Withdrawal

The more I consider Homo Sacer, the less I understand it. Perhaps it is because I am thinking about it separately from the other work, perhaps not. I have great affection for The Time That Remains. Homo Sacer, though, remains a puzzle. Perhaps because it is a middle work, a transitional and transitioning work, a speculative work. Perhaps not. At any rate, there will be a roundtable discussion of the book on Thursday and I don't know what to say. Ideally, I would make comments that wouldn't require knowledge of another theoretical system. Unfortunately, I easily give in to the temptation to try to reformulate some of the ideas in a vaguely psychoanalytic direction.

What to make of 'the secret tie uniting power and bare life'? Why, I wonder, is it a secret? Who is keeping it and from home? Plato's examples of shepherds and physicans aren't secret. From a different direction, his emphasis on luxury and against necessity as he builds the city in speech suggest a more to the formation of the republic than bare life, a more that matters, that makes the city what it is.

More troubling: the withdrawal of the state as a means of capture via the ban. Here, there is nothing outside or external to the state. How can such a notion be useful (much less plausible) in an international arena where there are multiple externals and internals and exclusions and inclusions? To be sure, the challenge of refugees and immigrants point to a condition of the withdrawal of the state and resulting vulnerability to be violence. But is the ban the best way to understand this condition? Does it make sense to think of this condition as a kind of capture? And, how is that here, with this example, was is affirmed, strengthened, and solidified is state sovereignty? What about the excesses of people that, erm, exceed the capacities of the state? That expose its limits, inadequacies, and pretensions?

Is, then, a prior sense of universalization victimization--we are all homni sacri--accurate and necessary for conceptualizing a politics adequate to the present? Must we accept the obscenity that all is Auschwitz? Must we jettison every capacity for differentiation?

Just say no. Or even, prefer not to.

Comments

[mattcalarco]

Jodi--once again, very interesting discussion. I wish I were in on the roundtable!

I'd say that Agamben is with you on both of the main points you raise. There *is* an outside to the state and there are ways to expose its limits. Sovereignty is widespread but it is not a dispensation of Being that is somehow invariant across history.

And I don't think he would want to say we are all actually homines sacri. Rather we are all *virtually* so, as long as sovereign structures are in place. (Zizek's statement that Agamben holds an Auschwitz-is-everywhere thesis is not at all true.) Whether one actually occupies the position of homo sacer would depend on one's good or bad fortune. Eliminating that virtual possibility and developing another politics is what drives Agamben's political thought.

I think the concept that might light up the text and make it look a bit more positive is the notion of form-of-life. You can track that back to the concept of potentiality if you want to develop it more thoroughly.

I'm not uncritical of the book--it has some problems. But I think his position is actually pretty close to yours and the concerns you raise.

[Jodi]

Matt--thanks for emphasizing virtually. Of course you are right about that and I had overlooked that key point. The difference between virutally homines sacri and potentially homines sacri isn't clear to me. I understand, though, that potentiality opens up the possibility of not being or being otherwise.

I've wondered--and Zizek suggests this--whether Agamben's argument can be understood in terms of moving from the masculine to the feminine formulae of sexuation, from the logic of the exception to the logic of the non-all. It seems, if I've understood, which is a very, very big if, that for Agamben the extension or generalization of the logic of the exception (could we say the way that it incorporates its surplus via an inclusion?) morphs into the logic of the non-all, which is how I understand 'in force without signification'--to the extent that there is nothing that escapes the law, there is no exception that guarantees or supports it, so the same over-extension presents an intense openness or maybe under-determination that allows for possibilities. If this is close to what he has in mind, then I think my disagreements may not be significant, or, that they may be academic pedantry.

At the same time, since so much seems to ride on the argumentation, on the originary notion of sovereignty and all this, I find myself wondering: why accept the conclusions if I reject the argument?

[Floyd]

I am only beginning to read Agamben, but (and I cringe at my own words here) it immediately struck me that how one interprets the "sovereign ban"-- and therefor how one is able to argue from it-- seems 'merely' a matter of semantics. ie, To reason than the state is established in an act of exclusion is also to say that the state is established through inclusion. It all matters where you start. As members of a bourgeois class defined by luxury, we are all potentially (and precisely not virtually) homines sacri, but this obviously can't be said of the refugee. If it wasn't for the contingent fact of the rapidly disappearing amount of unclaimed space in the world, the existence or nonexistence of the ban would be irrelevant for their political status; they have none. Which leaves us at the shores of Schmitt: their relation to a sovereign state (whether it has exiled them or not) is one of enmity (or possibly even friendship). I am afraid I may not be thinking clearly here, just reacting.

[old]

I really do need to go back and read Homo Sacer again, but it does seem to me that, at the very least, that book is far less clear about "the originary notion of sovereignty." It seems, at this point, as if he is far closer to the shift Foucault sees (discussed in my long comment on the other post) allowing for the possibility of analogical reasoning between the camp as exposing the limit of the nation state and the homo sacer as exposing the limit of the unitary sovereign. I don't know if there is a difference between the virtual and the potential homni sacri, but whether a group is virtually or really homni sacri is simply a matter of facts on the ground, or as Matt puts it, good or bad fortune. If you find yourself in Guantanamo or being served soup by Mennonites from Kansas somewhere on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, you're a part of homni sacri.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
The roundtable sounds great, wish I would be there.
I think Agamben's frustratingly opaque and may well ultimately just not have some things resolved about what he wants to say. I find some of the time he does sound like we are all always-already bare life (bare life as ontological/existential condition), while other times he sounds like bare life is a legal category or an idea implied in certain social practices (bare life as historical). I like to read bare life as analogous to abstract labor in Marx, and with both I like to emphasize the claims as being critical and epistemological - attacks on the counting of some as abstract/bare - rather than ontological. That may be fudging the text a bit, but it's the most charitable (ie, coherent) read I know how to give.
take care,
Nate

[khalid]

Isn't power and bare life a "secret" because the role of power was to aim for the good-and this was not seen in terms of life (zoe) or labour?

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[marcegoodman]

Jodi,

I don't think I've seen it mentioned here yet but there is video recording of a January '07 lecture (in English) by Agamben entitled "The Power and the Glory."

Aviva over at Form of Life features the video on her blog along with a short comment.

http://formoflife.blogspot.com/2007/03/power-and-glory-here-is-video-of.html

[Richard]

Hi Jodi,

I've been following your blog for a while, and after fitfully and occasionally posting comments to Adam Kotsko's blog, I'd thought I'd chime in, if somewhat poorly.

It's been a while since I picked up my copy of Homo Sacer, but if my memory serves me well, Agamben locates the secret binding sovereignty and bare life in violence. Where he really picks up on this is in his discussion on constituting and constituted violence in the text (I forgot where it is...). It's no wonder then, in the epilogue that he implicity envisions and advocates a non-violent form of politics (lest such a 'politics to come' render itself vulnerable to claim that might makes right in the soverign relation through a sanctioning of violence).

The reason violence is to remain secret in the relationship of sovereignty is that if the force of violence show itself to bind sovereign power to the bare life it produces, where violence alters or disfigures the existence of a singular being, then bare life has the possibility to discover that it itself is of no relevance short of providing fodder for the political machine generating sovereignty. It shows the political myths and ideologies to be hollow, but throroughly controlling of one's existence. Understanding how power works through violence in any form, physical and psychological, is the key for people to attempt to leave it behind, or better, overcome it with another politics that is neither modern nor classical.

[Jodi]

But, Richard, violence is no secret. Not even from theorists of sovereignty and the law. Not least from the very theorists on which Agamben relies. I'm also not ready to agree with the claim that he advocates non violence.

[old]

I don't think Agamben advocates non violence, but I do think he refuses violence as at the heart of the problem.

[Richard]

I'll have to re-read the section on violence to see what he advocates. His writing evokes more than prescribes.

I may have been over-stressing Agamben's tendency to non-violence, but there is certainly a movement towards non-violence. Violence is a term that Agamben deploys but does not flesh out as much as I would like it to. Perhaps he does so in Language and Death or in Potentialities, neither of which I've had a chance to read.

While I don't have an argument developed for it, I still want to push the idea that the bind between power and life is an constantly spoken, but unaddressed circuit of violence that is occasionally summoned under extreme conditions (threats to security, 'property', personal boundaries etc.). Where would the idea go?

One of the ways that violence operates in language through the use of euphemisms to cover, divert, or keep secret. It's one of many manners in which a State keeps secrets by exposing them. Advertising and marketing is adept at these techniques to move people to markets.

Isn't it such that in a social field where everyone is encouraged (if not for the sake of being considered relevant) to be in on a secret that secrets are what we know but do not risk resisting or pushing to its conclusion? And in this case, do we not risk summoning the violence of the state against us in exposing the state's secret against itself?

To put into play the logic of exception with respect to secrets, isn't it such that all secrets are out in the open, and that to be in on a secret is to in some sense possess the power (and the threat of violating another through its use)of knowledge over those who are perceived to not know?

[jdean]

My book Publicity's Secret explores the relation of the secret to the presumption of the public in democratic theory.

[Richard]

Thanks, Jodi.

This thread got me thinking a little more about the matter, especially on secrets and secrecy, and on violence and language. I looked up your book and also stumbled upon an article you wrote of the same title. Would you recommend the article as a good starting point?

[b. grant]

I've been reading Homo Sacer and Remnants in a seminar, the aim of which is to understand "biopolitics" in all its senses. Everyone in the seminar is having a lot of trouble specifying exactly what Agamben (as opposed to Foucault) means when he talks about biopolitics. I mean, we understand what Agamben does when he relocates biopolitics as the originary political relation, as opposed to a distincitvely modern phenomenon. Does anyone know exactly what this term means for Agamben, and how it's different from thanatopolitics or necropolitics?

[old]

Good questions b. I'd say that reading The Open would help quite a bit. Also, getting a grasp on what Agamben means by potentiality (and how that stacks up against other theories of potentiality) is crucial. There's a great article available online by Brett Nielson that goes a long way here.

[mattcalarco]

b. grant--as a quick response to your question:

By "biopolitics," Agamben typically means political structures aimed at producing and controlling bare life.

[old]

I think that definition is just right, Matt. But to figure out what Agamben means by 'bare life,' figuring out what he means by potentiality and knowing what he is up to in The Open is critical.

[mattcalarco]

Old,

Agreed 100%. The conceptual framework developed in the The Open is very powerful, both in itself and in terms of understanding Agamben's own position. I've written on The Open at length and think it is Agamben's best attempt thus far to articulate how bare life is produced, how it is controlled, and what an alternative politics might look like.