Agamben Calls Research Articles

A Contemporary Myth of Er? From Homo Sacer to Freeform Life in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library

ABSTRACT Like the souls in Plato’s myth of Er, Haig’s protagonist Nora Seed, trapped between life and death in the Midnight Library following a suicide attempt, is able to select alternative lives. Inspired by Agamben and Malabou’s separate readings of the myth of Er, this study posits Nora’s journey as one from the exile of bare life (where zoe is trapped within a bios) to the happy, or philosopher’s exile, characterized by form-of-life (in which zoe is not separable from its bios). At first, then, Nora can be understood as a figure of bare life, in that, even in her selection of lives, she is at first trapped in modes of life which are ultimately imposed upon her through the expectations of others, a situation which arguably provoked her suicide attempt in the first place. However, through the experience she gradually gains via the Midnight Library, she eventually achieves what Agamben calls form-of-life, realizing the unlimited potentiality she contains even within an old, familiar mode of life.

“The Time That Is Left Us”: Imagining a (Post)Pandemic Future and Plagued Temporalities in Michael Bay and Adam Mason’s Songbird

Released during the height of the pandemic, Songbird (2020) received negative criticism from film critics for opportunistically capitalizing on the latent anxieties borne from those uncertain times. Critics have suggested that it sent an irresponsible message by emphasizing the capacity of public health institutions to enable authoritarian regimes. There is, however, critical and cultural value in confronting this problematic cinematic text during the (post)pandemic present as it can potentially allow a rethinking of how we conceptualize temporalities vis-à-vis film aesthetics and narrative. Songbird articulates a dystopian future where COVID-23 has ravaged the world and operates on two temporalities that are emblematic of the tension between the homogenous time of the authoritarian state and the ephemeral time of the people. By positioning the film as an example of what Giorgio Agamben calls “gestural cinema,” I examine how the film seeks to capture the irreconcilability of irrecoverable temporalities and the nostalgic future. The film dramatizes these temporalities in the context of a dystopian world where those infected with the virus are excluded in quarantine facilities while the remaining uninfected populace is forced to stay at home at all times with only a few exceptions. This article theorizes “plagued temporalities” as a new viral modernity that elicits a fresh, altered perception of chance and contingency. In Songbird, these plagued temporalities are experienced by the COVID-23 immune protagonist who can roam freely through urban spaces in solitude while simultaneously encountering figures who have different experiences of lived time.

On the Haunting of Hospitality

Marcabru noted that Jaufré Rudel calls ‘inn of the afar / alberc de lohn’ both the remote place where his beloved lady of Tripoli resides, and the locus where the poets situates himself: an ideal place that Giorgio Agamben calls topos outopos. In the N voice or difficult voice of the trobar, this figures the contradiction on which the troubadour lives: at once the desire for the inaccessible body of his beloved, and the desire never to reach it. This issue is addressed here as a medieval instance of Derrida’s ‘hostipitality’, with the ungraspable as the most precious good ever hosted in the rooms or stanze of the poem, and it is argued that this is primarily a question of translation. As a case in point, this article presents the Magna Curia of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen as a magisterial example of the alberc de lohn topos, where the Emperor became his guests’ guest in a deliberate cultural transference policy that translated Aristotle and his Muslim and Jewish commentators, thus setting in motion a process of reciprocal acclimatization. The article further argues with Walter Benjamin and Antoine Berman, that translation as hostipitality or ‘auberge de loin’ inscribes itself in futurity and reaches beyond the linguistic being of man.

Nachleben der Antike, Time, and Restitution: Notes for a Nocturnal Jurisprudence of the Image

Justice is usually represented as a feminine figure holding a pair of scales and a sword. The history of that image is relatively recent and has attracted a great deal of attention. However, a different appreciation of it may come from a “nocturnal” jurisprudence seeking to foreground its presence and effects in the transmission of modern culture and so also of law. In this essay, I take my cue from Aby Warburg and the Pathosformeln that, he suggested, can be glimpsed through certain material objects inherited from the past—specifically, Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus and other related visual art. I then consider what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the image of the image’ emphasising the timely quality of those images and I ask, with Georges Didi-Huberman, whether it might not be high time to “return” that which those images ostensibly show. The associations established in this essay between those different insights may help to recognise the extent to which the innumerable images to do with justice found at the four corners of the world can make the cognitive and emotional experience of those encountering them a rather more complex and potentially problematic affair than it may be at first supposed. What, on closer inspection, can those images give us to see? Are the ancient configurations they sometimes transmit not made up of crystals of historical memory carrying dormant energies that could be suddenly reignited in unpredictable ways? Should the task ahead not be, in some cases, one of restitution—the inapparent gift that turns the “blotted-out” into something striking that can be then handed over and known? These, I argue, are some of the questions a “nocturnal” jurisprudence of the image can be about.

Human Rights and the pedagogy of fear: a reading of “In the construction to the Great Wall of China” from Kafka

The work seeks to establish a dialogue between Law, Literature, and Political Philosophy on what Giorgio Agamben calls "impolitic of exile," and which is perpetrated by the West against people who seek survival through migration, in many cases fleeing wars provoked and/or financed by the same States that deny them protection and shelter. In the Kafkanian text that serves as a paradigm for this work, the narrator, who was one of the thousands of people who worked in the Construction of the Great Wall of China, describes the reasons, circumstances, and first construction activities in which, on the one hand, the bureaucratic and unquestionable decision to carry it out, and on the other hand the justification for it, named in this text as the pedagogy of fear. Fear from who? Of the northern barbarians, identified as monstrous figures. To us, this method is a particular aspect of globalization because things that do not have personality have free transit by the frontiers; persons with fundamental human rights are prohibited from migrating and searching for a new and good life. The great contradiction: things have a price; persons, value, and according to the political philosophy of Kant, only what has value is genuinely important; things are substitutable. And this is the most contradiction of globalization: the minus value of human beings and their fundamental rights. The work is based on the transdisciplinarity methodology, characterized by dialogue between knows – in this case, International Human Rights Law, literature, and Political Philosophy - and criticism, adopting the prevalence of fundamental principles of Human Rights as a way of protecting human beings in exile.

World, war, zoo: zoo-break narratives in a biopolitical frame

ABSTRACT This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of ‘zoo-break’ narratives in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the figure of the sacrifice zone in particular. Taking the zoo cage as a manifestation of what Agamben calls the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of zoē within bíos, and hence of the sacrificial logic that constitutes the human subject at the expense of the animal, the article explores how in these ‘zoo-break’ narratives, the biopolitical framework breaks down, and how they lay bare the sacrificial logic of human exceptionalism. Focusing especially on the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, the article investigates how this sacrificial logic operates and asks how we might reframe these zoo-break narratives as productive sites for representing and reflecting on history and violence in a more-than-human sense. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the zoo-in-wartime can also be read as a ‘frame of war’ (Butler) in which both human and nonhuman lives become grievable, but only if we engage in a mode of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone.

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The essay offers a critical examination of what Agamben calls the ‘syntagma’, ‘form-of-life’. This ‘syntagma’ becomes increasingly important in Agamben’s work as a way of redeeming and reconciling the archi-political separation of bios and zo?e? ? that his project Homo Sacer undertook, as a whole, to thematise. Given its pivotal function, the attention that ‘form-of-life’ has received in recent years is unsurprising. The present essay aims to show the structural instability of the ‘syntagma’ and its implications for Agamben’s ontology and politics. In doing so, it gestures towards a new path of investigation of the formation of life.

Bare Life and Biopolitics in El Rey de La Habana

In this essay, I propose a reading of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s novel El Rey de La Habana (1999) as a critique of the reduction of political life to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” The novel, written during the período especial highlights the state of emergency and economic crisis that overwhelmed Cuba following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. My analysis centers on Reynaldo, the novel’s protagonist, and the various ways he embodies the thresholds or zones of indistinction that constitute bare life. In Agamben’s terms, Reynaldo exhibits the traits of homo sacer, the sacred man whose exclusion from political life is constitutive of modern sovereign power. In this sense, my biopolitical reading contemplates the central role of excessive corporeality in the novel as an index of the violence of sovereign power during Cuba’s Special Period.

Sexing the Alien: A Posthuman Hermeneutics of the Embodied Self in Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives"

Dominant discourses seek to take hold of every epistemic stratum through ubiquitous attempts to regulate quotidian experiences and routines. Ranging from language to culture, from gender to political organizations, disciplinary practices constitute a complex web of relations in hierarchical structures and produce specific identities and situations for subjects to inhabit. As critical scholarship in body studies has shown, body is among the central focuses of dominant discourses in that a regulated experience of corporeality secures, as a site of ideological inscription, the continuity of governing paradigms. Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives” calls for a reformulation of the ethics of embodiment and explores how anthropomorphic demarcations are imprinted upon the genderless bodies of extra-terrestrial beings. In this feminist narrative featuring the generic qualities of science fiction, the heteronormative register of the anthropocentric thought finds a new space (a different planet) to actualize its political agenda. The story interrogates the functioning of the humanist set of beliefs against the background of the precarious relation of ideology to embodied subjectivity. As resistance is an immanent constituent of power relations, the nonhuman inhabitants of the colonized planet somehow manage to survive upon being captured by men; nevertheless, this happens at the expense of being reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” a way of living that is stripped of its potentials and qualities. This study offers a posthuman hermeneutics of the ideological embodiment in Lisa Tuttle’s story and seeks to question the precarious continuity between ideology and the body.

Joan Didion’s Woman Bartleby in Play It as It Lays

ABSTRACT In her novel, Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion explores passivity as a way to contest the neoliberal conception of freedom. Neoliberalism celebrates ever greater freedom (its slogan being “you can be whatever you want to be”); yet, this freedom coincides with the imperative to compete, improve, and maximize one’s productivity. Against this capitalist notion of freedom, Didion seeks to defend the resolutely negative power of human potentiality, namely what Giorgio Agamben calls “impotentiality” – a potential not to do. For Agamben, the paradigmatic figure of impotentiality is Bartleby in Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” carves out a space for the potentiality-not-to, by suspending the dichotomous logic of potentiality vs. actuality. In Play It as It Lays Didion explores a similar possibility for inaction through her depressive heroine Maria. In a culture in which one’s agency is merely reduced to his or her capital-enhancing activity, Didion suggests that Maria’s passivity, her retreat into herself, paradoxically constitutes a sovereign gesture. It punctures a hole in the capitalist world that knows no limits and no negativity.

On Exception and the Unconscious: Present/Absent, and the Otherness of Childhood

ABSTRACT This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge. In this article, I turn to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception, those times and places where the law and the norm are suspended, such as we have seen most recently in the context of the COVID pandemic, but is always the case sometimes, in some places, most often regarding particular groups of people. I examine, as examples, two particular exception categories, a status in the Israeli legal code called present/absent, and our modern concept of childhood. I use the notions of present/absent and of childhood to think about what we call in psychoanalysis “the unconscious,” the unconscious as a subjective/collective terrain where what is socially excepted and forbidden becomes that which is psychologically dissociated and disavowed. And I reflect on how a social-theory driven perspective on subjectivity can both complicate and deepen our ability to address the intricacies of human experience.

A Tropics of Estrangement: Ghurba in Four Scenes

This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience.

Animality and Entanglement: The Gothicized “anthropological machine” in Bram Stoker’s short fiction

This paper closely reads what constitutes the “non-human” vis-à-vis animality in Bram Stoker’s often overlooked short stories, namely The Squaw and The Burial of the Rats. The Squaw is a tale about an American who murders a kitten in cold blood, and in turn, the mother grotesquely avenges her kitten. The anxiety of interspecies relationship is evident in this text, and I argue that this anxiety allows what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (a system which excludes animals from the zone of livable human life) to operate. The same can be said in The Burial of the Rats where the inability to articulate a boundary between animality and humanity becomes the same thing that pervasively haunts the characters in the story. Here, the vermin and the humans become “relationally entangled” as Donna Haraway puts it and I argue that the notion of entanglement here is precisely what makes the “anthropological machine” gothic in the stories. I also suggest that what makes the representations of animals horrific is the possibility that the caesura between man and animal is non-existent.

‘Native Foreigners’ of Turkey: The Non-Muslim Minority as An Instantiation of Homo Sacer

ABSTRACT Non-Muslims of the Ottoman Empire took part in the nascent Turkish Republic with minority status in accordance with the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. The Law of Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi), as an exceptional law, was imposed on Turkish citizens between 1942 and1943 at the expense of non-Muslim Turkish nationals. Non-Muslims who could not pay the tax were taken to labour camps. Non-Muslims’ treatment by the Turkish state generally has been discussed in terms of exclusion as ‘foreigners’, mentioning the racist elements in nation-state building process. But this article argues distinctly that their inclusive exclusion from the social space and political society produced what Giorgo Agamben calls ‘bare life’, wherein they were subjected to the violence of the sovereign as homo sacers. It critically examines the problematic of sovereignty, using Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty on power and its relationship to the state of exception, depending on the diary of a Greek Turkish citizen written in a labour camp.

Regimes of freshness

Today, it seems that nearly every aspect of life is affected by cryogenic techniques: we cool our food, environments, drugs, organs, eggs, milk, semen, tissue, blood and much more. Our central argument is that these developments lead to the formation of a new form of life, which in many ways is the antipode of what Agamben calls bare life. In analyzing the emergence of cryogenic culture from a biopower point of view, this study offers a new perspective on how populations are fostered and governed through regimes of freshness. While the history of chilled and frozen food slowly gains increasing attention in historical and cultural studies, the historical dynamics of the cryopolitical economy in the network society still need to be explored. Biotechnology, encompassing food production as well as assisted reproductive technology (ART), currently emerges as a most important apparatus (dispositif) of governing populations. It should be understood as a means of ‘biopower’ because it not only contributes to reproducing life but also helps to improve and preserve it. Highly dependent on refrigeration, modern biopower invents a new type of life, which is technologically self-sustained: this is the cryogenic culture. In our paper, we trace the emergence and dissemination of what we call cryogenic life – meaning the ways of producing, distributing, maintaining and dispositioning organic matter via cooling, chilling and freezing. With the introduction of artificial coldness in the late nineteenth century and the expansion of the cold chain, these techniques have become a constitutive element of modern biopower.

Narrative Disorientation and Beckett's Bureaucratic Space

This essay investigates political implications of narrative space in Samuel Beckett's closed-space narratives, arguing for a narratological understanding of these spatial politics. It focuses on Imagination Dead Imagine, a text that radically disorients reader engagement with narrative space. In this text, Beckett collides bureaucratic narrative logic, which compartmentalises and accounts for all details of narrative space, against trenchantly anti-bureaucratic grammar, in which sentence structure disrupts and undermines spatial ordering. This dialectical relationship between bureaucratic narrative voice and unstable grammar critiques the logic that, in Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical sense, defines the bureaucratic nation-state. By associating narrative space and its inhabiting characters with the bureaucratic logic of modernity, Imagination Dead Imagine enacts and examines what Agamben calls the state of exception, inscribing politics onto the bare life of characters. While the text avoids direct reference to these historical conditions, its structure performs and resists the politics implicit in those conditions.

Queering the Social Imaginaries of the Dead

ABSTRACT I offer a philosophical examination and feminist queering of the social imaginaries of the dead – with specific reference to recent public disclosures about death in Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes – by looking at the issue of spectrality through the work of Jacques Derrida and others. What does it mean to respond to the dead, who, though temporarily forgotten, return to haunt us not as remembered human beings but as remnants or remainders? The normative distinctions between past and present; past, present and future; between living and non-living; absence and presence; and self and other are all made indistinct when displaced by a non-linear temporality. What differential is in play with respect to those who are grievable (in Judith Butler’s terms) and the others who constitute what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life? The strategy of memorialising the re/discovered dead seems inadequate, and I outline an alternative hauntological ethics, as suggested by Derrida, and ask if there are queer social imaginaries that allow us to live well with the dead not because we give respect, but because death itself has been rethought. I close with some speculations arising from Deleuzian vitalism and Rosi Braidotti’s optimistic claim that ‘death frees us into life’.

Lyric Wilt, or, The Here and Now of Queer Impotentiality

James Schuyler has often been read as a poet singularly devoted to the beauty of the world as it exists, a seemingly unanimous consensus that makes it surprising that he figures so prominently in José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia as a radical partisan of the future. This essay considers the apparent tension between Schuyler's commitment to the here and now and what Muñoz calls "the there and then of queer futurity," suggesting that the key to understanding these seemingly contradictory commitments is to recognize his career-long investigation into the idea of potentiality. From his very first published poem, Schuyler's works are concerned with the problem of the relation between potentiality and what Giorgio Agamben calls impotence or impotentiality: the potential to not be that is central to the experience of potentiality as such. Attending to various forms of impotence and impotentiality, both figurative and literal, Schuyler's poem conjure a lyric present that allows for a capacious present tense that contains not only the presence of the future, as recently suggested by Paul Saint-Amour, but also a sense of contingency and a wide range of experiences that will never pass into actuality: the beauty of unrealized intentions, the frisson of friends that might become lovers, the insight of poems never written. Attending to this dynamic offers an opportunity to extend theoretical insights into the creative power of bad feelings and failure. But it also underscores the limitations of such arguments, helping us to recognize the power of powerlessness without romanticizing it or losing sight of its debilitating effects. Schuyler's poems thus offer a moving picture of the way that poetry becomes the specific circumstance in which making nothing happen can be a beautiful accomplishment.

I Nomi Degli Dei: A Reconsideration of Agamben’s Oath Complex

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it.

Borders, Bordering, and the Transnation

The hope for a better life that drives increasing numbers of refugees to seek shelter has corresponded to an increasingly hysterical sealing of national borders around the world. Whatever the world would look like without borders, refugees have been reduced to the condition of homo sacer – bare life – in what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception outside the law. This article considers the oxymoronic conditions by which the nation-state produces ‘states of exception’, not only to record the sinister development of the incarceration of asylum seekers, but also to emphasize the tenacious and innovative nature of the processes and techniques by which subjects inhabit borders of all kinds. Despite the powerful structural effects of the state—particularly its effects on transnational mobility— individual subjects inhabit the borders of nations in ways that demonstrate their political mobility, constituting what I call the ‘transnation’. While the transnation—the outside of the state that begins within the nation—may or may not engage in physical travel, it reveals the utopian possibilities offered by the actual proliferation of national subjects. The article considers the function of literature in the transnation, particularly the utopian possibilities it offers to move between the structures of the state.