Bare life and life in general

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 46, 2012, Pages 6-25

  Weber, Samuel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84859645536     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Giorgio Agamben, "Che cos'è un campo?" in Mezzi senza fine: Note sulla politica (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996).
2. Published in French as Giorgio Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" in Moyens sans fins: Notes sur la politique, trans. Danièle Valin (1995; Paris: Rivages, 2002).
3. Published in English as Giorgio Agamben, "What Is a Camp?" in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
4. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 47.
5. Here and in what follows I am translating from the French while consulting the Italian and English editions.
6. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7. Agamben's talk is published as "The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern," 106-118.
8. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 47.
9. and compare Agamben, "The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern," 106.
10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Rome: Einaudi, 1995).
11. Published in French as Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, trans. Marilène Raiola (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
12. Published in English as Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
13. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 49.
14. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 51.
15. Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, 81-84.
16. Here and in what follows I am translating from the French while consulting the Italian and English editions.
17. Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, 95.
18. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (1922; Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt, 1985), 11 (my translation).
19. Available in English as Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5.
20. One of Schmitt's earliest publications, Gesetz und Urteil (1912), 2nd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1968).
21. lays out this problem of legal practice (Rechtspraxis). The gap between law and verdict or judgment can be bridged, according to Schmitt, only by a process of "decision" that he relates, in a Humean manner, to established tradition (98, 100, 114).
22. Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, 98-99.
23. Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, 95.
24. In Il regno e la gloria, Agamben seeks to extend the legal interpretation of "biopolitics" beyond the perspective articulated by Foucault, by retracing its origins to early Christian theology, demonstrating in particular how the notion of oikonomia is invoked to mediate between theological transcendence and worldly immanence. However, his genealogy underestimates the significance of the Protestant Reformation in calling this mediation into question and thereby setting the stage for the emergence of modern biopolitics.
25. Giorgio Agamben, Il regno e la gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo (Milan: Neri Pozza Editore, 2007).
26. Available in English as Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
27. Benjamin Madley, "From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe," European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 429.
28. I am indebted to Andrew Hennlich for calling this remarkable article to my attention.
29. "The growing separation between birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact in the politics of our age and what we call camp is this split."
30. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 54.
31. Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 201-202.
32. Available in English as Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 251. The translation used in this article is my own.
33. Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," 199-200.
34. Walter Benjamin, "Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, 140-157.
35. Available in English as Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, 62-74.
36. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 475.
37. See the discussion of this aspect of Leviathan in Derrida's lectures on "The Beast and the Sovereign": Jacques Derrida, La bête et le souverain, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008), 73.
38. See, also, Samuel Weber, "Protection and Projection," in Religion beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 626-646.
39. Agamben, "Qu'est-ce qu'un camp?" 48.
40. I explore certain aspects of the theological dimension of "credit" in modern finance capitalism in Samuel Weber, Geld ist Zeit: Gedanken zu Kredit und Krise, trans. Marion Picker (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009).
41. Alain Badiou, St. Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme (Paris: PUF, 1997), 75.
42. Franz Kafka, "Der Bau," in Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1981).
43. Agamben sees in this story a description of "precisely what has happened in the political space of Western nation-states. lethal traps for the very 'peoples' that were supposed to inhabit them."
44. Agamben, "In This Exile (Italian Diary, 1992-94)," in Means without End, 138-139.
45. What I find significant, however, is not so much the "lethal" quality of the space as the confluence of outer danger with inner destiny-mortality in the guise of the illness that was soon to claim Kafka's life.
46. Kafka, 443.