Homo Sacer Series Research Articles

Az ontológiai apparátus deaktiválása Giorgio Agamben filozófiájában

In my paper, I attempt to identify and resolve a (prima facie textual) problem concerning the conceptual strategy of deactivating the ontological apparatus, which I hypothesize draws attention to a particularly important feature of this strategy (and of the Agambenian corpus). The problem lies in the double assessment of the ontological figure underlying the poetic experience (which consists in the exposure to impotence): while in the first volume of the Homo Sacer series this experience (and the ontological gesture that underlies it) is judged by the Italian philosopher as the most radical, but still insufficient, attempt to deactivate the ontological apparatus, in The Use of Bodies the same experience and gesture are presented as the essence of a form-of-life that deactivates the apparatus. After a deeper exposition of the apparently textual problem, it becomes clear that here one of the most important issues concerning Agambenian ontology and philosophy is brought to the surface: not only the success of the Agambenian task (the deactivation of the apparatus) depends on the solution to this problem, but also the clarification of a much broader distinction already raised by Walter Benjamin. It is a question of elucidating the topological difference between the two forms of the state of exception (“virtual” and “real”), since, like all apparatuses, the ontological one is based on the relation of ban and exception.

Reditus into Self-Inflicted Immaturity: Agamben’s Regressions

The article proposes an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy in the context of the idea of self-inflicted immaturity. If Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an exit out of the condition of immaturity marks the pinnacle of the human effort of maturation, Agamben’s philosophy locates itself on the opposite pole. This opposition is justified by the fact that the main task of the Italian philosopher is to develop the concept of a “simply human life”: undivided and unproblematic. In Agamben’s books the simply human life emerges in the realm beyond “the world of guilt and justice” as well as beyond God, spirit, and history, that is, beyond any overarching transcendental structure which the human subject used to assume in order to give its life a form and charge it with a task of bringing this form to perfection. It has neither form nor task, nor vocation, nor mission. It just is what it is, like an infant left to itself from the moment of its inception, counting for nothing in great eschatological schemes, and precisely because of that “naturally joyful.” In order to demonstrate the problematic nature of this approach to defining human life, the article offers an analysis of the basic concepts of Agamben’s philosophy in relation to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Otto Rank, Jean Laplanche and others. A reading of Agamben’s writings in the context of the psychoanalytic tradition of thought allows us to question the foundations of ethics and the politics of form-of-life, which the last volumes of the Homo Sacer series aim to clarify. As a result, it is possible to show that the underlying motif in Agamben’s work — the reversion of the trauma of birth, now taking the form of living as if this wish could indeed be realized, by putting into operation a “destituent potential,” virtually regressing the psyche to the prenatal bliss — despite its appeal is seen as problematic. Agamben’s philosophy paints an image of life that no livable or attributable life can sustain, yet he tempts us, by putting forward a seemingly possible messianic agent: a perverse de-natus, either un-born (most preferably) or already-dead/dying (as a second option).

Lispector’s Halo

In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector’s view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben’s notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one’s living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities.

Bare Life, Facticity, and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Early Heidegger

AbstractThe first book of Agamben'sHomo Sacerseries contains very few references to Heidegger. Even so, the pages that Agamben devotes to Heidegger in the third part of the book are far from a digression. They touch on a number of crucial topics that are vital to both Heidegger and Agamben, such as the relationship between philosophy and politics, the specific philosophical motivations behind Heidegger's political commitment, and life as a central philosophical theme. This article evaluates Agamben's interpretation of Heidegger in those pages by concentrating on two interrelated questions: (1) whether and to what extent Agamben's biopolitical reading of Heidegger is plausible and persuasive, and (2) how to judge the relationship between their respective accounts of life, which center around the two seminal concepts of “bare life” and “facticity.”

When did biopolitics begin? Actuality and potentiality in historical events

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno’s own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power.

A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary

The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.

Potentiality, Forms of Life, and Politics

ABSTRACT The meaning of potentiality and the relationship between potentiality and form of life recur in multiple ways throughout Agamben’s work, from his interpretation of Aristotle to the political turn in his Homo Sacer series. If the object of the Homo Sacer series is to disclose and criticise the ways ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’ have been conceived and employed in political thought, and subsequently to provide an alternative approach to potentiality that heralds an alternative politics, the question at the heart of this essay is whether Agamben’s proposal of an inoperative ‘form-of-life’ adequately responds to today’s political upheavals. By ignoring the concrete manifestations of capitalism in their historical context, Agamben risks missing the emancipatory opportunities specific power-relations hold.

Instruments of immolation: Giorgio Agamben and the Eucharistic reformations of the sixteenth century

Throughout the Homo Sacer series, Giorgio Agamben takes seriously the political and philosophical significance of Christian ritual in his archaeology of Western political discourse. In Opus Dei, Agamben argues for the sacrifice of the Mass as the paradigm for the ontology of effectivity, an ontology he sees as still regnant in the West. This ontology depends on the discourse of duty or office, and it begins with the priestly office. The priest’s duty is to be an “animate instrument” in the Mass. However, Agamben’s archaeology contains a massive gap between scholastic theology and Enlightenment political theory—the Protestant Reformation. I argue that Agamben’s hypothesis requires attending to the reformation of the Mass. Examining the works of Luther and Zwingli, I show that in spite of their rejection of the priesthood, the discourse of duty and operativity not only persists but expands through their respective sacramental theologies.

On use and care: a debate between Agamben and Heidegger

ABSTRACT The theory of use with which Giorgio Agamben concludes his Homo Sacer-series is introduced as an alternative to the concept of care. This article critically examines the ontological status of use and care as developed by Agamben through the lens of Agamben’s discussions with Martin Heidegger’s thought on the notion of use. In particular, it is shown that this discussion includes at least three different stages: Agamben’s explicit analysis of the relation of use and care in Sein und Zeit, Agamben’s attention to the more ontological and abstract sense of use in ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’ and, much more implicit, a debate between Agamben and Heidegger concerning the role of use and concern in their reading of the letters of Saint Paul. This article critically discusses these three stages in order to flesh out in detail the basic disagreement between Agamben and Heidegger on the role and the sense of use in relation to care and related terms.

Beyond the Agamben paradigm: The spatial logics of exceptionalism

This article considers how notions of space shape Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and its thesis of sovereign violence. To do so, it examines the paradigm as Agamben’s principal methodological ...

Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series

The last two volumes of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series are concerned with developing a theory of use. This article offers a critical assessment of the two concepts, use and form-of-life, that form the heart of this theory: how do these two notions offer a solution to the problem of bare life that forms the core of the Homo Sacer series? First, the author describes how the original problem of bare life is taken up in The Use of Bodies and how the notion of use offers an important additional characteristic of bare life. Second, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of ancient Cynicism, the author discusses in which sense the type of ‘solution’ Agamben offers to the problem of bare life might be seen as an heir to ancient Cynicism and how this interpretation clarifies his connection of form-of-life and exile. Third, the author critically assesses the different usages of use that we can find in Agamben, by comparing how Franciscan usus, Pauline chrēsis and Platonic chrēsis are taken up in his analysis. Fourth, following Foucault, the author deepens the Platonic sense of use and its relation to taking care of justice. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Agamben’s reading of Plato’s myth of Er, in which the motifs of use, exile, and care are gathered.

Arché-ic: Secularization in Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” series

This paper puts Agamben in conversation with the topic of secularization. The fit between thinker and topic is quite natural, given that Agamben frequently approaches modernity through a theological archive, takes secularization narratives as the contrast space for his own account of intellectual history, and regularly discusses secularization through the lens of signatures. The result is that his work ends up revising secularization narratives by relocating the source of modernity in a deeper metaphysical regime rather than a past historical moment. The paper begins first by outlining Agamben’s engagement with secularization theorists and concepts throughout the Homo Sacer series. Next, I sketch Agamben’s ontological picture, exploring the “arché” as the backdrop for his analysis of secularization as a signature. I conclude with three ways Agamben’s work might reconfigure our conversations about the secular and allow engagement with new theoretical partners. By turning our attention away from the binaries of religious/secular to the third option represented by the messianic, Agamben revises traditional narratives about the decline of metaphysics, broadens our alternatives beyond the overly-narrow constraints represented by someone like Charles Taylor, and opens the beginnings of a possible rapprochement with postcolonial accounts of modernity.

Agamben’s Space and Postcolonialism

아감벤의 [호모 사케르] 프로젝트는 ‘수용소’의 역사를 추적하는 ‘고고학’적 연구이다. 아감벤이 영역판 [호모 사케르]의 표지에 아우슈비츠의 설계도를 실었다는 사실은 그의 작업 자체가 전체주의의 ‘공간’적 설계를 이론적으로 도식화하려는 시 도이며, 그의 공간에 대한 사유가 오랫동안 지정학적 공간이 그 분석의 대상이었던 ‘탈식민주의’ 비평과 맞닿아있다는 것을 보여준다. 사실 아감벤의 [호모 사케르] 프로젝트와 관련된 ‘생명정치’ 연구는 인종주의, 민족주의 주권, 난민 문제, 디아스포 라 등 탈식민주의가 주안점으로 삼고 있는 이슈들에 활발히 전유되고 있다. 하지만 그러한 이론의 쓰임에는 문제에 대한 검토가 선행되어야 할 것이다. 아감벤의 이론을 탈식민주의에 전유하기에 곤란한 이유 중 하나는 그의 이론에 내재하는 칼 슈 미트의 공법철학이다. 특히 주목해야 할 점은 슈미트의 결단주의가 아감벤에게 있어서는 ‘공간’적인 문제로 발전했다는 사실이다. 아감벤의 이론은 주권자의 ‘결단’이 주체를 수용소와 같은 법적권리가 박탈된 ‘예외적인 공간’에 구속하는 권력이라 고 상정한다. 아감벤의 공간 이론에 내재한 슈미트의 결단주의 덕에 수용소가 주체의 ‘합의,’ ‘선택,’ ‘투쟁’을 거치지 않은 주권의 자의적 ‘결단’에만 좌우된 공간으로 이해될 소지가 있다. 이러한 문제는 아감벤의 이론이 탈식민주의에 원용될 때 큰 불안으로 남는다. 아감벤이 아리스토텔레스 등 그리스 철학자들의 글을 분석하여 ‘비오스’와 ‘폴리스’의 영역이 일종의 정치적 영역으로서 일치한다고 보았던 점을 고려한다면, 비도시의 영역, 즉 아감벤의 담론에서 ‘수용소’로 요약되는 공간은 ‘조에’의 공간적 위치로 인식된다. 즉 그의 논리를 따르다보면, 탈식민 사회의 영역은 수용소의 공간으로 환원되는 경향이 있다. 사실 아쉴 음벰베를 포함한 많은 탈식민주의 학자들이 아감벤 이론의 공간적인 논리를 그렇게 수용하여, 아프리카와 남미의 탈식민 사회, 탈공산주의 러시아 사회, 가자지구 등에 적용하고 있다. 따라서 아감벤을 경유하여 식민주의를 분석하는 이론은 자칫 식민권위를 ‘주권’으로 피식민자들을 ‘벌거벗은 생명’으로 간주함으로써, ‘식민권력’과 ‘식민지의 삶’의 관계 를 ‘나치의 권력’과 ‘수용의 삶’의 관계 단순화 할 수 있다. 그것의 결과는 ‘저항’과 ‘탈주’가 불가능한 폭력이 일방향으로 흐르는 식민지의 공간을 상상하는 것일뿐이다.Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, as an archaeological project, follows history of camps. In its English translation of Homo Sacer, Agamben uses the blueprint of Auschwitz as its jacket showing that his work is an attempt to delineate the spatial design of fascism. Agamben’s philosophy is inseparable from and intricately articulated with postcolonialism that has analyzed the spatial understandings of colonialism. In fact, today Agamben’s theories are extensively received in postcolonial studies, especially, analyzing the issues of racism, national sovereignty, diaspora, and immigration. This essay critically examines receptions of Agamben in postcolonial studies, and reveals their related theoretical problems. The first reason Agamben’s theory is thorny to be used in postcolonial studies is that his theory is based on Carl Schmitt’s decisionism, and this extremely pessimistic philosophy of power relations develops into the question of “space” in postcolonial theories that follows Agamben’s reception of Schmitt. As Schmitt believes that the sovereign is who decides, its Agambenian development tends to understand camps as a space where political power is swayed one-sidedly by sovereign decision. In Agamben’s concept of camp or colonial space, inevitably, subjects are reduced to bare lives, deprived of any political agency. Ironically, Agamben’s theory repeats Nazi’s argument by saying that it should be avoided. Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial theory, for instance, follows Schmitt’s decisionism via Agamben’s spatial understanding, and in his theory the entire postcolonial world is reduced to a camp ruled by sovereign decision where subjects are reduced to bare lives.

The use of bodies. Agamben’s idea of a non-capitalist form of life

With the notion of the form-of-life as a counter-figure to the notion of bare life, Agamben seems to invite us to place at the center of a critical theory of capitalism a reflection on bios. To envisage a form of emancipation that unfolds against bare life suggests, at first glance, another relation to the living body. Such a gesture seems to be inspired by the desire to think a natural life that would also be a politically qualified life. The idea with which Agamben closes the Homo Sacer series, namely that of a use of bodies, also gestures in this direction. In this paper I show how the categories of bare life and of the use of bodies fail to live up to their promise, before demonstrating in what sense the idea of a subtraction of law as a political project which subsumes all others ends up weakening the critical potential of the idea of a form-of-life that is to be realised against the force of production of bare lives.

The German Beast Unleashed: Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht and the Suspension of 'Human Rights' in the Era of Nationalism

This article scrutinises the aporetic confrontation of different ultimate values in Kleist’s infamous Die Hermannsschlacht, namely nationalism and a basic notion of ‘human rights’. Kleist’s play does not settle for one of these priorities, but conceptualizes the nation as a facilitator, promulgator, and protector of rights and — at the very same time — as an inexorable principle of selection which ties the notions of exclusion and elimination closely to those of inclusion and participation. In this respect, Die Hermannsschlacht not only prepares and anticipates elements of Carl Schmitt’s political theory, but also comes very close to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and the production of politically qualified life in his Homo Sacer series. However, it does so without completely abandoning the universal ideas of human rights.

Book Review: The Use of Bodies

The Use of Bodies. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. xxii + 291 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).With English publication of The Use of Bodies, we now have final volume of Giorgio Agamben s remarkable series of investigations into ontological foundations of Western politics. Beginning with eponymous volume in 1995, nine entries of Homo Sacer series attempt an elucidation of deepest philosophical and theological foundations of contemporary Western politics. As Agamben specifies his project, he is after the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had remained at same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in (p. 263).In book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben famously claimed that Western politics is based on aporiatic exception, where natural life (zoe) was distinguished from a political life (bios). We see this distinction most acutely in Roman legal figure of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is paradoxical because it is a life that can be killed (because it has been stripped of its political meaning), yet not sacrificed (also because it has been stripped of its political meaning). Precisely because of its (former) life in political order, figure of homo sacer has been stripped of its political being and exists merely as bare life (zoe). It is included in political order only, paradoxically, by exclusion.Through an intricate analysis of both ontological and theological themes, Agamben claims this divlsio is fundamentally constitutive of Western political order. Politics, then, is founded on a specific definition and attendant understanding of life. In so doing, West produces a politics that brings natural life, or very fact of living, into question. Moving beyond Foucault and Arendt, Agamben controversially names concentration camp as bio-political paradigm of Western modernity, place where sovereignty can both produce and have absolute power over bare life. The paradigma of camp is representative instance of bio-political control that sovereign power wants to achieve; not then as an aberration of modern West, but rather its truest expression.In The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to series' origin and takes up again topic of life, giving us perhaps most complete genealogy of philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of form-of-life, long awaited in his work. …

Living à la mode

The publication of The Use of Bodies, the final volume in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, makes it possible to take stock of Agamben’s project as a whole. Having started with a powerful critique of the biopolitical sovereignty as the essence of modern politics, Agamben concludes his project with an affirmative vision of inoperative politics of form-of-life, in which life is not negated or sacrificed to the privileged form it must attain, but rather remains inseparable from the form that does nothing but express it. The article begins by reconstituting the non-relational logic that Agamben develops in order to render inoperative the existing apparatuses of ontology, ethics and politics. We then address the dimension of lifestyle as a new key domain of Agamben’s work, in which biopolitics may be recast in an affirmative key of form-of-life. While Agamben is better known for sceptical and scornful statements about contemporary liberal democracies, we shall argue that his affirmative biopolitics, characterized by destituent power, resonates with Claude Lefort’s understanding of democracy as structured around the ontological void and epistemic indeterminacy. In the conclusion we question the viability of this biopolitical democracy, focusing on Agamben’s example of the Nocturnal Council in Plato’s Laws.

Ungovernable: reassessing Foucault’s ethics in light of Agamben’s Pauline conception of use

ABSTRACTIn the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’

Borgerkrig fra Athen til Auschwitz:

The starting point of this article is the concept of civil war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series. In spite of its relative obscurity, Agamben insists that civil war is the fundamental political structure, which has characterized all of Western history since Ancient Greece. As such it constitutes a privileged vantage point from whence it is possible to discern the limitations of his political thought. These limitations originate in his deployment of Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, which serves to include civil war in the sovereign order – this entails that classical modes of political contestation and conflict e.g. revolution, are always already internal to the sovereign state, and can therefore only serve to reaffirm it. The state of exception thus produces an inherent incapacity to think or move beyond the sovereign state. Agamben subsequently attempts to challenge the state of exception albeit with varying degrees of success. This suggest the necessity of taking exception to the exception and explode the conceptual coupling of civil war and sovereign power, in order to create a space where it is possible to think political contestation within or beyond the works of Agamben.

Forvaltningen af det bestående:

The article investigates Giorgio Agamben’s turn to, and radicalization of, Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which Agamben argues constitutes a ’decisive point’ in the Homo sacer-series. The article shows that in the investigation of the Trinitarian oikonomia, Agamben finds the point of intersection between the ‘totalizing procedures’ of the state and ‘individualizing techniques’ of biopolitics thereby disclosing the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and government and politics and economy, which constitutes power in the West. Furthermore, the article argues that Agamben shows how the economy is not something distinct from politics, encroaching on its logic, but rather how the governmental paradigm of the West constitutes the continual administration of the given, the continual and perpetual government of the economy and thereby of the existing economic and political power-relations.