Giorgio Agamben

11 Key excerpts on "Giorgio Agamben"

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  After Sovereignty

  On the Question of Political Beginnings

  • Charles Barbour, George Pavlich(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge-Cavendish

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11 Giorgio AgambenThought between two revolutions Amy Swiffen      

  Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has become a leading figure in political theory, and his work is having a profound influence on scholarship in the Anglo-American world. His work garners pan-disciplinary attention in large part because of the forceful critique of sovereignty, combined with a rejection of conventional political concepts such as right and representation (Diken and Laustsen 2005; Norris 2005; Noys 2005; Miller 2007). If one of the more influential philosophers writing today, he is also one of the more controversial. Famously, he has argued that the Nazi concentration camp has replaced the Greek polis as the paradigm of modern governance (Prozorov 2007: 69). From Agamben's perspective, modern politics can only be understood with reference to the model of the camp (Agamben 1998: 166). His critique of political sovereignty is both a challenge to notions of democratic governance, and an attempt profoundly to rethink conventional categories of political thought. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault among others, he argues that our conceptions of political power and participation must be ‘revised without reserve’ in light of a ‘biopolitics’, where sovereign power is exercised at the level of life itself (Agamben 1998: 12). Profound though it might be, critics have also found this critique to be one of the most elusive and ambiguous parts of his work (McLoughlin 2005). One goal of this paper is to understand Agamben's critique of sovereignty in connection with the critical confusion surrounding what it implies about political power and political change.

  In this regard, fellow Italian philosopher Antonio Negri has written of contradictions in Agamben's text (2003). He has characterized the discussion of sovereignty as fatalistic because it seems to attribute a determining strength to the state and be engaged in a ‘fated … continuous confrontation with the idea of death’. By the same token, he notes that in other places in his work, most notably the Coming Community (1993a) and Means without End (2000), Agamben's articulations ‘positively construe the idea of [political] redemption’ (2003). To the extent that the fatalism remains unreconciled with the political optimism, Negri writes that there are ‘two Agambens’, and favours the second one that goes beyond sovereignty ‘ethically and conceptually’ (2003). Negri might be right about Agamben going beyond sovereignty in the conceptual and ethical sense but the dissonance he identifies remains. Other critics have noted what are perceived to be ‘missing’ elements in text. Passavant argues that while the critique of sovereignty he offers is seemingly total, Agamben has no theory of political action that would be adequate to resisting it (2007). This begs the question that Slavoj Žižek has also addressed, that of how to move politically

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  Critical Theorists and International Relations

  • Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Giorgio Agamben

  Nick Vaughan-Williams

  Giorgio Agamben is an Italian thinker whose work does not consist of a single aim or ‘big idea’. Rather, it is helpful to approach his thought as a series of overlapping fragments, which engage in a range of problems relating to language, metaphysics, aesthetics, politics and ethics. When taken as a whole, these fragments form a rich historical and philosophical mosaic that is difficult to label or classify as belonging to a particular school of thought. In recent years, especially since the publication of his work in English from the early 1990s, Agamben has had a significant impact across the humanities and social sciences and beyond. In international relations, there has been a spirited (though not uncritical) uptake of his controversial diagnosis of the nature of the relationship between politics, life and sovereign power. Increasingly, this diagnosis is taken as a starting point for many analyses of practices associated with the current ‘War on Terror’ unleashed by the US and its allies in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Indeed, Agamben has personally protested against the US government’s response to these attacks by resigning from his position as Visiting Professor at New York University. He also refuses to travel to the US and submit to what he considers to be the ‘biopolitical tattooing’ of the Immigration Department. Nevertheless, the topicality of his thought belies the extent to which it is rooted in rigorous and painstakingly detailed philosophical thinking developed over the past four decades.

  Intellectual biography

  Agamben was born in 1942 in Rome, where he studied law and philosophy and wrote his doctoral thesis on French philosopher and Marxist activist Simone Weil. As a post-doctoral researcher, Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars on Heraclitus and G.W.F. Hegel in 1966 and 1968. From 1974–75, he held a Fellowship at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. Since then, Agamben has taught at the Universities of Verona and Marcerata in Italy, Henrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (where he was Director of Programmes from 1986–93), and the New School in New York. At the time of writing, he was Professor of Aesthetics in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Venice. In 2006 he was awarded the Prix Européen de L’Essai Charles Veillon

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  Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism

  Liberty, Security and the War on Terror

  • Andrew W. Neal(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2 argued that sovereign exceptionalism cannot be opposed to the principles of modern liberty without the potential contradiction of sovereign power defending liberty by destroying liberty. Agamben avoids the contradictions of this dualistic opposition by considering Western sovereignty as an original, productive, dialectical relation between modern subjectivity and its excluded negation. As such, Agamben argues that

  the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the exception.8

  For Agamben, the exception is the limit condition in which forms of unqualified or excluded life dwell and are produced, which is in fact the production of a more fundamental biopolitical relation. For Agamben, sovereign power does not affirm its power over life by asserting its dominion, or by presiding over a progression from natural life to politically qualified modern life, but by with-drawing its protection and thus abandoning bare life to a realm of violence and lawlessness. This is the sovereign ‘ban’, the exclusion which is in fact an inclusion, an inclusive exclusion, because sovereign power applies all the more in withdrawing its protection. As Agamben explains:

  He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally impossible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order.9

  Agamben brings this originary political exclusion into focus by calling upon the archaic Roman figure of homo sacer – sacred man. Here the term sacred means not simply holy but rather the more ambiguous meaning explored in nineteenth-century anthropology by such thinkers as Freud and Durkheim.10 The sacred is a realm in which the holy and the taboo, the divine and the profane, are ambiguous and often touch. Hence homo sacer

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  Agamben and Law

  • Thanos Zartaloudis(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  24 Political Life: Giorgio Agamben and the Idea of Authority DeCaroli Steven

  This article explores the relation between biological life and political life, placing it in the context of the ancient Greek distinction between the life of the home (the oikos) and the realm of politics (the polis). In contrast with the oikos, the life of the polls was characterized by attempts to exclude from its sphere both the constraints of necessity that oblige human action to conform to the exigencies of survival as well as the violence that accompanies this pursuit. Although this exclusion has never been successful, the question of how to achieve it lies at the heart of the oldest philosophical reflections on politics and, in a more concealed fashion, remains central to our political concerns today. Invoking the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article explores the earliest discussions concerning the question “what is political life?” to show why so much depends upon how we answer this question.

  KeywordsAgamben, authority, political life, violence, state of emergency, Arendt

  Virtue can be no object of the state…. Were all its members virtuous it would lose its character of a compulsive power altogether.1

  — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  Survival

  There is a bond between necessity and violence to which the long history of political thought testifies. As living beings, fundamentally concerned with the preservation of life, humanity is confronted with needs and driven by necessity, and so, before the “good life” promised by politics is made possible, the resources necessary for sheer life must be secured. “No man can live well,” Aristotle tells us, “or indeed live at all, unless he is provided with necessities.”2 It is for this reason that Aristotle dedicates the first book of the Politics to a discussion of the private domain of the household, the oikos, which in addition to being characterized by its role in procuring the pre-political necessities of daily living, serves as the backdrop against which the public character of the polls will be defined. In a similar fashion, the theory of the “state of nature,” which enters political discourse at the beginning of the modern period, also serves as a backdrop to political life, making explicit what is only implied in Aristotle. Not only does the pre-political state of nature replace the pre-political oikos as the site of permanent biological demands, but Hobbes’ notion of the “right of nature” (jus naturale) also confirms that each individual retains an extra-juridical authority to defend life through violent means.3 Whatever the case may be, and despite various formulations, there remains an indisputable truth in the fact that biological life burdens every living being with the most primal and profound sort of necessity, which is to say, survival. It is important to bear in mind, however, that survival does not simply mean to live; rather, to survive means to outlive (from the Latin supervivere, literally

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  Agamben and Colonialism

  • Marcelo Svirsky, Simone Bignall(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Grinberg discusses the inhabitants of these spaces as figures of homo sacer , subjects left to their own devices in abject territories. To survive, they must take responsi-bility for living in a state of exception that has become a political norm. The contributions in the final section of the collection draw mainly from Agamben’s writing on method and history; on tem-porality and potentiality. Chapter 10 by Leland de la Durantaye gives special attention to Agamben’s reflections on colonisation in his lecture ‘Metropolis’ (2006). He begins by noting that, for Agamben, there is no line of thought which is not strategic and that philosophy always and everywhere has a political potential. He then turns to consider the strategic dimensions of Agamben’s lecture on ‘Metropolis’, explaining that from the etymology of this term he will develop a paradigm of colonialism. Agamben is thus not concerned with colonialism per se, but with the para-digm it provides for understanding a more general set of prob-lems. Metropolis comes to mean, for Agamben, a ‘dislocated and dishomogenous’ space – one that can be traced in every city of the Western world. As de la Durantaye explains, the strategic element of Agamben’s thought inheres in the ‘historical’ element of his Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism 11 methodology: his paradigms are aimed less at understanding the past than at understanding the present situation, for in coming to understand the constitution of the present we may also come to understand its potential for development. Jessica Whyte interrogates Agamben’s account of rights through the lens of Haiti. For Agamben, the discourse of human rights is a biopolitical one, which erases the border between life and politics and enmeshes a life reduced to survival in the order of sovereign power. In tracing the development of biopolitics, he traces lines of continuity to reveal the hidden connections that link our present to the remote past.

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  The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism

  Critical encounters between Giorgio Agamben and architecture

  • Camillo Boano(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pushing the analysis further from the witness’s role in The Remnants of Auschwitz (2002[1998]) published in Italian right after Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben focuses his attention on the suspension of the rule of law that was the condition of possibility for the establishment of camps and beyond it. As in the title, Agamben links his reflection explicitly to the German jurist Carl Schmitt and his Political Theology (2012[1922]). The book proceeds through an analysis of the phenomenon of a state of exception where a sovereign suspends the rule of law, whose origin Agamben traces not in modernity, but within Roman law, which is applied to more modern cases as the states of exception declared by France’s revolutionary governments, Abraham Lincoln’s authorization in 1862 of the summary arrest and detention of persons suspected of disloyal and treasonable practices [and] the unlimited national emergency declared following the bombing of Pearl Harbor … and the long and deadly state of exception put into effect by Hider's decrees and the Bush’s ‘indefinite detention’ of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities. (Agamben, 2005d: 19–22) In this genealogical reflection Agamben proves that he is not only interested in the spaces of exception, but also in the paradigm of governmentality and the use of law and legal decree that “changed from a derogatory and exceptional instrument for normative production to an ordinary source for the production of law” (Agamben, 2005a[2003]: 16). Agamben examines this biopolitical machine, isolating the case of the United States and its declaration of a ‘global state of exception’ not only as historical, juridical and political phenomena, but also around an “original structure [ struttura originale ] where the law includes […] the living [ il vivente ] through its own suspension” (2005a[2003]: 3)

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  Giorgio Agamben

  Sovereignty and Life

  • Matthew Calarco, Steven DeCaroli, Matthew Calarco, Steven DeCaroli(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  Agamben’s thesis concerning the biopolitical character of Western politics in turn rests upon one of the provisional conclusions of the inquiry undertaken in this book, namely the thesis that the “fundamental activ- ity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as the originary politi- cal element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios” (HS, ). He presents this thesis concerning the relation- ship between bare life and political sovereignty as a “correction” or at least a “completion” (HS, ) of Michel Foucault’s account of the emergence of biopolitics as a key moment in the development of modern techniques of state power. Agamben represents Foucault as asserting that a crucial threshold was crossed when the bare natural life of the governed first began to figure in the calculations of state power and became an object of specific techniques of government. “Bare life” is Agamben’s term rather than Fou- cault’s, and it is introduced here with reference to Aristotle’s distinction between zoē, that is the simple fact of life in a biological sense, and bios, meaning a way of life shared among a particular group. In these terms, Foucault’s thesis about the emergence of biopower amounts to “the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such” (HS, ). Whether or not this reformulation corresponds to Foucault’s the- sis depends on precisely what is meant here by “politicization” and what Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics is meant by “bare life.” I return to these questions below after examining Foucault’s concept of biopower. Agamben’s reformulation of Foucault’s thesis continues by attribut- ing to him the suggestion that the politicization of bare life constituted “the decisive event of modernity,” and the further suggestion that this signaled “a radical transformation of the categories of classical thought” (HS, ).

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  Politics, Metaphysics, and Death

  Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sace

  • Andrew Norris(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Ironi-cally, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not by politi-cians: ‘‘In the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physi-cian and the scientist move into the no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate’’ (159). These are still marginal figures in our current political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude that the camp is the as yet unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled (or is realized—this paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categorically distinguishing between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is hopelessly confused. ‘‘When life and politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception’’ (148). ∂∏ In the end, the attempt to resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that seem to conflict with it. Agamben’s argument is not that Aristotle’s or Locke’s reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to the substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they ‘‘caused’’ the Holocaust (a term to which he objects [114]). What he does argue is that there is a deep a≈nity between such contemporary horrors and the tradition of political philoso-phy to which we might turn in an e√ort to understand and combat such phenomena. The practical implication would be not that there is no di√er-ence between Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle will not provide a stable

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  Viral Critique

  Postfoundational Perspectives on COVID-19

  • Hannah Richter(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Wolin 1992 , 426] Carl Schmitt), adds up to what many consider to be one of modernity’s most horrific aberrations: Auschwitz. The proper name refers to a particular but normalized spatial distribution – the situation of internal exclusion or exception – that is characteristic of sovereignty, and generates the biopolitical subject. Witness the camps.

  It’s a position that, since the late 1990s when Agamben’s work started to receive a wide English-language readership thanks to Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translations, has caught a lot of flak: defenders of modernity, sovereignty, and even biopolitics alike have held Agamben accountable for his flattening claims. If the camp expresses the logic of modernity specifically, then why tie that to sovereignty, a power that, while it arguably finds its first sustained articulation in thinkers like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, obviously has a longer history than that? Doesn't Agamben’s own focus on Roman law in his study of sovereignty acknowledge as much? On the other hand, can one really talk about sovereignty with respect to Roman law? Didn't the modern articulation of the concept bring a difference with respect to that law? Is there really a kinship or continuity here? Surely all of modernity doesn't add up to the camp? To talk about the camps as biopolitical doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense either when one thinks of them as death camps specifically (from that point of view, they strike one rather as examples of a thanato-politics – or necro

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  Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity

  • Kenneth A. Loparo, Jan De Vos(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  32), cannot but be considered as an unacknowledged entrance of the psychological in Agamben’s analysis. As his conceptualizations of potentiality inevitably call upon psychoanalytic themes such as the pre-oedipal and auto-erotic self-sufficiency, it even seems that one cannot not psychologize. Maybe this is eventually the reason why the elaboration of the aporia of the social sciences is practically absent and undeveloped with Agamben. It certainly can be maintained that Agamben neglects how, in late-modernity, psychologization and academization are the very paradigms of biopolitics. Academia has become the very site of the biopolitical production of subjectivity. Thus, if Agamben’s tries to emancipate his form-of-life from the state, he might not target the sovereignty which is really at stake: A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting from the emancipation from such a division, with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty. The question about the possibility of a non statist politics necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of power available? (2000, pp. 8–9) As such, one can question Agamben’s solution of rejecting statism – a stance which appears similar to Alain Badiou’s “at a distance from the state” (2005, p. 119). In these de-territorialized times of the Empire not so much state is left

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  The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader

  • Michael Lewis, David Rose, Michael Lewis, David Rose(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It would be pointless to reconstruct the recent history of this paradigm here, one that originated from courses that Michel Foucault gave in the 1970s and that was pursued mainly by Italian interpreters — initially by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri — who developed the extraordinary insights of the French thinker along original lines. These authors’ different approaches to the category of biopolitics, however, are precisely what point to a difficulty, or better yet, to a fundamental antinomy – one that is somehow recognizable in a latent form in Foucault’s works – that consists essentially in a missing, or inadequate, joint between the two poles of bios and politics out of which the term “biopolitics” is composed. Rather than being joined into a single semantic block, it’s as if they were designed separately and then only later related to each other. What I mean is that the radical difference between a negative, if not apocalyptic, type of interpretation and an opposite, markedly optimistic and even euphoric interpretation of biopolitics is embedded in a semantic breach, already to be found in the writings of Foucault, between two layers of meaning in the concept that were never perfectly integrated and, indeed, that were destined to break it into two parts that are mutually incompatible or only compatible through the violent subjugation of one to the dominion of the other. Thus, either life appears to be seized and seemingly imprisoned, by a power destined to reduce it to mere organic matter, or politics risks remaining dissolved in the rhythm of a life that is able to reproduce itself without interruption beyond the historical contradictions that assail it. In the first case, the tendency of the biopolitical regime is to not deviate from the sovereign regime, of which it appears to be an internal fold; in the second case, it emancipates itself from the sovereign regime almost to the point of losing all contact with its deep genealogy.

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