Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life

Agamben and Levinas

Tom Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138726307
• eBook ISBN: 9781351752091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life, demonstrates how Agamben's immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas's ethics of the Other.

The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agamben's 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agamben's thought has greatly influenced scholarship in law, the wider humanities and social sciences. This book places Agamben's figure of form-of-life in relation to Levinasian understandings of alterity, relationality and the law. Considering how Agamben and Levinas craft their respective forms of embodied existence – that is, a fully-formed human that can live an ethical life – the book considers Agamben's attempt to move beyond Levinasian ethics through the liminal figures of the foetus and the patient in a persistent vegetative state. These figures, which Agamben uses as examples of bare life, call into question the limits of Agamben's non-relational use and form of existence. As such, it is argued, they reveal the limitations of Agamben's own ethics, whilst suggesting that his 'abandoned' project can and must be taken further.

This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate students and anyone with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas in the fields of law, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences.

1 An ever-divided life

10.4324/9781315191447-2

Introduction

Giorgio Agamben’s multi-volume Homo Sacer study began with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, where Agamben makes the claim that the conception of life in Western political thought is based on a division between a natural life and a politically ordered life which inexorably produces a remainder, bare life, cast out from the polis.¹ Life is not a biological concept but is a political one,² which is ceaselessly divided and separated through apparatuses of control.³ This chapter considers Agamben’s argument that the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereign power.⁴ It outlines how Agamben appropriates Michel Foucault’s biopolitical theory to this end, as well as how this has led to criticisms of both Agamben’s arguments and his method. I suggest that Agamben’s reading of Foucault must be seen in the context of the relationship of inclusive exclusion through which life is trapped, which is a theme running through Agamben’s wider philosophy. Specifically, the inclusive exclusion is connected to Agamben’s writings on the division between the human and the animal. The building of human life as an addition to animal existence is contended to be the same operation as the building of political life on natural life. Ultimately, this chapter aims to set the scene for my exploration of the main goal of Agamben’s philosophy – to seek a life which is not based on the continual division and separation of living beings.

Biopolitics and the division of life

Life is both a biological concept and a sacred one.⁵ Yet for Giorgio Agamben, life, before it could become merely biological, had to become sacred.⁶ The concept of life never is defined as such. What this means is that:

[T]his thing that remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions that invest it with a decisive strategic function … everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided.⁷

This has been a consistent theme in Agamben’s thought.⁸ In What Is An Apparatus? Agamben explains that:

The event that has produced the human constitutes, for the living being, something like a division … This division separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment.⁹

This division is crucial for how life is treated in modernity. The division of life, which Agamben traces to Aristotle’s De Anima,¹⁰ operates on several levels – vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human. These divisions pass as a “mobile border” within living man, and operate as an apparatus through which the decision of what is human and what is not human is possible.¹¹ Thus Agamben’s task in his thought is clear – to investigate the very divisions and caesurae which have separated man from non-man, the human from the animal, over and above taking positions on the so-called great issues of the day such as human rights.¹²

The result of these divisions is the creation of a remainder, the most famous of which is the figure of homo sacer, bare life. This figure, an “originary political element”, is created as “the fundamental activity of sovereign power”.¹³ The figure of homo sacer was first mentioned by Agamben in Language and Death, when he mentioned that the figure is “excluded from the community, exiled, and abandoned to himself”.¹⁴ In Homo Sacer Agamben delves deeper into bare life’s creation through an engagement with the biopolitical theory of Michel Foucault.¹⁵ To understand the position of bare life in Agamben’s thought, it is important to turn to how he appropriates Foucault’s thought to explain how bare life is formed by the endless division of life.

The appropriation of Foucault

My starting point is the start of Homo Sacer where Agamben states that his aim is to “correct, or at least complete” Michel Foucault’s hypothesis of biopower.¹⁶ This hypothesis was forwarded by Foucault in a series of lectures at the Collège de France and published as Society Must Be Defended,¹⁷ and in the first volume of The History of Sexuality.¹⁸ To enter debates about the history of philosophy and focus upon a thinker’s influences, particularly a specific influence such as Foucault, can certainly be a fraught affair. For instance, Agamben has openly admitted being influenced by the writings of Hannah Arendt,¹⁹ and studied under Heidegger at Le Thor.²⁰ It may not seem immediately clear why such a focus on Foucault is necessary. However, much scholarship deals with the fact that many of Agamben’s works owe a large debt to Foucault. If Agamben’s thought is conflated too readily with Foucault’s then Agamben’s wider project is in danger of being effaced, or worse, missed.

Biopower for Foucault was an analytic of power that focused not on sovereign power as the central source of power within the social body but instead upon disciplinary and normalising mechanisms designed to transform and influence human life. Biopolitics refers to when life enters political calculations. In his work Foucault moved away from classical views of sovereign power as it had a negative form, being used against the populace to repress or prohibit,²¹ which was ineffective for the task of biopower, that of regulating life itself.²² For Foucault biopower was a direct combination of power and life, a juncture which when explored requires the redefinition of both terms.²³

Agamben begins Homo Sacer by arguing that Foucault’s death prevented him from developing his nascent concept of biopolitics.²⁴ Such a position is a mischaracterisation at best – biopower occupied a transitory moment in the thought of Foucault and was not a central part of Foucault’s analyses of power. The reason that biopower gained so little attention from Foucault was that biopower was not a refined enough category of power, which was why governmentality and apparatuses of security began to enter his work.²⁵ Foucault’s studies of biopower took him to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Table of cases
• Table of statutes
• Introduction: Continuing an abandoned project
• 1. An ever-divided life
• 2. The transmission of negativity
• 3. Immanence, Levinas, ethics and relationality
• 4. The inoperative potential of a messianic life
• 5. Agamben's hyper-hermeneutics
• 6. The origins of form-of-life
• 7. The limits of form-of-life
• Abandoning a continued project
• Bibliography
• Index