Zones of Indiscernibility

Abstract

The concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" plays a significant role in how both Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben conceive of life. Both attend to a level of sub-individual singularities in order to think life beyond, and below, the human, and it is to this level that the concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" pertains.1 Here, I will trace the divergences between their respective formulations of this concept, which in Agamben becomes a zone of indistinction or indifference, by considering the way each treats the relation between humans and animals. This relation will be the point of departure for the present analysis both because our conceptions of humanity and animality are central to how life gets organized and defined, and because both Deleuze and Agamben take the interchange between the human and the animal to be a zone of indistinction and indiscernibility. Loosely defined in a way consistent with both philosophers, a zone of indiscernibility or indistinction is an ontological domain in which the terms of a seemingly clear distinction are seen to overlap. On Deleuze's understanding, zones of indiscernibility are the loci of becoming. Thus, in A Thousand Plateaus, relations between humans and animals can be understood in terms of a process of becominganimal. Agamben devotes his 2002 text, The Open, to problematizing the ways in which the relationship between humans and animals has been articulated. Further, he clearly believes that the decisions shaping this relation are constitutive of the notion of "bare life," which figures so prominently in the rest of his work. Zones of Indistinction and theInclusion/ Exclusion Paradigm In a recent interview, Agamben asserts the need for a logic of zones of indistinction and his desire "to question the interweaving" of categories that have been rendered distinct and oppositional: in order to understand what is really at stake here, we must learn to see these oppositions not as "di-chotomies" but as "di-polarities," not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances.2 On his account, then, zones of indistinction are regions in which there is a coincidence of two seemingly opposed terms. Their separation and distinction creates two poles, but these poles are not, for example, "the animal" as a rigid, pure entity that is completely disconnected from "the human." Instead, the two poles indicate two types of movement with respect to this fundamental indistinction. The zone of indistinction makes possible relational structures in which all inclusions are simultaneously modes of exclusion and all exclusions are simultaneously modes of inclusion. This general paradigm pervades Agamben's work, which he characterizes as offering genealogies of specific instances of this structure of inclusion and exclusion. Indistinction, then, is the persistent and underlying structure, and what is of interest are the ways in which this indistinct zone is carved up and distinctions demarcated and maintained. The structure of the zone of indistinction can be explained briefly with reference to the figure of homo sacer and the sovereign exception that constitutes this limit figure. The state of exception, which is precisely not an exception but a constitutive exercise of power, is-not simply the enclosure of an outside within the domain of the sovereign power of the state for the purposes of controlling and suppressing it.4 Rather, the state of exception is one in which the law suspends itself in order to ground itself: "what is excluded in the exception [a particular case, e.g., homo sacer] maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule's suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it" (Agamben 1998, 170-71). The form of "non-relation" that characterizes the state of exception also characterizes the figure of homo sacer that is constituted on its basis. …