Agamben, Kristeva, and the Language of the Sacred

Abstract

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben outlines a theory of biopower that purports to extend and correct Michel Foucault's writings in first volume of The History of Sexuality. Where Foucault suggests that biopower fosters or disallows it to point of death, Agamben claims that biopower maintains a hidden and violent solidarity with sovereign power; biopower, as he puts it, makes survive. Agamben's titular figure symbolizes rethinking of sacred involved in this provocative thesis. An archaic figure of Roman law, homo sacer is that sacred man whose killing constitutes neither murder nor sacrifice, who lives beyond reach of both human and divine law. Included in juridico-political order by being excluded from it, this obscure vulnerable figure is, for Agamben, original meaning of sacred and original element of politics; by marking life's radical and unambiguous exposure to law's violence, homo sacer implies that Western politics has always been a biopolitics. Framed by Agamben's account of biopower, homo sacer challenges a long tradition that defines sacred through its apparently ambiguous or ambivalent character. Since late nineteenth century, and especially in anthropological, psychoanalytic and linguistic texts, theory of ambivalence of sacred has focused on term's contradictory associations; sacer can mean both sacred or cursed, sacred objects are objects of both veneration and fear, sacred persons cannot [be] touched without dirtying oneself or without dirtying.1 If ambivalence appears a persistent characteristic of sacred, it nevertheless does little to elucidate - and in fact occludes - figure of homo sacer. A psychologization of religious experience, ambivalence fails to explain why divine law does not recognize homo sacer, why he is excluded from sacrifice.2 While thinkers from Durkheim to Freud to Rene Girard assume that ambivalence is proper to sacred and obscure its political character, Agamben exposes a necessary, intimate and violent link between sacred and sovereign, a link that might hide within but still functions through scientific mythologemes.3 Working in a psychoanalytic lineage, Julia Kristeva's theory of sacred extends Agamben's concern with violent intersection of power and life; as Kristeva might revise it, contemporary power - increasingly chaotic, normalizing and empty- makes [the psyche] survive. In terms that resonate with Agamben's account of biopolitics, Kristeva writes that today a new version of erects [itself] as supreme value and threatens to destroy after having devalued question of its meaning.4 For Kristeva, however, soft totalitarianism represents a danger to sacred (understood as intersection of and meaning) rather than an expansion of sacred (in which exception becomes rule). On her reading, a politics of itself threatens sacred experience of meaning to act of giving that is life and imperils sacred passage between the animalistic and verbal, sensible and nameable.5 To be sure, Kristeva's distance from Agamben vis-a-vis sacred suggests that she participates in an economy of ambivalence and sacrifice, especially in her association of sacred and the abject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva posits as an essential part of sacred passage of symbolic development. In abjection, child renders mother's body disgusting or revolting in order to facilitate maternal sacrifice; as something rejected from which one does not part, abject symbolizes child's ambivalent relationship to mother. Despite Agamben's warnings about ambivalence, notion of abjection appears dedicated towards exposing rather than obscuring political violence.6 In Kristevan text, abjection marks failure of soft totalitarianism to support development of symbolic bonds; disempowered and disconnected, sacred gives way to abject as subjects re-invoke violent processes of identity differentiation against vulnerable populations. …