january 2005

examining
alternatives in political theory

Agamben's Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life
Catherine Mills
5, December 2004

Excerpts from her Essay in :
47 Contretemps
http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/dir/contents.html

My concern in this paper is to consider issues of life and death as political issues,to locate a .bio-politics., a politics of life, and a .thanato-politics., a politics of death, within our ways of thinking about and imagining politics. I follow two recent theorists, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who are convinced that not only must we consider how we exercise powers of life and death in modern politics but how the very notion of politics and political community are intimately related to such issues. At issue is the power we call sovereign power, and its relation to this politics of life and death. I shall in turn consider four possible theses that can be derived from the work of these thinkers and from other twentieth century critical and legal theorists.

Human life is politicized only through an

abandonment to an unconditional power of

death.1

In Homo Sacer, Agamben concludes the text with an elusive gesture toward a new .form-of-life. as the ground of a coming politics over and against the bloody nexus of sovereign violence and biopolitics.
sovereign (one exercising supreme authority within a limited sphere)

The key parable of Kafka for Agamben is "Before the Law," in which a man from the countrypresents himself before the doorkeeper who refuses to let him enter through the door (of the law).
The man from the country waits indefinitely, only to be told toward the end of his life that the door was meant for him alone.

Drawing simultaneously on Aristotle, Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin as well as the
obscure figure of sacred man or .homo sacer. from Roman law, Agamben argues that life captured within the sovereign ban is bare life, and as such, is life irreparably exposed to the force of death that characterizes sovereignty. Further, Agamben argues that the originary relation of the law to life is not application, but abandonment.

Agamben states, "what is at issue in the sovereign exception is not so much the control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity."5

The sovereign thus operates as the threshold of order and exception, determining the purview of the law. This means that the state of exception is not simply the chaos that precedes order. For Agamben, it operates both as a condition of law's operation and an effect of the sovereign decision such that the exception is not simply outside the realm of the law, but is in fact created through the law's suspension. The sovereign determines the suspension of the law vis-à-vis an individual or extraordinary case and simultaneously constitutes the efficacy of the law in that determination.

Importantly, the theoretical point of inspiration for this claim comes from the eighth fragment of Benjamin.s "Theses on the Philosophy of History," where he writes that:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.27

Taking up the first theoretical provocation in this thesis, Agamben generalizes the sovereign exception such that it no longer appears as the exceptional case, but as the norm. This means that the capture of bare life within the exception is a general condition of existence, such that the rule and the exception, inclusion and exclusion, and right and violence are no longer clearly distinguishable. Agamben claims from this that under a regime of biopolitics all subjects are potentially homo sacers. That is, all subjects are at least potentially if not actually abandoned by the law and exposed to violence as a constitutive condition of political existence.28

As empirical evidence of this politicophilosophical claim, he cites the figure of homo sacer, genocidal violence, the apparently ever-expanding phenomenon of concentration camps—which he argues reveal the .nomos of the modern.—as well as the redefinition of life and death in the categories of the .overcomatose. or brain dead, and neo-morts. Agamben has been heavily criticized for his apparently eclectic collection of empirical evidence and the rendering of these examples as .indistinguishable.. Yet, what unites the examples Agamben selects is the thesis on the generalization of the exception and the correlative indistinction of fact and norm in Western politics and philosophy.

Even so, one should not conclude from the rejection of Foucault's more historically and empirically restrained theses on the emergence and institutionalization of biopower that Agamben sees no substantive difference between classical and modern democracy. Rather, Agamben suggests that what distinguishes modern democracy from classical democracy is that the former "presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoe."29
(Homo Sacer, 10,Agamben)

Thus the raison d. etre of contemporary political power is the annulment of the distinction between bios and zoe; that is, a total politicization of biological life that undercuts the distinction between bios and zoe and therefore eradicates bare life. At the same time though, Agamben also claims that modern democracy has consistently failed in the endeavor to reconcile bios and zoe, such that "bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something which is included only through an exclusion."30( Homo Sacer,11, Agamben)While modern politics is increasingly played out on the level of biological life, in its attempt to discover the bios of zoe it nevertheless produces bare life as the excrescence of its failure, thereby preventing the overcoming of the sovereign exception and the violence that conditions bare life. This situation leads toan aporia specific to modern democracy: "it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—"bare life"—that marked their subjection."31(Homo Sacer,10,Agamben)

This account of the aporetic violence of modern democracy provides the starting point for the particular formulation of political futurity that Agamben develops. For according to Agamben, this aporia stymies any attempt to oppose biopolitical regimes from within the framework of bios and zoe. Such projects will tirelessly repeat the aporia of the exception, the danger of which lies in the gradual convergence of democracy with totalitarianism. In other words, the condition of abandonment indicates a fundamental aporia for contemporary politics, where attempts to overcome the capture of life within the sovereign exception through recourse to natural life necessarily repeat and reinstall that capture in their politicization of natural life.

Thus, Agamben rejects Foucault.s gesture toward a .new economy of bodies and their pleasures., claiming that "the body is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power."32(Homo Sacer,187,Agamben)

He argues instead that: Until a completely new politics—that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the "beautiful day" of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.33(Homo Sacer,

The reference in this passage to the .beautiful day. of life not only gestures toward the distinction Aristotle makes between the great difficulty of bios and the natural sweetness of zoe, but offers the key to the foundation of the coming politics that Agamben proposes.
34(The relevant fragment from Aristotle's Politics for Agamben.s argument is quoted as: "This life [according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to zen auto monon]. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness." Aristotle, Politics, 1278b, 23-31. The parenthetical inserts are Agamben's.)

I have argued that Agamben's diagnosis of contemporary politics as a condition in which the exception has become the rule draws on Benjamin.s formulation in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." It is also important to note the second part of this formulation here though, in which Benjamin calls for the inauguration of a real state of exception as a means of forestalling Fascism.

For Benjamin, the normalization of the exception merely amounts to a virtual state of exception, a condition which is fundamentally nihilistic. What is required then, he suggests, is the inauguration of a real state of exception to overturn the virtual suspension of the rule.

Analogously, for Agamben, the overcoming of the sovereign ban that characterizes modern politics can only take place through the inauguration of a .form-of-life, or, happy life. that supersedes the distinction between bios and zoe. As he states in Means Without End:

The "happy life" on which political philosophy should be founded thus cannot be either the naked life that sovereignty posits as a presupposition so as to turn it into its own subject or the impenetrable extraneity of science and of modern biopolitics that everybody tries in vain to sacralize. This "happy life" should be rather, an absolutely profane "sufficient life" that has reached the perfection of its own power and its own communicability—a life over which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold.35

Thus, Agamben points toward a new conception of life, described as .happy life. or a .form-of-life., in which it is never possible to isolate bare life as the biopolitical subject.

The happy life will be such that no separation between bios and zoe is possible, and life will find its unity in a pure immanence to itself, in .the perfection of its own power.. In this then, he seeks a politico-philosophical redefinition of life no longer founded upon the bloody separation of the natural life of the species and political life, but which is beyond every form of relation insofar as happy life is life lived in pure immanence, grounded on itself alone.

While Agamben's starting point for the theorization of bare life is the term .mere life. that Benjamin uses in "Critique of Violence," the inspiration for his conception of a .happy life. derives at least in part from the short text, "Theologico-Political Fragment." In this, Benjamin explicitly addresses the relation of Messianic and historic time and writes that "only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic."36Benjamin, "Theologico-Political Fragment" 312). Constructing an image of two arrows pointing in different directions but which are nevertheless reinforcing, Benjamin goes on to say that .the order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness.. This is because while the profane cannot in itself establish a relation with the Messianic, it assists the coming of the Messianic Kingdom precisely by being profane. In other words, while the profane is not a category of the Messianic, it is "the decisive category of its quietest approach," because "the rhythm of Messianic nature is happiness."37

Happiness allows for the fulfillment of historical time, since the Messianic kingdom is "not the goal of history but the end."38.( Benjamin, "Theologico-Political Fragment" 312; Giorgio Agamben, "Walter Benjamin andthe Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption," Potentialities 154.)

Agamben.s absolutely profane happy life draws on this characterization of the profane and Messianic, wherein the profane happy life provides passage for Messianic redemption.

The inauguration of happy life in which neither zoe nor bios can be isolated allows for the law in force without significance to be overturned such that the Nothing maintained by that law is eliminated and humanity reaches its own fulfillment in its transparency to itself. For Agamben, happy life might be characterized as life lived in the experience of its own unity, its own potentiality of "being-thus,"
39(,Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 93; Also see Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999) 115-162. As Wall and others note, the key characteristic of Agamben.s formulation of the coming community is that the community of whatever is a community that has never been: it is not a nostalgic return to Gemeinschaft, or an identitarian conception of community, but a notion of community predicated on the pure immanence of .whatever. beyond identity and all relation.)

and as such, is life lived beyond the reach of the law.40(Agamben, Means Without End 114-115) In his way, Agamben offers a redemptive hope that is external to the problems of biopolitics; the problems posed by the state of exception and sovereignty's capture of bare life are resolved by the inauguration of the happy life, and the coming politics it grounds redeem humanity in the face of biopolitical annihilation.

To summarize so far then, Agamben argues that bare life is produced as the excrescence of the distinction between bios and zoe and as such, is the carrier of the sovereign nexus of right and violence and the locus of biopolitical capture. Against this situation, he points toward a new conception of life, described as .happy life. or a 'form-of-life', in which it is never possible to isolate bare life as the biopolitical subject.41 The happy life will be such that no separation of bios and zoe is possible, and life will find its unity in a pure immanence to itself, in .the perfection of its own power..

In this way, Agamben offers a redemptive hope that is external to the problems of biopolitics; the problems posed by the state of exception and sovereignty's hold over the bare life caught within it can be resolved by the coming unified life. The inauguration of the happy life and the coming politics it grounds annuls bare life by overturning the conditions of its biopolitical capture.

Happy Life and the Force of Law: Agamben and Derrida

As provocative as it is, Agamben's gesture toward a happy life that provides foundation for the coming politics clearly warrants further consideration and to do this, I turn to discussing the theoretical commitments that underpin Agamben's theorization of biopolitics and the sovereign exception. In particular, I consider the messianic dimension of Agamben's theorization, which derives from his theoretical debt to Walter Benjamin and which is perceived to provide the means of overcoming the structure of the ban idenitified in and through Schmitt.s conception of sovereignty.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the most important of Benjamin's texts for Agamben are those in which the gesture toward the messianic is most explicitly formulated.42 However, I am less concerned with the particular characteristics of Benjamin's conception of the messianic than with the way in which this gesture operates within Agamben.s argument on sovereignty and biopolitics. This implication can be brought out succinctly through a comparison of his position with that of Derrida, particularly of their respective interpretations of Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" and Kafka.s parable "Before the Law."

The notion of abandonment provides the point of departure for this discussion, for it can now be said that for Agamben, recognition of the status of law as being in force without significance in the ban is insufficient as the aim and achievement of contemporary thought, since residing in this recognition does little other than repeat the ontological structure of the sovereign ban. Instead, Agamben claims that contemporary thought must think abandonment beyond any conception of the law in order to move toward a politics freed of every ban.
He states that:

The relation of abandonment is now to be thought in a new way. To read this relation as a being in force without significance – that is, as Being's abandonment to and by a law that prescribes nothing, and not even itself – is to remain inside nihilism and not to push the experience of abandonment to the extreme. Only where the experience of abandonment is freed from every idea of the law and destiny… is abandonment truly experienced as such.43

This complicated suggestion brings to light several crucial aspects of Agamben's theorization of abandonment. First and most obviously, this statement summarizes Agamben.s critique of the conception of abandonment given by Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay "Abandoned Being." Nancy argues that abandonment is the condition—perhaps the sole condition—of the thinking of being in the contemporary world and, further, abandonment is always to be abandoned in relation to law, since "abandonment respects the law; it cannot do otherwise."44 He concludes that "abandonment's only law… is to be without return and without recourse."45

Without exploring the complexities of Nancy.s text or his critical relation to Heidegger from whom the notion of abandonment is taken, it can be said that Agamben diverges from Nancy on this final point of the resolution and recourse of abandonment. Agamben's divergence from Nancy.s formulation lies in his claim that the state of abandonment must be overcome through pushing the experience of abandonment to its extreme limit, beyond the law.s being in force without significance and beyond the contemporary condition of nihilism.

In fact, this reference to nihilism is key for disentangling Agamben.s commitment to a Benjaminian messianics as the path of overcoming the condition of abandonment, for it prefigures the distinction between perfect and imperfect nihilism that he poses as synonymous with the virtual and real state of exception posed by Benjamin in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History."
46.(This comment also indicates the critical relation that Agamben maintains toward Heidegger. On Agamben.s relation to Heidegger see Leland Deladurantaye, "Agamben.s Potential," Diacritics, 30:2 (2000) 8. Deladurantaye.s note concerning Agamben.s comments in the French daily newspaper Libération on his theoretical engagement with Martin Heidegger and Benjamin is of particular importance. Agamben is quoted as claiming that his encounter with Heidegger meant that .philosophy became possible.. He goes on to say though that "this is precisely the interest of encounters—both in life and in thinking. They render life, for us, possible (or, sometimes, impossible). In any event, this is what happened to me with Heidegger, and, during these same years, with Benjamin.s thought. Every great oeuvre contains a degree of shadow and poison for which it does not always furnish the antidote. For me, Benjamin was that antidote which helped me to survive Heidegger." (Agamben, cited in Deladurantaye, "Agamben.s Potential" 8, n.8).

Benjamin's fragment, cited above posits the generalization of the state of exception and the correlative necessity of developing an account of historical time that can clearly illuminate and assist in realizing a means of overcoming that state through the creation of a real state of exception. The distinction that Benjamin posits between the virtual and the real state of exception or state of emergency can be understood as strictly analogous to a differentiation between the state of exception that constitutes sovereignty according to Schmitt.s thesis and the exceptionality of the messianic, which redeems and rescues humanity from the grip of the former.

That is, historical fulfillment or redemption comes in the form of a messianic, real exceptionality that overcomes the form of law in the virtual state of exception, the latter of which is at least partly equated for Benjamin with Fascism.

Given that the fragment from the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" presents a barely disguised critique of Schmitt,47 it provides Agamben with the solution to the perceived urgency of overcoming or escaping the operations of the sovereign ban and the biopolitical capture of bare life that this entails. Accepting the essential correlation between nihilism and messianism posited by Scholem and Benjamin, Agamben claims that it is necessary to distinguish between two forms of messianism or nihilism.48(Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign" 171. The distinction Agamben poses between imperfect and perfect nihilism is similar to that between passive and active nihilism distinguished by Nietzsche in for instance Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed., trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), esp. 5-82 at 17. Additionally, one should see Heidegger.s discussion of nihilism in Martin Heidegger, "On the Question of Being" [1 55], Pathmarks, ed., trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 291-322 and Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988).)

The first form, which he calls .imperfect nihilism. nullifies the law but maintains "the Nothing [that is, the emptiness of the law] in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity." This is the nihilism that Agamben refers to above in his critique of Nancy.s conception of abandonment. The second form, called .perfect nihilism. overturns the Nothing, and does not even permit the survival of validity beyond meaning; perfect nihilism, as Benjamin states, "succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing."49

The task that contemporary thought is faced with then is the thought of perfect nihilism, which overturns the law in force without significance that characterizes the "virtual. state of exception of Western politics."50( Agamben.s conception of the law is particularly ambiguous throughout his work and has given rise to a number of criticisms. This ambiguity derives from his characterization of the institutions of positive law on the model of the Torah, a characterization that is unlikely to be convincing for many legal and political theorists. Indeed the theological dimension of Agamben.s political analysis is no doubt problematic from a number of points of view. It could be argued, for instance, that the strong messianic position that Agamben takes is problematic in its insistence on the overturning of the law in its totality, a position which is further reinforced by the association of positive legality with divine law. Setting this aside for the moment though, it remains the case that the analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics in Homo Sacer offers important reconsiderations of violence and the determination of life worth living. See Fitzpatrick "These mad abandon.d times"; Fitzpatrick, "Bare Sovereignty"; Anton Schütz, "Thinking the Law with and against Luhmann, Legendre and Agamben," Law and Critique 11: 2 (2000) 107-136; Thanos Zartaloudis, "Without Negative Origins and Absolute Ends: A Jurisprudence of the Singular," Law and Critique, 13:2 (2002) 197-230, for further discussion of Agamben.s approach to the law.)

Importantly though, the overturning of the law does simply mean instituting a new law, and nor does it mean reinstating the lost law of a previous time "to recuperate alternative heredities."51 Both of these modes of progression would merely repeat the political aporia of abandonment. Rather, the task of redeeming life from the aporia of law in force without significance requires both the destruction of the past and the realization of "that which has never been."52 It is only the inauguration of that which has never been, the not having been of the past, that will suffice to overturn the Nothing maintained by the law in force without significance and thereby restore human life to the unity of bios and zoe, a unity that itself has never yet been. As Agamben states "this—what has never happened—is the historical and wholly actual homeland of humanity."53

In this light, it becomes clear that the .form-of-life. or .happy life. that Agamben proposes as the foundation of the coming politics constitutes the .real state of exception. from which the biopolitics of modern democracy and its correlation with totalitarianism can be combated and life redeemed.

For Agamben, the real state of exception or the messianic redemption that overturns law in force without significance can be actualized in the inauguration of a happy life that does not partake in the distinction between natural life and political life, but which might instead be characterized as life lived in the experience of its own unity, its own potentiality of .being-thus..54

In this, the notion of happy life is structurally similar to the theoretical gesture that Agamben makes in his earlier text, The Coming Community. Though not formulated in the terms of bare and happy life, the messianic overturning of expropriated being provides the logical impetus of this text, in which Agamben develops his conception of community without essence realized in the .whatever. singularity. In this text, the community of whatever, the being-thus of humanity, which is neither general nor particular, without attribute or identity, is essentially a messianic community of humanity restored to its own potentiality, its own .being-in language. that thereby overturns being's expropriation by the Nothing of the spectacle to which it is currently condemned.55( Guy Debord.s classic analysis of the spectacle of commodification in The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), is crucial for Agamben.s political theory.

However, to be clear this does not amount to a nostalgic re-invocation of Gemienschaft; rather, as should be expected from the structure of messianics, the coming community has never yet been. As Thomas Carl Wall comments, "without destiny and without essence, the community that returns is one never present in the first place."56(This also indicates and helps explain Agamben.s unequivocal insistence on the elimination of the dogma of the sacredness of life, for here he states that "a fulfilled foundation of humanity in itself necessarily implies the definitive elimination of the sacrificial mythologeme." (Agamben, "*Se" 137)

This suggests that the gesture toward the necessity of a new form of life or happy life to ground the coming politics that appears in the final pages of Homo Sacer brings to light the formulation of messianism that underpins Agamben.s conceptions of life, politics and historical transformation developed in much of his recent work.

Also Mitchell Dean :Four Theses on Life and Death

My concern in this paper is to consider issues of life and death as political issues,

to locate a .bio-politics., a politics of life, and a .thanato-politics., a politics of death,

within our ways of thinking about and imagining politics. I follow two recent theorists,

Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who are convinced that not only must we

consider how we exercise powers of life and death in modern politics but how the very

notion of politics and political community are intimately related to such issues. At issue

is the power we call sovereign power, and its relation to this politics of life and death. I

shall in turn consider four possible theses that can be derived from the work of these

thinkers and from other twentieth century critical and legal theorists.

Friendship - Giorgio Agamben and other texts.

http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/dir/contents.html

Erich Fromm :

Historically...those who told the truth about a particular regime have been exiled, jailed, or killed by those in power whose fury has been aroused. To be sure, the obvious explanation is that they were dangerous to their respective establishments, and that killing them seemed the best way to protect the status quo. This is true enough, but it does not explain the fact that the truth-sayers are so deeply hated even when they do not constitute a real threat to the established order. The reason lies, I believe, in that by speaking the truth they mobilize the (psychological) resistance of those who repress it. To the latter, the truth is dangerous not only because it can threaten their power but because it shakes their whole conscious system of orientation, deprives them of their rationalizations, and might even force them to act differently. Only those who have experienced the process of becoming aware of important impulses that were repressed know the earthquake-like sense of bewilderment and confusion that occurs as a result. Not all people are willing to risk this adventure, lest of all those people who profit, at least for the moment, from being blind.

Quoted by a friend, Bill Conroy, of Gary Webb, investigative journalist, recently dead of two gun-shot wounds to the head... that are described as suicide by the USA authorities.Rense.com

Rembrandt: Aristotle with Homer's portrait.