The contradictory state of Giorgio Agamben

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 147-174

  Passavant, Paul A ^a  

^a HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES   (United States)

Author keywords

Giorgio Agamben; Homo sacer; Sovereignty; State of emergency; The state

Indexed keywords

EID: 34147144257     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591706297691     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).
3. Jay Bybee, "Memorandum for Alberto Gonzales," August 1, 2002, in Torture and Truth, ed. Mark Danner (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004). This memo is said to have been ghost-authored by John Yoo.
4. John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 151.
5. Military Commissions Act of 2006, Public Law 109-366;
6. Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green, 2004);
7. and David Rose, Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights (New York: New Press, 2004).
8. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000);
9. and Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
10. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (1990; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
11. Further references to this and Agamben's other works will be made parenthetically within the text. The Coming Community will be abbreviated as CC.
12. His other works that I will reference include Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (HS; 1995; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998);
13. Giorgio Agamben, "The Thing Itself" (TI; 1984), and "The Idea of Language" (IL; 1984), in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans.
14. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 27-38 and 39-47 respectively; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (RA; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999);
15. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (MWE; 1996; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
16. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (TTR; 2000; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005);
17. and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (SE; 2003; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
18. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; reprint, Detroit: Black & Red, 1983);
19. and Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (New York: Verso, 1998).
20. One might note the close similarity between Agamben's argument here and that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. For an introduction to the thought of Hardt and Negri,
21. see Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, eds., Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004).
22. I owe this insight to communication with Jodi Dean.
23. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The geographic literature discussing how economic inequalities are being translated geographically is massive.
24. See Theresa Caldeira, "Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation," Public Culture 8 (1996): 303-28;
25. and Mike Davis, Planet of the Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
26. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 23.
27. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988);
28. Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and HS, 15-16.
29. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 61, 38-39.
30. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5, 7.
31. By using this analogy, Agamben is highlighting the need to think politics and community beyond sovereignty due to his interest in getting beyond a negative relation to an outside.
32. Relation would relate two distinct, hence to some degree separated, things. Connection would also imply difference and separation. Connection might also lead to a constitutive exclusion as these two things were connected while, say, a third was left out. We might note, however, that only absolute alterity or absolute otherness (God?) could remain beyond relation. In other words, relation implies relating to others.
33. See Rudolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things; Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
34. Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 132-56.
35. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 786, 788.
36. Ibid., 790.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid. See also Nikolas Rose, The Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
39. Graham Burchell, "Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
40. Vikki Bell, "The Promise of Freedom and the Performance of Freedom," in Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and Political Reason;
41. and Paul A. Passavant, "The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Government," Theory and Event 8, no. 3 (2005).
42. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968);
43. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986);
44. and John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), ch. 13.
45. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 13, 16.
46. For instance, coffeehouses in seventeenth-century Great Britain functioned as a "site of assembly" for the bourgeois, with elaborate rules of patron conduct both for the control of its space and to distinguish it socially from the more "popular" taverns and alehouses. They were also centers of bourgeois commercial and political organization. See ibid., 94-100.
47. For another rendering of St. Paul, see Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
48. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).
49. In Austin's initial introduction of performatives, he notes that they rely on "appropriate circumstances"; ibid., 6.
50. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001);
51. and Badiou, Saint Paul.
52. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben recognizes that a dead language does not inspire subjects; RA, 160.
53. Schmitt, Political Theology, 12-13.
54. All law is situational law: a normal situation is necessary for a legal norm's validity, and chaos has no law. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 13; for a study informed by this approach to law,
55. see Paul A. Passavant, No Escape: Freedom of Speech and the Paradox of Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
56. Of course, to Derridean ears, Agamben's oral or phonocentric approach to law sounds like what Derrida would call an approach unable to free itself from the metaphysics of presence. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Oayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
57. This approach to law, however, cannot escape the problem of différance through the sheer assertion that the word of his law does not suffer ruin thanks to the nearness of the word to us for its having been inscribed upon our hearts with God's breath.
58. The distinction between law of faith and law of works is not "an antinomy that involves two, unrelated and completely heterogeneous principles." Instead, Agamben argues, "the opposition lies within the nomos itself (TTR, 95).
59. On law's ambivalence between indeterminacy and determination as it seeks both to encompass everything while simultaneously providing a rule by which to govern conduct, see Peter Fitzpatrick, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
60. Compare Zenon Bankowski, "Anarchism, Marxism and the Critique of Law," in Legality, Ideology, and the State, ed. David Sugarman (New York: Academic Press, 1983);
61. with E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 258-69.
62. Hardt and Negri's Empire is symptomatic of this ambivalence.
63. See Paul A. Passavant, "From Empire's Law to the Multitude's Rights: Law, Representation, Revolution," in Passavant and Dean, Empire's New Clothes, 95-120.
64. In an essay written prior to the English translation of Time That Remains, Andreas Kalyvas anticipates Agamben's ironic relation to law with the wry comment that since Agamben describes how the camp, in order to become unmediated power, had to create a rightless people through legal dispossession, it is therefore "reasonable to infer that had these rights not been revoked, the camp might not have been possible."
65. See Andreas Kalyvas, "The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp," in Norris, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 107-34, 115.
66. Badiou, Ethics;
67. and Badiou, Saint Paul.
68. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000);
69. and Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality," in Acts of Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 356-420.
70. Badiou, Ethics;
71. and Badiou, Saint Paul.
72. Schmitt, Concept of the Political.
73. Chantai Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000).
74. For a recent approach to politics that is not primarily focused on the question of ontology, see Jodi Dean, Zizek's Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
75. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), is a story about a premodern institution that takes on new functions and new significance in the modern era.
76. Passavant, "The Strong Neo-liberal State."
77. David Cole and James Dempsey, Terrorism and the Constitution, 3rd ed. (New York: New Press, 2006), 135-38.
78. Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). I discuss how the neoliberal state differs from the Cold War national security state in Passavant, "The Strong Neo-liberal State."
79. Kim Lane Scheppele, "Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11," University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 6 (2004): 1001-80.
80. Yoo, Powers of War and Peace, is an example of the emergent legal regime.
81. Hardt and Negri, Empire.
82. Jacques Derrida, Rogues, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
83. The radical anti-statism of Empire, in contrast with the moderation of some of Hardt's and Negri's reform proposals, such as greater transparency and accountability for institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in Multitude, enables this analogy.
84. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004).
85. On the urgency of the call of democracy, see Derrida, Rogues, 84.