Monday Reading Group – Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Comments Off on Monday Reading Group – Agamben’s Homo SacerMonday Reading Group — 08.18.03 – Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Contents:
1. About this Monday
2. PDF links to readings
3. Materials Related to Homo Sacer
(includes texts by Renon, Norris, Zizek, Negri, Agamben and an interview w/ Hardt,)
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1. About this Monday
What: Discussion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Who: All are Welcome
When: 7:00 pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 5th Floor
We have over the course of the last few years discussed texts and issues related to Giorgio Agamben’s writings/thoughts. In addition to reading his texts, more recent discussions have also incorporated questions raised by Agamben.
Last month, our discussions of ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ addressed specific questions raised by Zizek in relation to Homo Sacer. In the chapter “From Homo Sucker to Homo Sacer” Zizek critiques or restages Agamben’s central question by positing:
“What if the true problem is not the fragile status of the excluded but rather the fact that on the most elementary level, we are excluded in the sense that our most elementary, zero position is that of an object of biopolitics and that possible political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary gesture in accordance with biopolitical strategic considerations. What if this is the ultimate consequence of the notion of post-politics?”
More recently, as a part our discussions following Trevor Paglen’s lecture/performance click here for more info addressing the prison industrial complex (with particular focus on the Pelican Bay’s super maximum incarceration facility) at 16Beaver, the questions raised in Homo Sacer were again of critical importance. What is the status of the prisoner? What rights are afforded to prisoners and how do those rights fall within a larger field of rights afforded to individuals? What can the status (or treatment or classification or organization) of prisoners (or refugees or stateless people for that matter) tell us about one’s more general relation to sovereignty, democracy, the rule of law, and states of exception/emergency? What is the relation of democracy to totalitarianism?
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According to ancient Roman law, homo sacer (sacred man) referred to a person that could be killed but not ritually sacrificed. For Agamben, this figure offers “the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries”.
We begin this week with the introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, followed by “Form of Law” the fourth chapter in the book. The text is relatively short, but challenging. We hope to have enough time to discuss and go through the text together.
As much as this reading will be a continuation of our earlier discussions, we hope that it will also serve as a marker for further readings, discussions, events this summer and Fall that will deal specifically with Agamben’s writings as well as with broader questions related to fascism.
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2. PDF Links
Introduction:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/agambenhs.pdf
Chapter 4: Form of Law
http://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/agambenhs2.pdf
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3. Related materials
Below you will also find a set of related texts. This material is intended to be there more as a reference point. It includes a couple of short reviews, additional materials for folks who would like to read some of the discussions around or near the vecinity of this text. The last text by Agamben was one of the readings previously discussed at 16Beaver.
They include:
a. (via Netime) a short review by Alain Renon
b. A recent review in Radical Philosophy by Andrew Norris: “The exemplary exception – Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer”
Also:
c. Slavoj Zizek’s “Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?”
d. Toni Negri Review of Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception :”The Ripe Fruit of Redemption”
e. “Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri’s Empire”
f. Giorgio Agamben’s “The State of Emergency”
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a. (via Netime) a short review by Alain RENON: review of Giorgio AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer
Homo Sacer, a human being that could not be ritually offered, but whom one. could kill without incuring the penalty of murder according to ancient Roman law, is being used in this book as underpinning for a fresh decoding of the major political difficulty in our century: the rise of the worst sort of totalitarisms, with nazism at its apex. Giorgio Agamben sheds light on the paradoxical, but inherent link between the Rule of Law (Etat de Droit) and the State of Emergency (Etat d’Exception). This author invites us to reflect about “the strange continuum connecting democracy to totalitarism”, and describes the trap in which the Western democracies have fallen, “in gaining (…) rights and liberties in their conflicts against the central(ising) powers, individuals are each and every time simultaneously laying the foundation for a silent but ever deeper insertion of their life within the political order of the state, and hereby giving new and even more formidable power to the ruling authority from which they sought emancipation.”
By questioning this “secret complicity” between democracy and its opposite, we might possibly, says Giorgio Agamben, achieve a situation in which nazism and fascism are no longer “a clear and present danger”.
Giorgio AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. (‘Homo Sacer, On Sovereign Power and Naked Life’) Paris: Seuil, 1997 (collection “l’ordre philosophique”), 216p 130FF
(Paul Virilio’s choice as book of the year 1997)
(from Le Monde Diplomatique, feb 1998)
(Edited by Olga Nieuwenhuys)
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b. The exemplary exception – Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Andrew Norris
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.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben draws upon metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, set theory and the philosophy of language to advance a number of radical politico-philosophical claims. In contrast to arguments that understand political community as essentially a common ‘belonging’ in a shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that ‘the original political relation is the ban’ in which a mode of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a historically specific form of political authority that arises with modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the essence of the political. Similarly, biopolitics is not, as Foucault sometimes suggests, incompatible with sovereign as opposed to disciplinary power; nor is it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Instead it is the original form of politics: ‘the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.’ Attending to the etymology of the word ‘decide’ one can understand this sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life from merely existent life, political and human life from the life of the non-human. As this cutting defines the political, the production of the inhuman – which is correlative with the production of the human – is not an activity that politics might dispense with, say in favour of the assertion of human rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ‘today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.’1
The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are reduced to bare life; and the torture this life suffers is nothing else but its exclusion from the polis as a distinctively human life. The bare life that is produced by this abandonment by the state is not biological life; ‘not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element’.2 This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi in If This is a Man. One speaks of the Shoah as industrialized mass death, and of the camps as ‘factories of death’. But the product of these factories is not death but, as Arendt puts it, a mode of life ‘outside of life and death’.3 If for Arendt, however, the production of Muselm_nner is anti-political, in that the camps are spaces in which plurality is foreclosed, for Agamben it is the emergence of the essence of the political.
Such claims are difficult for political philosophy to address, as they undermine so many of its guiding assumptions. Instead of asking us to construct and evaluate different plans of action, Agamben asks us to evaluate the metaphysical structure and implications of the activity of politics as such. Instead of asking us to consider the true or proper nature of political identity, Agamben asks us to consider a threshold state of the non-identical, the liminal. And far from bringing concepts such as rights, authority, public interest, liberty or equality more clearly into view, Agamben operates at a level of abstraction at which such concepts blur into their opposites. He takes this approach because, like Arendt, he believes that claims to justice can only be made if one understands the ground of the political upon which both justice and injustice stand. If Foucault’s goal was ‘to make the cultural unconscious apparent’,4 Agamben’s is that of bringing to expression the metaphysics that our history has thus far only shown. He argues that, properly understood, what that history shows us is that politics is 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. In the ‘politicization’ of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence – the humanity of living man is decided [si decide].É There is politics because 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.5
What is perhaps both most intriguing and most problematic about Agamben’s work is that – unlike, say, that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy – it brings these claims about metaphysics into dialogue with a specific set of quite concrete examples, including refugee camps, hospital wards, death rows and military camps. All of these are sites where, on Agamben’s account, one can perceive the metaphysical negation that allows for the affirmation of distinctively human life: bare life, nuda vita.
One way to evaluate Agamben’s claims is to consider how well they help us to describe and understand such examples.6 Another is to ask whether Agamben’s claims are intelligible on their own account – to see, that is, whether they open themselves up to an immanent critique. This approach has a number of advantages, chief among which is that it does not demand that we simply choose whether to accept or reject Agamben’s approach in a global way. Instead such an approach allows us to be open to a radically different way of thinking about politics and political philosophy while at the same time maintaining some critical distance from it. In what follows I want to pursue this option by way of considering Agamben’s appropriation of the early decisionist political theory of Carl Schmitt. I will argue that Agamben’s acceptance of Schmitt’s central claims regarding political judgment make it impossible for him to weave together his suggestive reading of examples from philosophy and political history into a mode of political thought that fulfils his own ambition of ‘returning thought to its practical calling’.7
Agamben’s project hinges upon the paradigmatic status of the camp. But on his own account, there is an isomorphism between the exception and the example or paradigm. Given his acceptance of Schmitt’s analysis of the former as the product of the sovereign decision, this makes Agamben’s evaluation of the camp as ‘the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ into a sovereign decision beyond the regulation of rule or reason. As this casts his readers as either subject or enemy, it is hard to imagine how the politics it might produce will serve as a real alternative to that which it contests.
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c. Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?
Slavoj Zizek
When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters ‘unlawful combatants’ (as opposed to ‘regular’ prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an American citizen commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a ‘lawful criminal’. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals has no relation to that between ‘lawful’ citizens and the people referred to in France as the ‘Sans Papiers’. Perhaps the category of homo sacer, brought back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient Roman law, someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death had, for the same reason, no sacrificial value. Today, as a term denoting exclusion, it can be seen to apply not only to terrorists, but also to those who are on the receiving end of humanitarian aid (Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans), as well as to the Sans Papiers in France and the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil or the African American ghettoes in the US.
Concentration camps and humanitarian refugee camps are, paradoxically, the two faces, ‘inhuman’ and ‘human’, of one sociological matrix. Asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, ‘Concentration Camp’ Erhardt (in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be) snaps back: ‘We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.’ A similar distinction applies to the Enron bankruptcy, which can be seen as an ironic comment on the notion of a risk society. Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without having any real choice: what was risk to those in the know was blind fate to them. Those who did have a sense of the risks, the top managers, also had a chance to intervene in the situation, but chose instead to minimise the risk to themselves by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy – actual risks and choices were thus nicely distributed. In the risk society, in other words, some (the Enron managers) have the choices, while others (the employees) take the risks.
The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a ‘war’ operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into the very notion of a ‘war on terror’ – a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire. Which brings me back to the ‘unlawful combatant’, who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals – the US rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political Enemy excluded from the political arena.
This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer – ‘ethnic-religious conflicts’ which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a ‘humanitarian pacifist’ intervention on the part of the Western powers – and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely ‘unlawful combatants’ resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict – the US-dominated global force – has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the ‘local population’.
This weird ‘coincidence of opposites’ reached its peak when, a few months ago, Harald Nesvik, a right-wing member of the Norwegian Parliament, proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing their decisive role in the ‘war on terror’. Thus the Orwellian motto ‘War is Peace’ finally becomes reality, and military action against the Taliban can be presented as a way to guarantee the safe delivery of humanitarian aid. We no longer have an opposition between war and humanitarian aid: the same intervention can function at both levels simultaneously. The toppling of the Taliban regime is presented as part of the strategy to help the Afghan people oppressed by the Taliban; as Tony Blair said, we may have to bomb the Taliban in order to secure food transportation and distribution. Perhaps the ultimate image of the ‘local population’ as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be dropping bombs or food parcels.
This concept of homo sacer allows us to understand the numerous calls to rethink the basic elements of contemporary notions of human dignity and freedom that have been put out since 11 September. Exemplary here is Jonathan Alter’s Newsweek article ‘Time to Think about Torture’ (5 November 2001), with the ominous subheading: ‘It’s a new world, and survival may well require old techniques that seemed out of the question.’ After flirting with the Israeli idea of legitimising physical and psychological torture in cases of extreme urgency (when we know a terrorist prisoner possesses information which may save hundreds of lives), and ‘neutral’ statements like ‘Some torture clearly works,’ it concludes:
We can’t legalise torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.
The obscenity of such statements is blatant. First, why single out the WTC attack as justification? Have there not been more horrible crimes in other parts of the world in recent years? Secondly, what is new about this idea? The CIA has been instructing its Latin American and Third World military allies in the practice of torture for decades. Even the ‘liberal’ argument cited by Alan Dershowitz is suspect: ‘I’m not in favour of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.’ When, taking this line a step further, Dershowitz suggests that torture in the ‘ticking clock’ situation is not directed at the prisoner’s rights as an accused person (the information obtained will not be used in the trial against him, and the torture itself would not formally count as punishment), the underlying premise is even more disturbing, implying as it does that one should be allowed to torture people not as part of a deserved punishment, but simply because they know something. Why not go further still and legalise the torture of prisoners of war who may have information which could save the lives of hundreds of our soldiers? If the choice is between Dershowitz’s liberal ‘honesty’ and old-fashioned ‘hypocrisy’, we’d be better off sticking with ‘hypocrisy’. I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial ‘prisoner who knows’, whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done.
In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to ‘keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’) Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because the ‘ticking clock’ example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is not done in order to resolve a ‘ticking clock’ situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning. Here’s a simple thought experiment: imagine an Arab newspaper arguing the case for torturing American prisoners; think of the explosion of comments about fundamentalist barbarism and disrespect for human rights that would cause.
When, at the beginning of April, the Americans got hold of Abu Zubaydah, presumed to be the second-in-command of al-Qaida, the question ‘Should he be tortured?’ was openly discussed in the media. In a statement broadcast by NBC on 5 April, Rumsfeld himself claimed that American lives were his first priority, not the human rights of a high-ranking terrorist, and attacked journalists for displaying such concern for Zubaydah’s well-being, thus openly clearing the way for torture. Alan Dershowitz presented an even sorrier spectacle. His reservations concerned two particular points: 1. Zubaydah’s is not a clear case of the ‘ticking bomb’ situation, i.e. it is not proven that he has the details of an imminent terrorist attack which could be prevented by gaining access to his knowledge through torture; 2. torturing him would not yet be legally covered – for that to happen, one would first have to engage in a public debate and then amend the US Constitution, while publicly proclaiming the respects in which the US would no longer follow the Geneva Convention regulating the treatment of enemy prisoners.
A notable precursor in this field of para-legal ‘biopolitics’, in which administrative measures are gradually replacing the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was – with regard to its Constitutional order – a ‘normal’ parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner claimed, we were all living in a state of emergency because of the worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the full implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a permanent state of emergency obtained. This state of emergency was suspended every four years for one day only, election day, to legitimise the rule of Stroessner’s Colorado Party with a 90 per cent majority worthy of his Communist opponents. The paradox is that the state of emergency was the normal state, while ‘normal’ democratic freedom was the briefly enacted exception. This weird regime anticipated some clearly perceptible trends in our liberal-democratic societies in the aftermath of 11 September. Is today’s rhetoric not that of a global emergency in the fight against terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, together with the explosive display of ‘American patriotism’ after 11 September, create the climate for what amounts to a state of emergency, with the occasion it supplies for a potential suspension of rule of law, and the state’s assertion of its sovereignty without ‘excessive’ legal constraints. America is, after all, as President Bush said immediately after 11 September, in a state of war. The problem is that America is, precisely, not in a state of war, at least not in the conventional sense of the term (for the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of emergency.
Such paradoxes also provide the key to the way in which the liberal-totalitarian emergency represented by the ‘war on terror’ relates to the authentic revolutionary state of emergency, first articulated by St Paul in his reference to the ‘end of time’. When a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the ‘normal course of things’. It is, you will recall, a feature of all reactionary proclamations of a ‘state of emergency’ that they were directed against popular unrest (‘confusion’) and presented as a resolve to restore normalcy. In Argentina, in Brazil, in Greece, in Chile, in Turkey, the military who proclaimed a state of emergency did so in order to curb the ‘chaos’ of overall politicisation. In short, reactionary proclamations of a state of emergency are in actuality a desperate defence against the real state of emergency.
There is a lesson to be learned here from Carl Schmitt. The division friend/enemy is never just a recognition of factual difference. The enemy is by definition always (up to a point) invisible: it cannot be directly recognised because it looks like one of us, which is why the big problem and task of the political struggle is to provide/construct a recognisable image of the enemy. (Jews are the enemy par excellence not because they conceal their true image or contours but because there is ultimately nothing behind their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the ‘inner form’ that pertains to any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in a formless, infinite plasticity.) In short, ‘enemy recognition’ is always a performative procedure which brings to light/constructs the enemy’s ‘true face’. Schmitt refers to the Kantian category Einbildungskraft, the transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognise the enemy, one has to ‘schematise’ the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with the concrete features which will make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle.
After the collapse of the Communist states which provided the figure of the Cold War Enemy, the Western imagination entered a decade of confusion and inefficiency, looking for suitable schematisations of the Enemy, sliding from narco-cartel bosses to the succession of warlords of so-called ‘rogue states’ (Saddam, Noriega, Aidid, Milosevic) without stabilising itself in one central image; only with 11 September did this imagination regain its power by constructing the image of bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist, and al-Qaida, his ‘invisible’ network. What this means, furthermore, is that our pluralistic and tolerant liberal democracies remain deeply Schmittean: they continue to rely on political Einbildungskraft to provide them with the appropriate figure to render visible the invisible Enemy. Far from suspending the binary logic Friend/Enemy, the fact that the Enemy is defined as the fundamentalist opponent of pluralistic tolerance merely adds a reflexive twist to it. This ‘renormalisation’ has involved the figure of the Enemy undergoing a fundamental change: it is no longer the Evil Empire, i.e. another territorial entity, but an illegal, secret, almost virtual worldwide network in which lawlessness (criminality) coincides with ‘fundamentalist’ ethico-religious fanaticism – and since this entity has no positive legal status, the new configuration entails the end of international law which, at least from the onset of modernity, regulated relations between states.
When the Enemy serves as the ‘quilting point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) of our ideological space, it is in order to unify the multitude of our actual political opponents. Thus Stalinism in the 1930s constructed the agency of Imperialist Monopoly Capital to prove that Fascists and Social Democrats (‘Social Fascists’) are ‘twin brothers’, the ‘left and right hand of monopoly capital’. Thus Nazism constructed the ‘plutocratic-Bolshevik plot’ as the common agent threatening the welfare of the German nation. Capitonnage is the operation by means of which we identify/construct a sole agency that ‘pulls the strings’ behind a multitude of opponents. Exactly the same holds for today’s ‘war on terror’, in which the figure of the terrorist Enemy is also a condensation of two opposed figures, the reactionary ‘fundamentalist’ and the Leftist resistant. The title of Bruce Barcott’s article in the New York Times Magazine on 7 April, ‘From Tree-Hugger to Terrorist’, says it all: the real danger isn’t from the Rightist fundamentalists who were responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and, in all probability, for the anthrax scare, but the Greens, who have never killed anyone. The ominous feature underlying all these phenomena is the metaphoric universalisation of the signifier ‘terror’. The message of the latest American TV campaign against drugs is: ‘When you buy drugs, you provide money for the terrorists!’ ‘Terror’ is thus elevated to become the hidden point of equivalence between all social evils. How, then, are we to break out of this predicament?
An epochal event took place in Israel in January and February: hundreds of reservists refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks are not simply ‘pacifists’: in their public proclamations, they are at pains to emphasise that they have done their duty in fighting for Israel in the wars against the Arab states, in which some of them were highly decorated. What they claim is that they cannot accept to fight ‘in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people’. Their claims are documented by detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Israel Defence Forces, from the killing of children to the destruction of Palestinian property. Here is how an IDF sergeant, Gil Nemesh, reports on the ‘nightmare reality in the territories’ at the protesters’ website (www.seruv.org.il):
My friends – forcing an elderly man to disgrace himself, hurting children, abusing people for fun, and later bragging about it, laughing about this terrible brutality. I am not sure I still want to call them my friends . . . They let themselves lose their humanity, not out of pure viciousness, but because dealing with it in any other way is too difficult.
Palestinians, and even Israeli Arabs (officially full citizens of Israel), are discriminated against in the allocation of water, in the ownership of land and countless other aspects of daily life. More important is the systematic micro-politics of psychological humiliation: Palestinians are treated, essentially, as evil children who have to be brought back to an honest life by stern discipline and punishment. Arafat, holed up and isolated in three rooms in his Ramallah compound, was requested to stop the terror as if he had full power over all Palestinians. There is a pragmatic paradox in the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian Authority (attacking it militarily, while at the same time requiring it to crack down on the terrorists in its own midst) by which the explicit message (the injunction to stop the terror) is subverted by the very mode of delivery of that message. Would it not be more honest to say that what is untenable about the Palestinian situation is that the PA is being asked by the Israelis to ‘resist us, so that we can crush you’? In other words, what if the true aim of the present Israeli intrusion into Palestinian territory is not to prevent future terrorist attacks, but effectively to rule out any peaceful solution for the foreseeable ” future?
For its part, the absurdity of the American view was perfectly rendered in a TV comment by Newt Gingrich on 1 April: ‘Since Arafat effectively is the head of a terrorist organisation, we will have to depose him and replace him with a new democratic leader who will be ready to make a deal with the state of Israel.’ This isn’t an empty paradox. Hamid Karzai is already a ‘democratic’ leader externally imposed on a people. Whenever Afghanistan’s ‘interim leader’ appears in our media, he wears clothes that cannot but appear as an attractive modernised version of traditional Afghan attire (a woollen cap and pullover beneath a more modern coat etc), his figure thus seeming to exemplify his mission, to combine modernisation with the best of Afghan traditions – no wonder, since this attire was dreamed up by a top Western designer. As such, Karzai is the best metaphor for the status of Afghanistan today.
What if there simply is no ‘truly democratic’ (in the American sense of the term) Palestinian silent majority? What if a ‘democratically elected new leader’ is even more anti-Israeli, which wouldn’t be surprising since Israel has systematically applied the logic of collective responsibility and punishment, destroying the houses of the entire extended family of suspected terrorists? The point is not the cruel and arbitrary treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories but that they are reduced to the status of homo sacer, objects of disciplinary measures and/or even humanitarian help, but not full citizens. And what the refuseniks have achieved is a reconceptualisation of the Palestinian from homo sacer to ‘neighbour’: they treat Palestinians not as ‘equal full citizens’, but as neighbours in the strict Judeo-Christian sense. And there resides the difficult ethical test for contemporary Israelis: ‘Love thy neighbour’ means ‘Love the Palestinian,’ or it means nothing at all.
This refusal, significantly downplayed by the major media, is an authentic ethical act. It is here, in such acts, that, as Paul would have put it, there effectively are no longer Jews or Palestinians, full members of the polity and homines sacri. One should be unabashedly Platonic here: this ‘No!’ designates the miraculous moment in which eternal Justice momentarily appears in the sphere of empirical reality. An awareness of moments like this is the best antidote to the anti-semitic temptation often clearly detectable among critics of Israeli politics.
Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and pyschoanalyst, is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia – i.e. he doesn’t have to teach. His latest book is Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
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d. “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption”
Toni Negri Reviews Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception
http://slash.autonomedia.org/BookReviews/03/07/30/138212.shtml
Giorgio Agamben’s latest book is dedicated to the State of Exception, the condition that now invests each power structure and radically empties any experience and definition of democracy. Despite being a habitual reader of Giorgio Agamben, so far I have only reviewed one of his books, entitled Language and Death and published in 1982 [1].
Language and Death was a proper introduction to philosophy and proposed the method of analysis that was to mark his future work: to critically build, digging at the margins the existential and the linguistic, a road of redemption on the terrain of being: a fully immanent redemption that never forgets the mortal condition.
To labour in philosophy then entailed going through being with ethical commitment whilst eliminating all dialectical residues (that were at the time so popular amongst the epigones of idealism and the declining socialism), and consequently producing a knowledge that was true, politically oriented, ethically qualified, and moved towards a possible human redemption. At first sight Agamben seemed to be close to Derrida and Nancy, looking through a point of being desiring another, however illusiory. But this was not the case. As Agamben deepened his phenomenological analysis of being, he worked on the possible and on a new horizon, similarly, in other words, to Blanchot when he went through the linguistic world in terms of critical ontology. It is in this way that Agamben and the description of the reality he observes come close to the General Intellect, i.e. to a positive idea of the linguistic being of the common as traversed by struggles, processes of exploitation and quivers of liberation.
How is it possible to structure the world that this ontological approach constitutes? How can someone like Agamben, who has always borne death in mind in his phenomenological descriptions, positively construe the idea of redemption? It is on this project that Agamben’s theoretical path presented increasingly evident jolts. Perhaps, we find the greatest jolt in The Coming Community of 1990 [2], when the experience of redemption presents itself as distopia. It demanded of the threshold of death to be traversed by the tension of life, and of the method to interiorise the Spinozian maxim: “Rather than thinking death, the wise man thinks of life.” In Agamben’s thought, the idea of the biopolitical here began to emerge as core potenza, surely a restless and perhaps alternative power, yet structurally innovative. Then again in Homo Sacer [3] this problematic is manifest in all its complexity and contradictions.
There are in fact two Agambens. The one holding onto an existential, fated and horrific background, who is forced into a continuous confrontation with the idea of death; the other seizing (adding pieces, manouvering and building) the biopolitical horizon through an immersion into philological labour and linguistic analysis: here, in the latter context, Agamben sometimes almost looks like a Warburg [4] of critical ontology. The paradox is that these two Agamben always live together and, when you least expect it, the first re-emerges to darken the second, and the gloomy shadow of death spreads over and against the will to live, against the surplus of desire. Or vice versa.
In The State of Exception (Bollati Boringhieri, pp. 120, 12 Euro) we have a chance to read the two Agambens together. Firstly, Agamben recognises and denounces the fact that the state of exception (a state of death) now invests all structures of power and eradicates any experience and definition of democracy. This is the imperial condition. Here a first line of interpretation emerges: this definition of the state of exception is posited at the level of an undifferentiated ontology, either cynical or pessimist, where each element is reassumed in the empty game of an equal negativity. The state of exception here appears to be the indifferent background against which all perspectives are neutralised and discoloured in order to be brought back to an ontology that is incapable of producing meaning in non destructive terms. This being is completely unproductive and is confused with right (or exists in its absence) where only right would be summoned to give meaning to the real. We thus see here an overestimation of right and an underestimation of ontology: reality does not produce meaning.
At this point, it is evident that there is no difference between state of exception and constituent power, because they both live on the same plane of indistinctiveness. The definition of the biopolitical — in this side of Agamben — poses itself as indifferent to antagonism: it is pointless to reply that the right of exception nullifies being, whilst resistance and constituent power create it! No, here all that occurs in bios is reduced to the indistinctiveness of nature, to zoe. In fact, it is not difficult to see in action the drift that forces each unilateral conception of bios to a naturalist reduction. The effect of this first rift of analysis is paradoxical: everything that happens in the world today seems to have been fixed onto a totalitarian and static horizon, as under “nazism/” But things are different: if we live in a state of exception it is because we live through a ferocious and permanent “civil war.” where the positive and the negative clash: their antagonistic power can under no circumstance be flattened onto indifference.
However, Agamben does not stop at this point. The state of exception presents us with a second, more original and powerful perspective: a spinozist and deleuzian one. On this second terrain the analysis does not look over an inert biopolitical but traverses it with a feverish utopian anxiety and grasps its internal antagonism. The philological weapon that Agamben handles with such dexterity, now faced with the complexity that invests it, betrays uncertainty and begins to vacillate; the discoveries come out as surprises, but they are real discoveries, conceptual and linguistic innovations. The postmodern is here presented as ontologically rigorous and creative. On this unfolding the geneaology of the biopolitical gives continuity to the archaeology and the philology. The utopic dispositif is not synchronically counterposed to the ontological perspective, but diachronically breaks into, penetrates and wrecks institutions and juridical development. Here dialectics is really overcome because the biopolitical is deconstructed and internally traversed.
In Agamben, the biopolitical is no longer looked at from the outside, as if it was an independent reality to study or recognise a fruit to pick. Hegelianism is here definitively overcome by a critique that realises the impossibility of the dialectical homology of opposites. The Hegelian Left is surpassed too. Agamben moves even beyond Benjamin, who lived through and presented this series of problematic hitches and painful dialectical reminiscences. With a formidable gesture, he ethically and conceptually goes beyond the state of exception by going through it: just as primitive christianity and the communism of the origins had gone through power and exploitation and destroyed them by emptying them. In this second scenario, Agamben’s analysis shows how immanence can be realist and revolutionary.
This is an annoying book in its development and its dualisms, yet extraordinary in its realisation. It clarifies an issue which post-structuralist and postmodern philosophy had so far only circumscribed to no avail turning, on the contrary, the biopolitical perspective into a verifiable and possible experience. A copernican experience.
Published in Italian on “Il Manifesto quotidiano comunista.” 26 July 2003.
Il Manifesto
Translated by Arianna Bove
[1] G.Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: un seminario sul luogo della negativité, 2a ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1982. Published in English as: Language and death: the place of negativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. A good bibliography of Agamben’s contributions in different languages can be found here: http://agambeniana.tripod.co.jp/index_it.html
[2] La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990. Published in English as:The Coming Community. (Michael Hardt, trans.) Theory out of bounds, volume 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991
[3] Homo Sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. Published in English as: Homo Sacer (Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.
[4] Aby Warburg, art anthropologist (1866-1929).
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e. human rights project
Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri’s Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)
4:3 | © 2000 Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm
1. Thomas Dumm. First of all it seems important to ask, how is Toni Negri? When might he be released?
2. Michael Hardt. Negri now has a work release arrangement whereby he is free to go where he pleases during the day but must return each night to the Rebibbia prison near Rome. After spending fourteen years in exile in France, he returned to Italy and prison in 1997 in the hope that he could both resolve his own case and work for a general amnesty for all those accused of crimes on the basis of their political activities in the 1960s and 70s. There has been no movement in the Italian parliament toward such an amnesty, however, and Negri’s own case has proceeded according to normal criminal procedures. In 1998 he reached the midpoint of his sentence (including the four and a half years he served before going to France) and he was thus eligible for work release. In 2001, when he reaches the point when three years remain on his sentence, he will be eligible for parole.
3. TD: It is good to know that despite his status it is possible for him to be able to continue his work, which includes the collaborative projects he has completed with you.
4. One of my favorite aphorisms is the opening sentence from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” Some may already be aware that the two of you have already written Labor of Dionysus together, and have worked on the French journal Futur Antérieur for some time, but could you tell us a little bit about how you and Antonio Negri came to collaborate on Empire?
5. MH: Negri has worked collaboratively for a long time, in journal collectives and political organizations. He also wrote a book together with Félix Guattari. I imagine that I learned how to write collaboratively largely from him.
6. I profit enormously from collaboration and I think collaborative writing should be encouraged more in the humanities. (It is already necessary in the natural sciences and many areas of the social sciences due in part to the technologies of research.) It is obvious I imagine how much collaborators learn from each other. Negri and I have very different disciplinary training — he in political science and I in comparative literature — and we refer primarily to different national literatures. Our writing projects thus always begin by making reading lists for the other person of what each of us consider to be the relevant literature. The collaboration is in this way a kind of mutual education process.
7. What is most exhilarating and challenging about collaborative writing is the negotiation involved in the writing itself. But really negotiation is not the right concept, because that would involve some kind of dialogue between two individuals. Alchemy is a better notion for the process. In cooperation, Marx says, humans are stripped of the fetters of their individuality. And this is why so many people have difficulty embarking on collaborative writing projects — it is so hard to abandon our individuality! I have found that there is a tendency when writing collaboratively to think like the other person and construct sentences that he or she would form. I feel the resulting prose is both mine and not mine. That is why it is futile to try to divide collaborative texts into passages written by this author or the other. Each author is adopting the other’s voice or, really, they are both adopting some third voice or numerous other voices. This is what I think Deleuze and Guattari mean when they refer to the crowd who wrote Anti-Oedipus. The alchemy of collaboration does not merge the two authors into a single voice but rather proliferates them to create the chorus of a multitude.
8. TD: The way you describe your process of collaboration sounds very much like the way you and Negri imagine labor having new opportunities to realize itself in the rhizomatic model of communication anticipated by Deleuze and Guattari, a model that seems crucial to your vision of absolute democracy in Empire. Indeed, your reference above to a “multitude” gestures toward the de-centered hybrid of the new revolutionary subject, one perhaps not identified with the either/or of the citizen or laboring body, but with a yet to be realized emergent being. The realization of this project seems to require a new vocabulary, and “the multitude” seems to be one of your most crucial conceptual interventions, in that regard. One is reminded of Marx’s comment in the 1844 manuscripts about how the authentic language of humanity would, in present circumstances, be heard as a scream.
9. MH: Perhaps Marx’s notion of a general intellect captures best this process of collective theorizing. It is easy to see that all of us stand on the shoulders of others when we think, using concepts, logics, and knowledges that we have inherited. What Marx’s notion of general intellect does for me is to pose this observation in social rather than individual terms. We are all part of a general intellect or a collective intelligence that produces concepts and knowledges. It is difficult and finally pointless to try to determine which idea was mine and which yours. We’re thinking together. (And that is why private property in the realm of the intellect is such a tenuous proposition.) That doesn’t mean that we all think the same or even less that we all agree, just that the process of thought is a social process.
10. TD: Perhaps it is partly a result of your collaborative process that Empire doesn’t dwell so much in the realm of negative critique. Instead, it appears as both a critical history of the present and a vision for the future. But whereas other recent interventions in theory seem to focus on one side of the problem of politics, perhaps too reductively we could call this the problem associated with techniques of normalization — say, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Derrida’s deconstruction, Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary society and governmentality, and even Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology — you and Negri seem to focus your most important critical energies and constructive efforts into understanding and providing ways of resisting sovereignty as it migrates away from the nation-state and to its newest networks. In this sense, the work you have done and the work of other thinkers like Giorgio Agambe concerning an immanent, rather than transcendent mode of thinking politically, seems both to resurrect an idea of history as movement and to resist Hegelianism while trying to use Hegel still. Why do you think sovereignty is now appearing as such a central problem for political theory?
11. MH: I assume that the renewed interest in the concept of sovereignty in the field of political theory is related in part to the analyses of the autonomy of the political that first focused on the work of Hannah Arendt and more recently on that of Carl Schmitt. Sovereignty does identify what is distinctive about the political or, at least, about the nature of rule and resistance. Another reason for increased interest today on the concept of sovereignty, not only among political theorists, is the decline of the sovereignty of nation-states. It is quite clear that in the various processes of globalization the locus of sovereignty has shifted away from the nation-state, at least in part, but it is not so easy to identity its new locus, if indeed it can be located at all. Furthermore, and this is the much more interesting question, perhaps the nature itself of sovereignty has changed in this passage. We claim that indeed there has been a shift from the modern form of sovereignty, theorized by authors from Bodin and Hobbes to Schmitt, to what we call an imperial sovereignty. The form of modern sovereignty can be characterized schematically by the dialectic of inside and outside. (Think of Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction as its basic unit if you like.) Imperial sovereignty, in contrast, operates on a network model and functions through hybrid identities and differences of degree.
12. Our perspective, of course, is against sovereignty in all its forms: imperial sovereignty, the nation-state, even the “popular” forms of sovereignty that arose in modernity. Absolute democracy is incompatible with sovereignty. But in order to challenge sovereignty and pose an alternative to it, one must understand first its contemporary form. Resistances to old, outdated forms of rule often tend not only to be ineffective against the present form but contribute to its functioning.
13. TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize th power of Giorgio Agamben’s argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of sovereignty at the end of modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may (not too unjustly) be thought of as a terrifying passivity that his position could result in.
14. MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben’s Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of sovereignty and biopower. Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl Schmitt’s notions of the decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of moder sovereignty thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and exception is the heart of modern sovereignty and grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is that by posing the extreme case of the concentration camp as the heart of sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily violence of modern sovereignty in all its forms. It implies, in other words, that if we could do away with the camp then all the violence of sovereignty would also disappear.
15. The most significant difference between our projects, though, is that Agamben dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we claim that modern sovereignty has now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we call imperial sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the concentration camp. It no longer takes the form of a dialectic between Self and Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion, but rules rather through mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid identities. This description may not immediately give you the same sense of horror that you get from Auschwitz and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty is certainly just as brutal as modern sovereignty was, and it has its own subtle and not so subtle horrors.
16. But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to look instead at Agamben’s notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term “naked life” to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben’s (and also Foucault’s) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life.
17. TD: How are people to be convinced that the relevant opposition is to sovereignty, though? That is, to put it maybe too simplistically, beyond the call for the end of big government, a call which has its ironies, through what communicative means do you see the constituent power of the multitude realizing itself against the nation-state?
18. MH: It is not a matter of convincing anyone to oppose sovereignty. It is natural to refuse authority and the refusal of authority is going on every day at all levels of society. And all of the various forms of modern and contemporary liberatory politics are at base a refusal of servitude, a refusal to accept as natural our subordination to rulers. I see the opposition to sovereignty as a way to name the generality of all these activities.
19. TD: Your resistance to all forms of sovereignty is certain to provoke some very strong responses, I would think especially among post-colonial thinkers who still see in the nation-state a way of advancing a progressive agenda. You and Negri are very appreciative of this position in Empire, yet you also urge people not to “harbor any nostalgia for the powers of the nation-state or to resurrect any politics that celebrates the nation.” (p.336)
20. MH: Anti-colonial and post-colonial thinkers have certainly not been united in their political evaluations of the nation-state. Franz Fanon’s work itself demonstrates the numerous complexities that surround the question. And the Marxist tradition too has been divided (the conflict between Lenin and Luxemburg was one powerful instance). But these were all tactical matters. The only logical and honest argument for the nation-state in these contexts is as a defense weapon against more powerful foreign forces, such as colonialist armies or transnational capital. The state itself, however, is at its base an apparatus of domination; it establishes a ruling authority that stands separate from and above society. The question is not should the state be destroyed in order to establish a democratic society but when is the right time to do so.
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