Homo Sacer Project Research Articles

FROM VOICE TO INFANCY giorgio agamben on the existence of language

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language.

The Notion of Life in the Work of Agamben

In his article "The Notion of Life in the Work of Agamben" Carlo Salzani analyzes the notion of "nudity" Giorgio Agamben's understanding of Western culture. Beginning with a reading of the essay "Nudity," in which Agamben proposes an archaeological investigation of the theological apparatus of the concept, Salzani analyzes the pivotal trope in Agamben's Homo Sacer project, "bare" or "naked life," that is, the nudity of life in the grip of sovereign power. Nudity and the nudity of life are construed as a "limit-concept" in a double movement of simultaneous positing and negation or in a positing that grants at the same time the inappropriability of its object. Salzani highlights how much this "liminality" owes to a tradition that borders the aesthetics and ranges from Kant's "sublime" to Heidegger's Ereignis via Benjamin's "expressionless-ness." In Agamben's thought this risks to resemble a "mystical intuition," as he argues in his first book, The Man Without Content, about Kant's aesthetic judgment.

EXCEPTIONAL STATES

Mahmoud Darwish's transition from the resistance poet of Palestinian nationalism to the ‘meditative and lyrical’ writer he became in his later years has often been controversial with Darwish's readers, who have frequently seen it as a movement away from the politics that first brought him to prominence. The question, as one commentator has provocatively put it, has been: ‘Does Mahmoud Darwish have a right to produce a book of poetry solely dedicated to love?’ (Hadidi 2008: 95). This essay will focus on his poem A State of Siege, which, though written during and about the 2002 Israeli siege of the West Bank, seems at times more concerned with the possibilities for love than with politics. I first attempt to view the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, focusing particularly on the period of the second intifada, within the theoretical framework of biopolitics established by Giorgio Agamben, before then going on to explore the resonances between Darwish's poem and the Homo Sacer project in an effort to bring to the surface the ‘emancipatory possibilities’ implicit in both texts. Ultimately, I want to suggest that there is, in fact, something radically political about the act of writing love poetry in a time of siege.

Reading Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer with René Girard

In his 1 998 book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Italian original in 1995), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben draws attention of his readers to an enigmatic of archaic Roman sacer or man.1 As Agamben notes, sacer was object of a peculiar form of violence, which suggests that Agamben's work on sacer offers a good starting point for a reflection on entanglement of the and violence. According to Agamben, violence that befalls sacer classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as homicide and therefore opens a sphere of human that is neither sphere of sacrum facere nor that of profane action (HS 82-83). In this light, Agamben proposes, homo sacer presents originary figure of life taken into sovereign ban and preserves memory of originary exclusion through which political dimension was first (HS 83). Agamben's attention to violence that befalls sacer suggests that his interest in this figure is motivated by larger frame of Homo Sacer-book, namely, his attempt to expose violent character of sovereignty. However, it is important to raise question of whether Agamben's interpretation of sacer - useful as it may be in context of his philosophico-political project - makes any sense at all in light of ancient Roman sources that are relevant for a discussion of this figure. The aim of present essay is to formulate an answer to this question. Questioning Agamben's interpretation of sacer does not mean that I reject legitimacy of overall aim of his Homo Sacer-project (i.e., unmasking violence of sovereignty), but I do contend that this aim does not justify an interpretation of sacer that is completely at odds with historical reality and that amounts to nothing but a fanciful creation by Agamben. We will find out that Agamben's interpretation of sacer is indeed problematical in light of ancient sources, and we will conclude this article by exploring an alternative interpretation of sacer, an interpretation that will be inspired by work of French- American literary critic Rene Girard.2 Introducing Homo Sacer The sacred man is one whom people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in first tribunitian [sic] law, in fact, it is noted that if someone kills one who is sacred according to plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide. This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. (HS 71) This fragment is Agamben's translation of definition of sacer offered by second-century Roman grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus in his De verborum significatione (On Significance of Words),3 an encyclopaedia of obsolete terms that was originally compiled by another Roman grammarian, Marcus Verrius Flaccus (ca 55 BCE-20 CE), but that only survived under form of shortened version of it produced by Festus. The definition of sacer quoted by Agamben appears under lemma sacer mons (sacred mount). According to Festus, this mountain was place to where plebeians, Roman citizens not belonging to aristocracy, retreated during secession of plebs which took place around 493 BCE. This secessio plebis was a kind of general strike during which plebs left Rome out of dissatisfaction with harsh debt rules at that time and which was solved by allowing plebeians to have their own magistrates, so-called tribunes, and to become in this way constituted as an assembly possessing political power (as narrated by Roman historian Titus Livius in The History of Rome, book II, chapter 32- 33).4 As noted by American historian Judy Gaughan, first tribunician law mentioned in quotation above taken by Agamben from Festus is best understood as the first regulation passed by [newly constituted] plebeian assembly. …

Swearing to God: Agamben's The Sacrament of Language

Swearing to God:Agamben's The Sacrament of Language Charles Barbour (bio) Giorgio Agamben , The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Adam Kotsko (trans.), Stanford University Press: 2011. 104 pages. US $45 (cloth). US $16.95 (paper). ISBN 9780804768979 The human being is that living being that, in order to speak, must say 'I', must 'take the word', assume it and make it his own. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language Those who follow Agamben's work have been waiting for him to articulate its positive or affirmative aspect - his promised consideration of the, as he puts it, 'form of life' that somehow might elude or point beyond the otherwise intractable regime of modern biopower, and the (entire) history of metaphysics on which it is said to be based. This study or intervention, it is believed, will constitute the fourth volume of Agamben's Homo Sacer project - a project that, to date, has included Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, or volume one; State of Exception and The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, or the first two sections of volume two; and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, or volume three. Agamben's most recent book, or most recently translated book, is not the much anticipated fourth volume. Rather, it is the third section of the second volume. It would, therefore, be prudent to continue to wait before endeavouring to integrate The Sacrament of Language within Homo Sacer in general, and to acknowledge that, whatever we might say about it now, its full significance will not be known for a while yet. This review, then, will seek merely to summarize the basic claims of The Sacrament of Language, and leave the problem of context for another time. The Sacrament of Language is, as the subtitle suggests, a study of the oath, or the act of swearing to god. It is organized in opposition to a long scholarly tradition - central to anthropology, linguistics, philology, as well as legal and religious history - that treats the oath as a remedy for the fact that language is ambiguous, or that humans have the capacity to lie, and that locates its origins in a 'magico-religious' stage in human history, or a time when humans genuinely feared divine retribution. According to Agamben, this tradition relies on the 'scientific mythologeme' of 'the primordiality of the sacred' (13), or the myth that human history proceeds from a primitive belief in the reality of the sacred realm to an increasingly rational juridical and scientific codification of that belief. In fact, Agamben insists, religion, law, and science have always comingled in human history. Thus it is of no use to try to understand the oath as a remnant of a primitive age, or to assume that the gods it invokes originally functioned as omniscient witnesses who would punish anyone who deigned to speak falsely. To swear to god is not to fear god's power or reprisal. Rather, Agamben proposes, it is to invoke, or even to partake of, the, as it were, godlike power of language itself, or the power that language has to name the world. The oath, in other words, is not a 'sacrament of power'. It is, instead, a 'sacrament of language' (71). The simplest way of explaining what Agamben means here is to say that, for him, the oath is a speech act, or a performative rather than a constative statement. In other words, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of what I say while under oath, the oath itself, or the act of swearing, refers to nothing other than itself, or that very act. Thus, Agamben claims, it 'cannot be contested or verified in any way'. Rather, it 'coincides with the call and is accomplished and extinguished together with it' (33). Or, to put the same point in slightly different terms, in the oath as in the speech act, the expression and its referent are consubstantial. There is an immediate connection between the world of language on the one hand and that of actions or things on the other. Thus, and once again in opposition to the traditional understanding, the oath...

Homo Profanus: Giorgio Agamben's Profane Philosophy

Giorgio Agamben's work first achieved international recognition—and notoriety—through his study of the sacred in Homo Sacer. This recognition and notoriety grew with the subsequent installments in this still ongoing series, Remnants of Auschwitz (Homo Sacer III), State of Exception (Homo Sacer II.1), and The Kingdom and the Glory (Homo Sacer II.2). Agamben's recent work, Profanations, is, however, not a part of that series. As its title indicates, it turns from the sacred to the profane, and in so doing reveals the most profound intentions of Agamben's philosophy. Agamben's naming the profane rather than the sacred in the title of this work does not, however, represent a turn to a new topic. Beginning with his first books in the 1970s, he has shown himself deeply interested in the idea of the profane, in significant part through terms and concepts employed by Walter Benjamin such as “profane illumination” and “the order of the profane.” In his Homo Sacer project, this idea of the profane has followed Agamben's studies of the sacred like a shadow. With this new work, however, it has moved to the center of his reflections and in doing offers his reader a glimpse of hitherto unseen elements in his personal trajectory, his philosophical vocation, and his political project. The works in the Homo Sacer series have compellingly and persuasively argued that the creating of sacred and sovereign states of exception has often been responsible for the dire states of political affairs we find ourselves in. Profanations seeks to offer a solution.