Fractured Life and the Ambiguity of Historical Time: Biopolitics in Agamben and Arendt

Abstract

Fractured Life and the Ambiguity of Historical TimeBiopolitics in Agamben and Arendt Anthony Curtis Adler (bio) Agamben and Arendt Agamben’s debt to Michel Foucault, from whom he borrows the term “biopolitics,” is well documented. But of equal importance for his theorization of the relation between sovereignty and bare life is the political thought of Hannah Arendt, and especially her masterpiece The Human Condition, which, as Agamben explains in the introduction to Homo Sacer I, had anticipated the biopolitical horizon of Foucault’s History of Sexuality by twenty years (1998, 3–4). Yet while Agamben tends to underplay his theoretical differences with Foucault, his relation to Arendt is more ambiguous.1 His encounter with her books, at a time when the Italian Left considered her taboo, profoundly affected the development of his thought, and was indeed, as he wrote to her in 1970, “a decisive experience” (de la Durantaye, 41, 207). The “Threshold” concluding Homo Sacer I nevertheless stresses the difference between their projects. Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoē2 and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city. This is why the restoration of classical political categories proposed by Leo Strauss and, in a different sense, by Hannah Arendt can have only a critical sense. There is no return from the camps to classical politics. (187–88) Agamben’s reception of Arendt, this suggests, depends on isolating the “critical” side of her project, cordoning it off from a positive, restorative, normative tendency. Classical politics cannot serve as a model for future authentic political life. [End Page 1] Within Agamben’s labyrinthine theoretical edifice, this distinction between the “critical” and the “normative” forms a defensive barrier. By distinguishing between these—perhaps structurally inseparable—tendencies of her project, and imposing a certain interpretation on Arendt, Agamben defends against a possibility of misinterpretation inherent in his own work, addressing a danger that is always present in its reception: the danger, namely, that it would also be taken as “political philosophy”—as a reactionary critique of modernity that seeks to return to prior political norms. Yet one might ask whether it is still possible to “know,” and to hold on to, the distinction between “critical” and “normative” when, as Agamben himself argues, all the other constitutive distinctions of Western politics have collapsed into indistinction. It is perhaps no mere sophistry to argue that this collapse itself threatens the possibility of drawing a clear distinction between a thought that depends on the simple knowledge of distinctions and one that is innocent of these. The aim of this essay is to follow out this hint, not by seeking to refute Agamben but by putting Agamben and Arendt in dialogue. While Agamben’s reading of Arendt as a quasi-Straussian “political philosopher” is not without some justification, it ultimately fails to do justice to the subtlety of her thought. Arendt conceives of the “classical political categories” neither simply as abiding norms to which political philosophy still has recourse nor as mere historical relics. Rather, she tries to understand politics, and the conceptual distinctions at its foundation, from the “modern” perspective of a biological life-process in which all distinctions have been lost. Politics itself is a surplus production brought forth from within biological life through a critical capacity—a capacity for distinction—that allows biological life to transcend itself. The “classical political categories” are not considered absolutely primary but are seen as effects of the living power of distinction. To sustain this account of the self-transcendence of biological life, Arendt avails herself of a complex notion of history, which, however, involves her thought in seemingly intractable contradictions. History, for Arendt, depends on the concept of fabrication, since, in its specifically linear character, it is comprehensible only as the history of distinctions that have been made, just as the Greek polis depends for its existence on the fabrication of physical walls and conceptual boundaries. While Hannah Arendt will argue that metaphysics went astray...