous times, one
kairos and the other chronos, one an operational time and the other a represented time,
which are coextensive but cannot be added together".154 This uni-dual structure of the
messianic event can be used to defeat the false impression of parousia as an onto-
theological notion of full self-presence which in fact continues to inform the notion of the
messianic as infinite deferment. The idea of deferment is made possible by a fallacious
"changing [of] operational time into a supplementary time added onto chronological time,
307 in order to infinitely postpone the end". Onto-theological representations of the messianic can only understand the latter in a contradictory and abstract manner, and this flawed conception is responsible for the doctrine of infinite deferment. Thus, onto- theology conceives of the time of kairos, while wanting to maintain its difference from chronos, in a relationship of exteriority with respect to the latter, and this exteriority effectively transforms kairos into another element juxtaposed (but thereby made equivalent) to the sequence of homogenous instants. Needless to say, the difference between the two times can in this way only be thought abstractly, as a kind of summation or self-present fullness coming at the end of the chronic expanse (which truly never comes).
Properly, that is non-abstractly, conceived, Agamben argues that "Messianic time lies beside itself, since, without ever coinciding with a chronological instant, and without ever adding itself onto it, it takes hold of this instant and brings it forth to fulfillment".156
The difference in these times, their perpetual non-coinciding yet without perpetual deferment, corresponds to Kafka's "theologoumenoti" in which "the Messiah does not come on the day of his arrival, but only on the day after; not on the last day but on the very last day".157 The sense of non-coincidence here is not that of infinite deferment— the messiah after all comes—but that such coming does not take the form of (onto- theological) self-identical presence. The reason for such non-coincidence, Agamben explains, is that "The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its
308 parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable". This graspable and "stretched" time is precisely remaining time, the time that is left us.
Agamben is not shy in indicating his Benjaminian inspiration here: "each instant may be, to use Benjamin's words, the "small door through which the Messiah enters"".159
This influence becomes still clearer if we briefly consider Benjamin's dialectical image. The dialectical image, Benjamin tells us in "Convolute N" of the Arcades, is more than a situation where "what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation".160 The dialectical image must exceed the simple relationship of chronological instances contained in both past and present, since this relationship is "a purely temporal, continuous one".161 In contrast to this continuity, the dialectical image is "not progression, but image, suddenly emergent". The paradoxical status of the dialectical image is that it flashes up precisely in its discontinuity with the continuous progression from past to present, and yet is not another time with respect to them. We might say that the relationship of what
Benjamin calls what-has-been, or messianic potentiality in the now of its emergence, is an original one, there all along—from this perspective the messiah has already come— but graspable in the moment of emergence or recognition, which is to say at any moment.
This is clearly in keeping with how Agamben characterizes the messianic situation, one which "concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in an inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of two terms in
309 this typological relation, it is the relation itself. According to Agamben, just as for
Benjamin and for Paul, messianic time constitutes "a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidability, in which the past is
dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past".164 The messianic remnant is thus "neither the complete nor the incomplete, neither the past nor the future,
but the inversion of both", an inversion in which, as we saw above, "the past (the
complete) rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfilled, and the present (the incomplete)
acquires a kind of fulfillment".1 5 The self-grasping that the extension of time makes
possible corresponds to the structure of memory that we saw in testimony. It is in
memory as witnessing, in which unspeakable lived events take on their sense in speech, that the fulfilled becomes unfulfilled and the unfulfilled is fulfilled. Not as an annulment
of the past, but as its abridgement or abbreviation, memory or testimony allows us to take
leave from the past by settling our debts with it, since "the recapitulation of the past is
also a summary judgment pronounced on it".166 It is in this capacity of restoration,
achieved through the messianic grasping of time, judgment upon it, and the restoration of
its potentiality, that humanity attains the ability to take leave of its own past rather than to
repeat it endlessly in new variations.
Another key link that it is important to make between Agamben's discussion of
messianic time in The Time that Remains and his work on politics in Homo Sacer and
Remnants of Auschwitz, is that of sovereignty as chronological time. Sovereignty,
according to Agamben, is the attempt to make of sheer living existence something
310 qualified. Sovereign power does this by contrasting qualified life with the life that it isolates in the sovereign ban, attempting to reduce bare life to pure objectivity or pure identity. But as we can now say, what sovereign power cannot entirely expunge is the intimacy of the relationship between chronos and kairos. It is precisely in testimony, in the passage from the anonymous existence of bare life to speaking that bare life is reclaimed, grasped from sovereign power's objedification. The coming of language to speech, which is also the coming of bare life to a subject, is the self-grasping of both bare life and language in the form of a subject who testifies to its simultaneous unity and difference from itself, from the sheer and solitary life that it is. Unlike the sovereign, who can only inhabit the dimension of chronos, the zoe that is simultaneously its kairos, its proximity to the haploi of innumerable forms of life, also exceeds in its mere and entirely passive existence, its chronological expressions. This allows us to glimpse the outlines of a form of life and a form of politics that, instead of continually trying to take life in hand, simply allows it to be the same as its potentialities.
Thus, it is evident that it is the possibility of a new humanity, of a new creature, that is at stake in Agamben's Benjaminian messianic recapitulation and fulfillment. In the essay on Bartleby which we have considered, Agamben writes that in being restored to its impotentiality, in being decreated, "the creature is finally at home, saved in being irredeemable".168 The creature is irredeemable because in grasping its own taking place as the simple life of its potentiality, its existence becomes in-different, not in the sense that it no longer matters, but in a way that recalls Agamben's notion of form-of-life, "a
311 life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life".169 A fulfilled or redeemed humanity, in other words, is a humanity that abandons the task of deciding on the limits of the properly human through the exclusion of the improper, leaves off producing its image by creating a counter-image in the form of bare life, or in seeking to expunge the irreducible multiplicity belonging to life in the simplicity of pre-predicative zoe. Instead, that multiplicity is included within humanity, and humanity realizes that its own "proper" form is to be continually potential with respect to any actual existence. Or, as Agamben puts this point rather nicely in The
Coming Community, a redeemed or new humanity would be able to accept the "being- such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging.. .and which is in no way a real predicate, [that] comes to light itself'.170
The echoes of Gnosticism in Agamben's analysis are evident in the idea that we considered at the outset, that "Ethics begins only when the good is revealed to consist in nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the proper have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper". If evil, the attempt to isolate and mould bare life, was grasped in this way and redeemed, it would usher in another politics beyond sovereignty. Although Agamben is vague about what such a politics would be like, I do not think this is a defect in his analysis, since it takes us to the very threshold of the actual, to the edge of the coming politics. A politics without a sovereign would not necessarily be the abolition of politics or even of law. A life in which bare life could never be separated out "always retains the character of a possibility", and this means that
312 "it always puts at stake living itself. Saying that living puts at stake life itself is to say that living becomes a question not of the proper or the improper but merely of the better and the worse; living becomes, that is, "irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness", or to its possibility.173 Agamben claims that this vision of life "immediately constitutes form-of-life as political life".174 If we recall Aristotle's definition of a political community as a community instituted for the sake of living and living well, and if we refrain from dissociating living and living well, then the kind of politics Agamben appears to be gesturing toward would seem both highly contemporary and indeed quite ancient: it would be political life understood as an experiment in ascertaining what possibilities or forms of life are good, which are bad, which lead to happiness and which to ruin. Yet the criteria for all of these states would be internal to the lives of the participants, that is, would depend crucially on the testimony of those involved, not imposed from outside and certainly not decided with any finality. And central to it all would be the capacity of the speaking being to testify to its life as the remnant that always saves, where what is said would be understood as an original gesture, neither confined within the archive nor banished beyond it as incomprehensible. It is this possibility that flashes up whenever speaking escapes the arcana of power to testify to its condition; each time sovereign power is put into question, each time gesturing toward the small door through which the messiah might enter. This is also what a life might look like that has seized "hold of the very haplos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics", bringing it finally to fulfillment.175
313 5.5 The Decision on the Exception Revisited
This dissertation has argued that Agamben's situating of the camp, as the privileged space of modernity, "the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule", provides the focal point for Agamben's investigation into the history of sacred life. Yet, as was suggested at the outset, the plausibility of this entire approach has been called into question by Andrew Norris's immanent critique of Agamben's recourse to the Schmittean notion of decision and its equation with the camp as its locus.
On Norris's account, the problem with Agamben's nomination of the camp as the biopolitical focal point of modernity is that such nomination can only be performed as a gesture of decision, thus repeating the sovereign decision which it is Agamben's stated purpose to escape. From the distance we have traveled from the beginning it is worthwhile to spend a little time on Norris's argument, since it is often cited as a
"demonstration" of the untenable nature of Agamben's political trajectory. The stakes here are relatively high because according to Norris Agamben leaves us with an entirely untenable vision of politics: Agamben not only does not, but indeed cannot, provide an escape from the sovereign decision, since his supposed "way out" is but another instance of it. If so, not only is the attempt to juxtapose archaic and modern sovereignty pointless, but it is totalizing in a way that Benjamin's dialectical images are not, at least in the sense that the latter are intended to allow an escape from the present; if, on the contrary, all such images turn out to be mere gestures of the sovereign decision there can be no outside and Agamben's project leaves us in a truly totalizing cul-de-sac.
314 Thus, in "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer", Norris argues that Agamben's claim that the camp provides the biopolitical principle of modernity is itself an instance of an authoritarian decision, and therefore that Agamben cannot provide a way beyond politics predicated on
177 authoritarian decisionism. It would appear that politics predicated on the immanence of self-reference cannot proceed without becoming trapped in its own terms and thus cannot provide a non-contradictory alternative. Norris constructs his critique in three main stages. The first stage consists of claiming that for Agamben Western politics and philosophy (or more specifically, metaphysics), are one and the same.178 Norris reads this parallel as an equation or even a reduction, that is, as the claim that the exception produced by the sovereign, and further, the decision enacted by the sovereign, is the place where metaphysics is transmuted into life, or, in Agamben's own terms, where life becomes politicized in order to realize the metaphysical task of self-identical or self- present signification. Norris locates the privileged instance of the equation of 170 metaphysics and politics in a spatial rendition of "logical categories". The spatialization of logic allows a direct application or transposition of the logical categories of metaphysics onto spatial forms, and it is this spatiality of metaphysical logic that allows the camp to become, quite literally, a space or state of exception.180
Norris goes a step further by suggesting that in light of the spatiality of the concepts of the exception and the example, it is possible to investigate the metaphysical status of the camp by means of an analysis of these concepts. In his critique, Norris relies upon an 315 analysis of concepts as a substitute for investigating Agamben's own socio-political and historical account of the development of the concentration camp and the role it plays in modernity that we have examined at length in chapter four. This is a serious problem,
one which I hope to have corrected by presenting Agamben's own account of the
development of the camps as an aspect of modern biopolitics. Insofar as Norris
neglects Agamben's account of why the camps might be exceptional, he overlooks the
fact that Agamben provides his readers with an account (which because it is not a
decision, is obviously open to dispute), of the significance of the camps, rather than a
mere decision that they are significant. In not engaging with this account, Norris
misrepresents Agamben's discussion of the camp, as though the status it has in
Agamben's analysis were the same as a pure sovereign decision.
The second stage of Norris' critique is to argue that Agamben is trapped in Schmitt's
decisionism by means of an analysis of the equivocal spatialized concepts of example and
exception. In order to do this Norris links Agamben's account of the example, as
providing the proof of the existence of a class, with Schmitt's account of the decision in
the state of exception. According to Norris, "Examples precede classes just as, for
Schmitt, decisions precede norms". The fatal conclusion Norris draws is that "Since
the example precedes and defines the rule, Agamben cannot appeal to an independent
rule or standard to justify his claim that the camps are exemplary of anything".183 The
example, as a pure gesture in the absence of a rule or ground, is therefore a pure decision
ex nihilo, which it is impossible to dispute on the basis of any rational ground or
316 empirical evidence, since the "determination that the camp is representative of the rule is made and not in any substantive sense recognized".
The third stage in Norris' argument, or really its conclusion, consists in the claim that Agamben, in adopting the logic of Schmitt's sovereign exception, fails to escape the latter's logic, and thus in the end simply repeats the sovereign decision anew. Thus according to Norris, "the claim that something is exemplary is as much a product of a
Schmitt-style decision as is the claim that something is an exception", with the unwelcome result that Agamben must decide "in an authoritarian fashion that politics is a matter of the decision on life as enacted in the camps". At least one devastating result of this charge is that, as Norris points out, Agamben in effect places the camp's victims in the position of being decided on once again, in effect repeating the gesture of the Nazis, first in history and then again in Agamben's attempt to make the camp exemplary of modern sovereignty.186 In summary fashion, Norris has seemingly located a devastating weakness in Agamben's account of the sovereign exception which "makes it impossible for his analyses to claim any general validity", and thus scuttles his ambition to think the
1 R7 political outside the logic of decision.
On the basis of both the discussion in chapter three and the exposition of the connection between sovereign chronos and messianic kairos, Norris' objection no longer appears particularly troubling. For Agamben, the purpose of showing the tight interconnection between the sovereign exception and sacred or bare life was to undo this connection in the messianic distinction between the objectified time in which sovereign 317 power seeks to isolate bare life and the time of testimony that undoes precisely this isolation. While the sovereign, as represented by Schmitt's theory of the exception, seeks to place all exceptions to law within a form of the law, the better to deny any possibility of a human power outside or beyond law, Agamben's gesture, following Benjamin's, aims to sever the link between law and life, allowing the latter to be seen in its excess over the former. That testimony itself severs this link in the time of the now, in the fulfillment or redemption of messianic time, is enough to show that Agamben's purpose in focusing on the state of exception cannot be simply to re-inscribe its fatal repetition.
Agamben's recourse to the state of exception does not simply repeat its terms but shows that the sovereign exception, rightly understood, is a form of human action blind to the basis on which it acts: the bare life on which it decides is its own bare life that only the difference of the subject of testimony can bring to light. Agamben (via Benjamin), occupies the theoretical "place" (i.e. the "non-location") of the singular or the anomic potentiality of life rather than that of the decision upon it.
On the basis of this discussion it is evident that Norris quite incorrectly positions
Agamben in the side (or site) of the sovereign decision-maker, in the position of Schmitt, rather than in the place of the subject of testimony; Norris shows by this move that he does not understand the role Benjamin plays in Agamben's critique of sovereignty
(although he admits that Agamben's account draws on both Benjamin and Schmitt).188
However, Norris does seem to understand better the role played by Heidegger.
According to Norris, Agamben's association with Heidegger (and Jean-Luc Nancy), at
318 least suggests the possibility that Agamben's post-metaphysical philosophy might include
"a variant of Heideggerian Gelassenheit - letting be".189 Indeed, Norris rightly suggests that this is arguably what Agamben has in mind in the Coming Community in the passages we have just cited above. Yet while Norris allows that something like
Gelassenheit might be located in the account of the singularity of life found in the
Coming Community, he insists that such a possibility is "not an accurate characterization of Homo Sacer",190 Yet mysteriously Norris ignores passages in Homo Sacer in which
Agamben specifically approaches a kind of Heideggerian conception of "letting be", for instance when he defines the term form-of-life as "life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it".191 This statement recalls, in the new sense of life Agamben introduces here, the singularity of the form-of-life that exceeds all attempts to separate it from itself in the sovereign ban, and that, in making the latter appear futile, offers the possibility of another form of politics. Indeed, in this same passage, Agamben draws the links to later Heidegger's idea of a new revealing of being very tightly indeed: "Today bios lies in zoe exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of existence, lies (liegf) in existence", a situation suggesting the situation of life which can no longer be the object of a decision because its singular form is caught up in all its possible ways to be qualified as so many forms of its expression.
If passages such as this one are read along with the account of testimony found in
Agamben's other texts, it becomes simply untenable to attribute to Agamben the kind of autocratic decision Norris claims that he makes. In his failure to read Agamben's
319 different texts alongside each other Norris also fails to extend to him the generosity of a reading that presumes that a coherent position might lie behind the various partial
articulations that he offers in any one work. In this sense, it is Norris that seems guilty of
taking an auto-referential decision on how to read Agamben's account of the camp.
320 Notes:
'Agamben, Homo Sacer, 185. 2 Ibid. 3 Agamben deals with the idea of an anthropological machine extensively in his book The Open. 4Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 85. 5 Ibid; It is worth pointing out that while the logic of Agamben's argument that there is a continuity between the Jew as the extreme point of the conversion of people into population and \hz Muselmann as absolute biopolitical substance (the endpoint of the process of converting people into population) is impeccable, it may not entirely jive with the facts (as they are known). According to Philippe Mesnard, for instance, the Muselmann does not represent the final stop on the road to the dehumanization of the Jew; instead, most Jews were "selected" for the gas chambers as soon as they reached the camps, revealing mat "no process of 'decilization' was deemed necessary" at the hands of the Nazis for the majority of Jews. See Mesnard "The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation", trans. Cyrille Guiat in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5:1, (London: Routledge) 2004: 1139-157; 153. Mesnard's analysis seems to place exceptional weight on Agamben's relative neglect of the broader circumstances and conditions of the camps. The analysis thus seems to present a critique of Agamben from the "historical totality" that Agamben neglects. This does not allow for the particular logic of Agamben's project, his attempt to isolate a particular logic at work in sovereignty. Perhaps the reason for this inattention on Mesnard's part is his characterization of Agamben's project as indebted to Heidegger's influence far more than any other thinker (ibid, 140). As we have seen, however, this view would necessarily overlook the problem of dialectical history as presented by Benjamin. 6 Ibid, 85. 7 Ibid, 85-86. 8 Ibid, 156-57. 9 Levi quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 44. 10 Am6ry quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 41. 11 Quoted in Ibid, 43; it should be pointed out that Muselmann is the German for Muslim. According to Agamben, Ryan and Klodzinski speculate that the reason for the use of this term was that "from afar, one had the impression of seeing Arabs praying. This image was the origin of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muslims", Ryan and Klodzinsi quoted in Agabmen, Ibid, 43. 12Agabem, Remnants of Auschwitz, 51. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, 52. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid, 55. 20 Bettelheim, quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 56. 21 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 58. 24 Ibid, 57. 25 Bettelheim, quoted in Ibid. 26 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, Ibid. 27 Ibid, 63. 28 Ibid, 63. 29 Ibid, 77. 321 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid, 66. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid, 67; one might well quarrel with Agamben's genealogy of modern moral philosophy here. For instance, it does not strike me as at all convincing that the idea of dignity as it appears in Kant's moral philosophy is simply borrowed from the theological-political model of sovereignty Agamben outlines. At any rate, and although I cannot take it up here, much more would have to be said to make such a claim convincing. 35 Ibid, 68. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid, 78. 39 Ibid; as evidence for this contradictory conception of humanity on the part of the Nazis that rests on the incapacity to see that the inhuman intrinsically resides within the human, Agamben cites the "testimony" of a (presumably since Agamben does not specifically attribute his quote to a specific person) Nazi official that "They [the prisoners] were so weak; they let themselves do anything. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possible communication—this is where the contempt came from" (Sereny 1983, quoted in Agamben, ibid 78-79). We can note that even this claim betrays the contradiction Agamben is pointing to here: if no communication is possible between two parties because there can be no common ground, then it follows that contempt would be equally impossible, since one can only have contempt for someone on the basis of something shared by both parties. Nazi dehumanization thus disavows what it acknowledges and acknowledges what it also disavows. 40 Ibid; Agamben's proximity to the Frankfurt School, particularly to the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which myth is enlightenment and enlightenment continually reverts to mythology, is quite evident here. This is unsurprising since both lines of thought find inspiration in Benjamin's work. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press), 2002. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid, 77. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid, 69; J.M. Bernstein's reading of this passage in his "Intact and Fragmented Bodies", gives rise to a particularly acute misunderstanding which becomes the basis for a rather severe indictment of Agamben's entire project. Bernstein seems to understand by the idea that the inhuman conforms to no norm beyond it, that it is absolutely immanent, precisely what sovereign power seems to understand by a life made absolutely bare: a pure biological substance or absolute identity. Yet it should already be clear that Agamben does not have any such thing in mind. Rather, as we will see even more clearly below, bare life, in its connection with the human subject, is what it is absolutely impossible to make into a bare substance. Bare life is completely immanent in Agamben's terms here because there is a point beyond which it ceases to be in any way dependant on the judgment of any subject upon it, completely in itself, yet not in the sense of becoming an identity, but remains a multiplicity or impotentiality. This "in itself is very different from the kind of complete identity that sovereign power seeks to impose. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid, 59. 47 Ibid, 60. 48 Levi, quoted in Ibid, 60. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid, 34. 51 Ibid. 322 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid, 97. 54 Ibid, 95. 55 Ibid, 105. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid, 105-106. 58 Ibid, 106. 59 Ibid, 112. 60 Levi quoted in Agamben, Ibid, 87. 61 Ibid, 115. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid, 116. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid, 116-117, original de-emphasized. 66 Ibid, 116; Agamben is drawing substantively on Foucault's understanding of discourse as an already circulating system of signification that we can "enter" only to the extent that we give ourselves to it, only to the extent that it speaks us rather than we it. Agamben discusses the archive on pages 143-146 of Remnants. For Foucault's treatment of the concept see The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books), 1972,79-126. . 67 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 117. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid, 122. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, 123. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid, 132. 76 Ibid, 133. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid, original de-emphasized. 80 Ibid, 133-34. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid, original de-emphasized. 83 Ibid, 135. 84 Thomas Carl Wall, "Au Hasard", in Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, Ed. Andrew Norris, (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press), 2005: 31-48,42. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid, 43. 87 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 38. 88 Ibid, 134. 89 Ibid; one might suggest a parallel here with Marx's claim in the German Ideology that human beings distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their lives, and thus why it is that human beings are as technological as they are natural. Agamben's suggestion here could be taken to supply an "ontological" reason why the human must consist of its own supplementation. See Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books), 1998: 37. 90 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 146. 91 Ibid, 147. 323 92 Ibid, 146. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid, 146-47. 95 Ibid, 147. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid, 147-48. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid, 155. 103 Ibid, 156. 104 Ibid. 105 That there is an accented racialized aspect to the War on Terror and to the makeup of prisoner identities is surely no accident. For more on this See Barbara Olshansky, Democracy Detained: Secret Unconstitutional Practices in the U.S. War on Terror (New York: Seven Stories Press), 2007. 106Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 156. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 This provides another way of interpreting Heidegger's much-misunderstood but still problematic statement that the concentration camps were the same as mechanized agriculture. While the comparison between the two brings out the fact of mechanization as a mode of placing everything at the disposal or power of a sovereign subjectivity, the statement remains deeply offensive as a claim that the two were equivalent. Even by Heidegger's own distinction between human Dasein which has world and the inanimate object, which has no world, even to suggest that the two are equivalent is simply unacceptable. 10 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 157. 11 Ibid, 158. 12 Ibid, 146. 13 Ibid, 164. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid, 158. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid; Agamben continues the thought in parentheses: "in this sense, the Muselmann is the way in which Jewish life must be effaced for something like Aryan life to be produced". 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid, 159. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 160. 24 Ibid, 161. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid, 161-62. 28 Ibid. 29 Agamben, "Bartleby, or On Contingency", in Potentialities, 243-271. 30 Ibid, 266. 31 Ibid.
324 132 Ibid, 267; In this passage, Agamben quotes Benjamin as follows from Convolute N of Benjamin's Arcades Project: "What research has established can be modified by remembrance. Remembrance can make the Incomplete (happiness) complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete. This is theology—but the experience of remembrance forbids us to conceive of history in a fundamentally atheological manner, even as we are not allowed to write history directly in theological concepts" (471) . 133 Agamben, "Bartleby", Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid, 270. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid, 271. 138 In this sense Agamben and Benjamin are fully in agreement with Spinoza's statement in me Ethics (EII,P 43 S) mat "As the light makes both itself and the darkness plain, so truth is the standard of itself and of the false" Spinoza, Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1994:142. I am of course paraphrasing from Benjamin's On the Concept of History, which, along with Convolute N of the Passegenwerk, constitutes the clearest statement of the relationship between memory and redemption of the past in the dialectical image. 139 This is why critics who accuse Agamben of misrepresenting the facts of the Nazi genocide in some sense miss the point. Agamben's treatment of the concentration camps is no more a standard work of historiography than is Benjamin's treatment of the Paris Arcades in the Passengemverk a standard social history. The point of this analysis is to read the events in such a way that it becomes possible not to repeat them, and that requires that they be read and remembered in the light of their messianic reconstitution. 40 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 163. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid, 163-64. 43 Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary to the Letter to the Romans, Trans. Patricia Dailey, (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 2005: 67. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid, 67-68. 46 Ibid, 68, original emphasis. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid, 69. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid, 70. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid, emphasis added. 55 Ibid; given Agamben's (and Paul's) re-conceptualization of parousia (which Agamben notes simply means "next to", "Being beside itself in the present" in Greek), there appears to be no substance to David Johnson's claim that Agamben desires "the absolute unity of signifier and signified in a now without temporalization, in a messianic present", a desire which would indeed constitute "only the most recent articulation of an ontotheology that misunderstands the aporia of temporalization", through "the absolute immunity of whatever comes"; See David E. Johnson, "As If the Time were Now" in Late Derrida, Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, Ian Balfour, ed., Spring 2007, Vol. 106, No. 2,265-290, 288. What Johnson seems to overlook is that Agamben, as a post-deconstructive thinker, cannot possibly understand by parousia what the thinkers in the tradition of onto-theology have meant by it, namely, presence in the sense of full and abiding self-presence in which all difference would be expunged or arranged hierarchically in accordance with the transcending signified. It could be shown that even the deconstruction of such a scheme necessarily retains it in order to show its insufficiency; perhaps this is the 325 very movement of deconstruction. But to claim that one cannot think presence otherwise, beyond the deconstructive moment, while simultaneously taking its breach of metaphysics seriously, is to presuppose the unsurpassibility of metaphysics at the same time as one denounces it. 56 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 71. 57 Kafka quoted in Agamben, Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Benjamin, Convolute N2a3, in The Arcades Project, 462. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Agamben, Time that Remains, 74, original emphasis. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid, 75. 66 Ibid, 78. 67 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 182. 68 Agamben, "Bartleby, or On Contingency", 271. 69 Agamben, "Form-of-Life", 3-4. 70 Agamben, Coming Community, 2. 71 Ibid, 13. "Agamben, "Form-of-Life", 4. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. 76 Agamben, State of Exception, 168-69, original de-emphasized. 77Andrew Norris, "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer", Radical Philosophy, 119 May/June, 2003: 6-16. 178 Norris quotes the opening pages of Homo Sacer where Agamben writes that "In the 'politicization' of bare life - the metaphysical task par excellence - the humanity of living man is decided" (Homo Sacer, p. 8). 179 Ibid, 12. 180 Although this is an interesting observation on Norris's part, it is one that Agamben would only partially endorse, because for him the exception applies precisely by dint of its non-localization, its ex-emption from locale. Agamben writes in Homo Sacer that "the state of exception is thus essentially unrealizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)", such that "The link between localization (Ortung) and ordering (Ordnung)...is even more complex than Schmitt maintains", p. 19, my emphasis. This already suggests that Agamben does not simply adopt Schmitt's account of the state of exception wholesale, as Norris maintains. 181 As an aside, it should be noted that Agamben's historical account of the camp in modernity is found in Homo Sacer, the same book used by Norris to present his criticism of Agamben. One wonders how thoroughly it was read. 182 Norris, 13. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid, original emphasis. 185 Ibid, 13,14. 186 Ibid, 15. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid, 9. Ibid, 15. 190 Ibid. 326 191 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. 192 Ibid.
327 Conclusion
This dissertation has attempted to present a synthetic overview of Giorgio Agamben's philosophical and political account of sovereign power and bare life, showing how this account needs to be understood in its referencing of his earlier work on the Western tradition's concept of language. Throughout his oeuvre, Agamben presents his readers with a double series between language and sovereignty on one side and between language and life on the other. In the series of logos and sovereignty, the political takes, shape as the sphere in which life must be taken in hand, properly qualified before it can enter or dwell in the polls; the sinister aspect that Western politics has not been cured of in its two thousand years is that a people can be constituted only as a biopolitical form of life continuously subjected to the exposure to death. In the other series, that between language and life, we are presented with the comparison between language as an infinite and anonymous semiotic field, and life as an equally anonymous, purely multiple or infinitely multiplying field of singularities. Both language and life consist of an imparting, an openness, communicability, or relation, the as such with all its qualities before any decision with regard to it. In Agamben's thought the latter series is shown in fact to underwrite the former one; there can be no proper or qualified life without the indefiniteness or anonymity of the sheer fact of living, no proper speech without the anonymous semiotic potentials of a pure language. But according to Agamben it is this fact that the Western tradition, it would seem, would most like to deny, to remove or cover over, expunging it from memory. This is why on Agamben's reading, metaphysical politics (politics informed and shaped by metaphysics), begins with
328 language and life as its objects, banishing the uncanny thusness of a pure living in excess
of speech from the "city of men", reconstituting thereby the simple as such of living in the form of its abject and naked double, life judged not worthy of its existence. The
imposition of a human measure on what is living is thus the immemorial political gesture; judging a life worthy or unworthy is what allows the subject to feel that it is first in the
order of things, that the foundation of the community does not fall beyond its agency in
confronting what becomes its other.
Agamben's messianic political gesture is accordingly to reveal to Western politics
that which it would most like to avoid seeing: that its dependence on life as such is
presupposed in the very prioritization of bios over zoe. In doing this, Agamben seeks to
reverse the priority given to properly qualified life by Aristotle, to show that for qualified
life to exist at all, it must issue from an anonymous power of living that is common to all
life, from gods to humans and animals, inscribing all three within a common threshold of
indistinction where decision becomes superfluous. But rather than simply reversing the
poles of an oppositional and contradictory ordering (since every reversal ultimately
repeats that which it reverses), Agamben must transfigure or render inert the opposition
between the terms so reversed. This he does by inserting a reconstituted notion of the
subject between the series. The subject, as we have seen, straddles or hinges the divide
separating the pure impartibility of life and language from the human world of qualified
lives, political hierarchies, and constituted discourses. The subject is not sovereign, but
witnesses to the inhuman that underwrites its humanity, providing it with the specific
qualities that in turn provide the speaking subject's discourse with its content. Thinking
329 the human being through the position of the infans, the impartibility of language and life, gives rise to the testimony of a speech and a subjectivity that can turn back toward and grasp their very taking place. But because such grasping never allows the full self- presence of a self-grounded intentionality, Agamben's messianic parousia eludes becoming yet another version of the metaphysical subject or a vision of human finality: what is grasped is merely the necessity of founding the world over and again in its multiplicity. For Agamben the reconstituted subject of messianic kairos would be able to recognize its dependence on the bare living that allows its pre-categorial difference to become what it is without—at least in Agamben's Utopian formulation of the bios that is at one with the pure medium of its zoe—such difference simply determining what it becomes. Instead, there would be the space of an auto-affection, of a subject that indeed becomes something but that also takes up what it becomes without being reduced. Such a subject, at least in Utopian circumstances, would be able to live its qualities or its predicates without feeling reduced to certain of them or forced to reject some of them in order to conform to an externally imposed and ill-suited form of life.1
Put this way, Agamben's vision of a post-sovereign politics draws close to many of the articulations of a Utopian form of human social relations by previous traditions of radical thought. It combines a certain sense of "autonomy", understood in terms of the ability to live one's existence freely, with a democratic and equalitarian form of society in which the autonomy of self-difference would have to be recognized and respected by all. In this regard Agamben's vision of a different form of life is not unlike that articulated by Marcuse or even Adorno, nor is it foreign to the tantalisingly brief hints at
330 the form of life enjoyed in a truly communist society entertained on occasion by Marx.
In line with more contemporary theorists, the case could be made that in its recognition of its living of singularity integral to the formation of the subject, the subject thought as testimony to the life that imparts itself to be lived in its modes or forms, Agamben's subject has a certain affinity with that of Alain Badiou's sense of a subject that assumes and is assumed by its relationship to the truth of an event arising from the multiple.2 In previous chapters Agamben's proximity to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy has been suggested, where the idea of life presented by the former is largely compatible with the latter's sense of being giving itself as singular plural. Agamben's thought is thus consonant with recent philosophical and political attempts to think the event of the political. As we have also seen, it is Agamben's following in Benjamin's wake that allows his thinking of the event to emerge, an event which consists of an illumination about the nature of sovereign power's politicisation of life rather than on the latter's decision that does not grasp the fatality implied in its own repeated action.
Although this dissertation has presented a largely sympathetic reading of Agamben's project and even though I have tried to demonstrate that the view of Agamben as simply repeating the sovereign decision to be untenable, this is not to say that his project as presently conceived is not without its apparent problems. One of the most obvious and yet facile objections to Agamben's work is that it does not lend itself to "application", that it does not provide anyone with the longed for blueprint that would take humanity to the promised land of Utopian harmony. The facile nature of this objection reveals itself through the understanding that the kind of illumination Agamben seeks to impart to his
331 readers is of a kind that would possibly allow the coming into being of a new form of political society—like communist society for Marx—whose contours cannot be grasped within the terms of the existing one; and it is from this messianic perspective that existing society is to be criticized'. In this sense, what separates Agamben's approach to politics from many others today—and again we can see a certain commonality with Badiou—is its insistence that there is something available other than politics conceived along the lines of the infinite task of purely tactical engagement around local instabilities of power.
In a way that is directly reminiscent of Benjamin's dialectical approach to the political moment, Agamben holds that it is precisely when sovereign power is greatest that the existing order reveals its secret vulnerability. From this perspective, those who wish to avoid a large-scale analysis of power by focusing on the discreet and the tactical at the cost of any broader assessment of the threats that face humanity reveal a politics of compromise or perhaps even of resignation. Perhaps Agamben's weakness on this front—his lack of a programme of action—is also a strength in. that he provides a theoretical basis on which we can think or conceive (even if we cannot yet imagine), a society that operates on the basis of a new relationship to life in the midst of overwhelming power over it. In a climate in which all Utopian gestures tend to be dismissed as "idealist" and "grand", one of Agamben's strengths is the very weakness of his vision. His is an uncompromising but weak messianic power.
Closing the door on the repetitive call for prophets and saviours that would provide a blueprint—an immediate identification between our desire and its object, bypassing the need for truly thoughtful and creative action—does, however, raise another objection that
332 seems more serious. Agamben, it is undeniable, conceives of sovereignty in the most austere and absolute of terms. His relentless claim, following Arendt, that human rights are merely the ruse of power, threatens to make his vision of a changed politics of life seem to be simply opposed to the present one in its entirety. Sovereignty and law, in his vision, is reduced to its power over bare life, and thus to its sinister dimension. However, by his own demonstration, the social effects of witnessing to the life that Agamben places at the origin of the subject, of the community, and even (ultimately) of sovereignty itself, do not begin only when Agamben points them out: such excessive life must have always already been at work in the very history which is also that of the decision on life, even if
Agamben denies that this life can be posited as somehow first apart from the attempt to regulate it. Sometimes Agamben seems to admit as much, as when he argues that the social division between classes—and their attendant conflict and struggle—is implicated in the division between bare and qualified life. Particularly when it comes to the formation of modern sovereignty, one suspects that the forms of democratic sovereignty are not the mere ruses of sovereign power, but are responses to real political struggle.
If so, the life that sovereign power would decide upon has all along given rise to forms of life and to subjects of witness and contestation that would dispute sovereignty's judgements on life, subjects opposing and struggling against the caesurae dissecting the body politic. Jacques Ranciere undoubtedly has something close to this in mind with his definition of democracy as a properly scandalous form of politics which "lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature. It [democracy] is
333 the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority".3
If democracy consists, as Ranciere argues, in the continuous although intermittent assertion of a radical form of equality prior to the hierarchical demarcation of political space, such equality can be conceived as the popular assertion, against age-old claims to rule based on natural inequality (and thus fitness to govern), of an equality "older" than the latter; older, that is, between the divisions erected by Agamben's sovereign between nature and culture, physis and nomos, bare and qualified life. What separates Agamben's account from one such as Ranciere's—and equally those of Hardt and Negri—is the denial that we can locate a stratum of living that has some kind of purpose and direction apart from its bare resistance to power; the latter accounts conjure a positive metaphysics of life from out of the neutrality that Agamben locates in the open and purely medial aspect of living multiplicity.4
The argument here is not that Agamben is wrong to contend that life must be thought as a kind of neutral force opposing sovereign power, but instead that sovereign power's original and immemorial gesture of politicising life in Agamben's account leaves unspoken its corollary: that the life so politicised has sought to reverse this politicisation in the medium of the resistant subject or collectivity of subjects. As Ranciere once again astutely notes, in opposing their status as disqualified, and by doing so partaking in the very public sphere from whose ranks they were to be excluded, the excluded or abject subjects "exercise, by their action, the citizen's rights that the law refuses them. They demonstrate in this way that they do have the rights denied them".5 By in turn politicising their own disqualified life, the oppressed and the excluded from the polis
334 testify to a singular equality of condition revealed through the sovereign's attempts to politicise and to divide, and which the sovereign power itself must presuppose. Ranciere seems to suppose that this equality of condition is a feature of discourse, for instance when he claims that "There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authority that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs".6 But, Ranciere also draws close to Agamben's more "ontological" reading of the roots of this equality in the common strata of living as such when he adds that "natural inequality can only be carried through on the presumption of a natural equality that assists and contradicts it". It would not be particularly hard to show that the discursive presupposition of equality at play works in tandom with the equality of singular lives prior to their division and to which the discursive subject bears witness through its assertion of an equality of right.
It is not as though Agamben himself remains entirely oblivious to the implications of his work for present political struggle, even if his sights are set on a horizon in which life would not have to be politicised any longer. In a collection of his more recent writings, he suggests that we conceive of subjectivity itself as a form of resistance to power in terms similar to those we saw used by Ranciere: "A subjectivity is produced where the living being, encountering language and putting itself into play in language without reserve, exhibits in a gesture the impossibility of being reduced to this gesture".8
Following this train of thought, Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, and Dianne Enns, have recently attempted to use Agamben's work to understand certain forms of resistance that people undertake who have been stripped of all legal rights.9 Edkins and Pin-Fat
335 focus on asylum seekers in Britain who have taken to extreme gestures, using their bodies as the stage of protest—such as sewing their eyes and lips closed—to deliberately dramatize their situation of being caught up in a system in which they have no rights, of effectively being reduced to bare life (and thus demonstrating their non-reducibility to bare life). For her part, Enns uses Agamben's work to argue that the forms of power theorized by Foucault are largely inapplicable to situations of extreme (sovereign) violence, since Foucauldian power relations presuppose a something like a minimal level of recognition of the freedom of the other person, a situation notably absent from extreme political situations. In such extreme political situations, Enns argues, forms of resistance to power seem to take on a strange power precisely to the extent that the actions involved are those of life that already inhabits a zone between life and death. In the work of these theorists, Agamben appears quite useful for understanding situations where people engage in political struggle by actively politicising their bare existence, drawing attention to their humanity by deliberately staging its undoing to symbolize sovereign power's activity, or in the last instance, employing life's very bareness as a weapon against sovereign occupation.' °
These discussions of an active contestation of sovereign power serve to ameliorate the starkness of Agamben's suggestion that both modern popular sovereignty and popular struggles for human rights might ultimately be reduced to a ruse of sovereign power. The historical persistence of such forms of struggle that continue within the jurisdiction of the sovereign have doubtless influenced its formation and operation, suggesting in turn that existing forms of popular sovereignty are neither a mere ruse of power, nor for that
336 matter, that straggle for their preservation and enhancement is entirely pointless. Indeed to the extent that democratic freedoms mean anything, sovereign power, however reluctantly, is and often has been forced to accept that its expressions of power over life are in fact not available to it in the ways and to the extent it would like. Hence, while it does appear that in his concern to put his problem as starkly as possible Agamben has neglected a theory of political struggle, there are aspects of his account that suggest that such struggle is not incompatible with it.
However, it might be possible to suggest that this relative neglect on Agamben's part is not simply the result of an oversight. Here, it is the insistence on the "neutrality" of
Agamben's ontological account of life as a pure multiplicity that can lead to misunderstandings. A good case in point, for example, can be found in an interview with the French journal Vacarme in which the interviewer quite pointedly suggests that
Agamben's political trajectory reveals a kind of almost a-political tendency:
[fjaced with the consistency of this adversary, you seem nevertheless to plead for a politics of inconsistency, of dissolution, of evasion: rather than fabricating collective subjects, we should learn to "let go" of ourselves...How can one let go of oneself, evade resubjectivation, be a non-State, etc., when one is HIV-positive, on welfare, or a drug addict— that is, literally caught in the categories and mechanisms of biopower? In short, one can have the sentiment that you plead for mobility and evasion at the very point where the power of capture and material thickness of the enemy leave us no other choice than to confront it.11
Agamben's response to this is interesting: ".. .you're right to protest. The notion of flight does not imply an elsewhere one might go. No, it's a very particular flight: a flight with no else where... For me, it's a question of thinking a flight which would not imply evasion: a movement on the spot, in the situation itself.
337 Agamben's response suggests that he does not mean to imply that people should refuse to become anything, as though it were merely a question of evasion or flight from
the world, or perhaps a saintly posture of pious refusal analogous to later Heidegger's
denken; the point rather seems to be that even in the midst of whatever it is we have, or
indeed must, become, we should not lose sight of a certain excess to our being outside the
material thickness of the moment. We can by no means be reduced to whatever material
situation the moment requires of us. This idea of freedom is entirely consistent with what
has been identified as Heidegger's sense of Dasein's passive potentiality or impotential
with respect to our facticity.
The neutrality of this impotential excess over any necessity that historical and
material conditions force it to assume, however, does not itself provide the motive for
resistance, and indeed Agamben's account of life as a pure medium of singularity does
not provide us with one. This is because the space of impotential, of pure being-such, is a
space beyond the subject and thus devoid of desire, including the desire for liberation.
From this perspective, Agamben's descriptions of freedom in their impeccable
Heideggerian neutrality seem unequal to the urgency in terms of which Benjamin puts the
task of redeeming history.1 Benjamin's urgency refers not to the desire to redeem
"future generations", but towards the past, from which stems the "hatred" as much as the
"spirit of sacrifice" of the working class, "nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors
rather than by liberated grandchildren".15 In other words, what appears missing from
Agamben's account is Benjamin's sense that "The subject of historical knowledge is the
struggling, oppressed class itself in its desire to be free of that oppression.16 This sense
338 opens the door to a quite different community than the one proposed by Agamben: an inter-generational community of the oppressed, in other words, an ethical community whose very struggle against oppression becomes the "secret agreement between past generations and the present one".17 Benjamin's reference to the "hatred" experienced by the working or oppressed class in the face of an image of enslaved ancestors, that is, the very immemorial nature of the oppression, suggests that, as he puts it, the claim of the past generations upon the present one "cannot be settled cheaply", and further, the
"historical materialist is aware of this".18 The revolutionary community and its attendant ethical subjectivity proposed by Benjamin is something largely omitted from Agamben's reading of Benjamin. Although Agamben's account is not inherently irreconcilable with such an orientation, the focus on freedom in the form of an impotential subtraction, in my view, does not do justice to the Benjaminian motive for combating and overcoming sovereign power: the desire on the part of the community of the oppressed to expiate the injustices of the past. While Agamben's account of the messianic features of testimony, as they reactivate potentialities of being foreclosed by sovereign violence, is laudable and is even necessary to an account of how sovereign biopolitics can be contested, it is ultimately not sufficient. What is missing from Agamben's account is the need on the part of the community of the oppressed to experience the relation between life as such and subjectivity differently—and thus not indifferently. Agamben necessarily presupposes such desire, even advocates it, but also remains somewhat blind to the role that it has played, and continues to play, in the world's political struggles for freedom and justice. Perhaps what is needed is a fuller account of how it is that the subject is able to
339 take over its living in and through its speaking, and how the subject's desires are ethically informed by the intersection of both its life and its personal-collective history, the history of life and the history of speaking in common. So far, however, this is a facet of his account of subjectivity and community that Agamben has neglected.
340 Notes:
1 This aspect of Agamben's work draws close to recent work by Judith Butler; see for instance her Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso), 2004. 2 It might be said that Agamben's biopolitics offers a version of what Badiou describes as the truth-event of the political. Of course, for Agamben bare life is something universal, underlying all subjects, whereas for Badiou the subject is itself an event (not all individuals are subjects. Subjects are those who act out of their fidelity to the truth-event, and are thus rare). See Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justine Clemens, (New York: Continuum), 2003, especially chapter three, "Philosophy and Politics": 69-78. 3 Jacques Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran, (London: Verso), 2006:41. 4 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 2000. 5 Hatred of Democracy, 61. 6 Ibid, 48. 7 Ibid. 8 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books), 2007: 72. 9 Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, "Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence", in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No.l, 2005: 1-24; Dianne Enns, "Bare Life and the Occupied Body", in Theory and Event, Vol. 7, No.3,2004. 10 Enns has in mind Palestinian suicide bombers who conceive of their lives as already bare, as already put into the category of a life that can be killed but not sacrificed. It is this very status of this limbo between life and death, however, which seems to enable the subject's desire to turns one's life into a gesture of sacrifice, once again showing that that life is not in fact as bare as sovereign power would like make it. 11 Jason Smith (trans), "I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am...: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben", Rethinking Marxism, 16:2,2004: 115-124; 120-21. 12 Ibid. 13 Agamben suggests as much in his Coming Community, where he suggests that being as irreparable, another term for life understood as pure singularity, are "whatever they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed" (90). While this might be an adequate description of pre-subjective multiplicity, it cannot as such supply the kind of desire that cares whether its situation is sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. 14 The most severe critique of Heideggerian "ontological neutrality" of course is to be found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. See for instance "Is Ontology Fundamental?" in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1996: 1-10. 15 Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 394. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid, 390. 18 Ibid.
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