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Agamben, Homo Sacer and the sacral figures of the day

  
 
Jackie Susann
04:41 / 02.05.03
I have been reading a fair whack of Agamben lately, a post-autonomist (?) Italian philosopher whose recent work has tended more towards political engagement, particularly around displaced people, the stateless, sans papier and refugees. Was wondering if other people here have read his stuff - especially Homo Sacer, and what you thought of it?

Failing that, I will have a go at a summary. Agamben starts HS with the ancient Greek distinction between bios, the bare fact of biological life, and zoe the life of the political subject. For Agamben, modernity has been characterised largely by the increasing dominance of zoe in such a way that bios becomes more and more central, but as the suppressed secret of political existence. Bare life, wherever it appears, is consigned to a condition of exile. Thus the refugee, deprived of all the relations, mediated by the nation-state, which constitute political life, emerges as the sign and site of a bare life no State can tolerate. Refugees, thus, reveal the central contradiction of modern politics. They are, as Arendt said back in the 50s, the most symptomatic group in modern politics.

So, whaddya think about that?
 
 
nihraguk
08:10 / 02.05.03
Speaking from an uneducated perspective -- having not read Agamben or any philosophy concerning refugees and their political status -- I nonetheless feel that it is too much of an overgeneralisation to argue that refugees are
the "sign and site of a bare life". Given that the diaspora of Jewish refugees, for example, form a strong international political force, especially manifested in the Jewish lobby in the US, and given that the Kurdish diaspora, rootless and scattered across nations, have been increasingly of political concern to states such as Turkey, Iran and Iraq, it will seem that perhaps the very fact that the refugee is something that no state can tolerate works to politicise the status of the refugee, rendering him/her a political animal by necessity and by the antagonism of the states that seek to deny him/her entrance or quarter.

In this day and age -- and here is a sweeping generalisation tossed into the mixer -- it seems hardly possible that anyone, any people, may exist as an nonpolitical entity.
 
 
grant
20:12 / 02.05.03
There's something Jungian about that, though. Like the refugee (or diaspora) is the anima of the State or something.

Does Agamben play that sort of game?

If it is a Jungian relationship, then the aim would be to synthesize refugee-ness into statehood to make a coherent "personality."

Whatever that would be like, I'm not sure. I have a hunch it'd look like what's going on in Somalia, though. (to crassly point people towards my own thread downstream from here...)
 
 
Cat Chant
07:49 / 05.05.03
I've read both Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz (Homoo Sacer III) and am extremely attracted by Agamben's thinking, though occasionally I think his arguments are a bit sketchy.

I was really struck by his pointing out that despite declarations of human rights, implying that people have rights as humans prior to being, um, interpellated or integrated into any political/national system, migration practices are making it more and more clear that in practice people are only "granted" rights as citizens of a territorial state.

His conception of the concentration camps as the limit figure of modern biopolitics - a type of space in which the normal order is suspended, which is now expanding - is, um, squicky, but pretty convincing, if you think of the camps as a zone of experimentation with the limit of the human - how far one can go with dehumanizing humans.

He links the space of the camps to refugee internment centres, "zones d'attente" in airports, etc, saying that each type of space:

delimits a space in which in which the normal order is de facto suspended & in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility & ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.

which I think is pretty spot-on.

Nihraguk - I think Agamben is not arguing that refugees exist somehow "outside politics", but that, as populations excluded from the political life of a state (without citizen rights, etc), they make increasingly visible the contradictions on which contemporary politics depends. Also he's making a distinction between 'politics' and 'police'and saying that 'police' is a more accurate term for most political activity today, as power acts more and more directly on 'bare life', rather than on politicized life (this is why the refugee or denaturalized person, without citizen status, is a central figure for him).

Grant - I don't think his aim is to synthesize the refugees into the life of the State. He says The only thought adequate to the task would be one capable of both thinking the end of the State and the end of history together & mobilizing the one against the other and as far as I can make out he thinks the crucial task is to re-shape the relationship between sovereignty and bare life, or violence and law.

In general, I think he's really good on trying to delineate the forms that biopolitical power takes, the structure that associates democracy in its present form with totalitarianism, without making oversimple equations of the different forms. I also think he's a very difficult writer, and he has an annoying tendency towards sweeping statements that say very little other than "Only I can save mankind" - but he has that in common with a lot of contemporary theorists/philosophers/ whatever so I shouldn't single him out.
 
 
nihraguk
12:34 / 05.05.03
deva: Thanks for the clarification.

For lack of anything else intelligent to add to this discussion, it is an intriguing argument that Agamben propounds. Will go read up more about him.
 
 
grant
15:17 / 05.05.03
I'm curious about the relationship between the refugee camp and the concentration camp, then - since one is thoroughly internal to the sovereign state, and one is a weird kind of borderland state/not-state space. Airports are definitely state/not-state. (And I've read news stories about some guy who's living in one of the international areas in an Asian airport. I think it's Chiang Kai Shek Int'l in Taiwan. He has unresolved citizenship issues.)

Although, that said, Germany's concentration camps were all placed in other countries, if I remember right (Auschwitz is in Poland, right?). And the model first came from the Boer War - British colonists putting the Afrikaners in camps during a battle for sovereignty.

So... does he compare refugees to POWs, then? I suppose there's a difference in status, in most cases. (Although in 1960s North Vietnam and today's Guantanamo Bay alike, that difference would be difficult to perceive.)

And Crunchy -- what is a post-autonomist?
 
 
nihraguk
15:52 / 05.05.03
How are refugee camps "a weird kind of borderland state/not-state space"? AFAIK, they tend to exist in the territories of states which designate areas for them to exist in, and exist for as long as the state allows the camp to exist, or as long as it takes to resolve the problem of the refugees. The state which owns the territory the camp is placed on still retains all sovereignty over the physical area of the camp, able to kick them out at will, etc.

I think what is common to both the refugee camp and the concentration camp are the people within the camps, whose status is outside that of the global political life of the international state system, because of the fact that no government lays claim to their protection.
 
 
grant
20:41 / 05.05.03
Well, a refugee camp is a collection of non-citizens, so they're not participating in the state except as internal Others. Thus state (subjects) /not-state (aliens). While in the case of Nazi concentration camps (to distinguish from the other concentration camps), the subjects in the camps were citizens of the state (although, of course, thoroughly disenfranchised). Like, their taxes helped pay for the barbed wire, which is a whole other area of fucked up.
 
 
Jackie Susann
02:45 / 06.05.03
A few things...

'Post-autonomist' in that he follows loosely in the tradition of the Italian 'autonomist' Marxists of the 60s and 70s, most famous for emphasising the autonomy of the working class rather than the repressive mechanisms of capital. He wasn't actually part of any of the autonomist groups, but his political work clearly draws on it somewhat (and he has been published in the context of autonomist work in English, ie the collection 'radical thought in italy').

I think its pretty fair to describe at least some refugee camps as state/nonstate borderlands - but there are very different kinds of refugee camps. Those in Somalia, Pakistan, etc., were not placed in designated areas by sovereign governments but imposed by mass crossborder movements - ie in Somalia where 2 million people were estimated to have crossed the border in one day during the Hutu/Tutsi conflict (and apologies for inevitable spelling mistakes). Once you've got that many impoverished, terrified people in your territorial borders it would court international pariah status to try to kick them out. Many states just make their lives incredibly difficult through indifference.

Also, Grant, Jews in Nazi Germany were all completely denaturalised before they were sent to the camps, so they were not actually citizens. This is a point Agamben makes...

I'm pretty much with Deva on the specifics of Agamben's work - I find a lot of his specific points quite compelling, but his broader arguments sketchy at best. In particular, I have a problem with his conception of sovereignty, and one of my problems at the mo is trying to work out whether you can work with his sub-arguments without bringing in a bodgy historical phenomenology through the backdoor. Will try to elabourate on that later.
 
 
grant
14:43 / 06.05.03
Huh. So in a way, exile never left us.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
05:10 / 07.05.03
I found the most interesting concept in Homo Sacer the notion of a 'state of exception' (which should interest people watching anti-terror laws remove what have been previously regarded as 'inalienable rights') and I kinda like his notion of sovereignty. He meshes biopolitics with sovereignty in a nice way, I reckon. It's sorta hard-going but worth it.

And grant, Agamben argues that before the notion of citizenship or sovereignty was even possible, 'exile' existed. In fact, through the possibility of exile (or exception), an inside and an outside to the state becomes defined.
 
 
Jackie Susann
06:47 / 07.05.03
grant-- one point agamben makes is that traditionally in europe (he cites cicero), there was some ambiguity about whether exile was actually a punishment, or a state of immunity from punishment. i thought that was interesting...

my problem with the concept of sovereignty and the 'state of exception' is that it assumes a prior consistency. for agamben, the sovereign is someone with the capacity to insitute a state of exception that suspends the law, thus being both inside and outside the law. but doesn't this presume a prior consistency of the law? i think his reading of foucault is really pretty bodgy, (not least because he completely misses what foucault meant by biopower on a really mundane level). i'm disinclined to accept the idea that there's any consistency in the application of 'The Law', such that it's 'suspension' is particularly meaningful.
 
 
grant
15:19 / 07.05.03
And grant, Agamben argues that before the notion of citizenship or sovereignty was even possible, 'exile' existed. In fact, through the possibility of exile (or exception), an inside and an outside to the state becomes defined.

Well, there's something very physical about that -- if you're outside the walls of the city, or town, or campfire, you can shit where you please, but the wolves can get you.
That seems sort of basic.

I suppose Agamben's saying it's not only basic, but essential? Pervasive, even?

grant-- one point agamben makes is that traditionally in europe (he cites cicero), there was some ambiguity about whether exile was actually a punishment, or a state of immunity from punishment. i thought that was interesting...

I'm going to get all geeky for a minute here. There was a short story by Robert Silverberg, I think, about a future punishment wherein the convict was sentenced to be invisible for a set period of time. I can't remember whether it was literal invisibility (being science fiction) or *legal* invisibility, or if there was even a clear distinction made. But the whole point of the story - the horror of it - was the absolute freedom of being excluded entirely from society while still living in the city. I vividly remember the one example the narrator gave of the trickiness of the condition: he was free to sneak into the kitchens of the finest restaurant and eat plates of food before they reached the diners, but the chef was equally free to pour a pot of boiling water on him without any thought of consequence. And no doctor would treat his burns.

Which seems kind of up the same alley.


That kind of backs up to a question I have about Crunchy's question:

for agamben, the sovereign is someone with the capacity to insitute a state of exception that suspends the law, thus being both inside and outside the law. but doesn't this presume a prior consistency of the law? i think his reading of foucault is really pretty bodgy, (not least because he completely misses what foucault meant by biopower on a really mundane level). i'm disinclined to accept the idea that there's any consistency in the application of 'The Law', such that it's 'suspension' is particularly meaningful.

Is the sovereign a literal, singular person? Or sort of a metonymy for the consensus of society, an embodiment of the Law rather than its author?
 
 
Perfect Tommy
19:11 / 08.05.03
This seems related to Hernando de Soto on why capitalism hasn't taken in developing nations, and former Communist nations: the supersimplified summary is that because property laws in these nations are outdated and in many instances nightmarishly complex--i.e., it might take years and hundreds of visits to different agencies to acquire the legal right to some piece of property--no one can prove ownership to anything, and thus can't secure loans against property, and thus can't turn ownership of property into useable capital. He estimates that there's a good $9 trillion in such dead capital.

The side effect is an extralegal economy; for example, the "construction industry" was slumping in Peru, yet concrete was being sold at a record rate because of the extralegal construction going on.

The part of The Mystery of Capital I haven't quite processed yet is about how this state of affairs existed in the US's Wild West period, but we've forgotten the intermediate steps of legalizing property.

(Or, I'm totally offtopic and everyone wishes we'd get away from economics for five minutes )
 
 
Perfect Tommy
19:13 / 08.05.03
(I guess whether this post should be moderated away or not is based on the question: how closely are political and economic disenfranchisement related?)
 
 
Cat Chant
09:19 / 13.05.03
Is the sovereign a literal, singular person? Or sort of a metonymy for the consensus of society, an embodiment of the Law rather than its author?

Agamben is taking the definition of the sovereign as 'he who/that which decides upon the exception' directly from Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist (with links to the Nazi party) who is being used a lot by leftish theorists of democracy at the moment - Derrida devotes chunks of The Politics of Friendship to his thought and Chantal Mouffe edited a book of essays on him.

Schmitt attempted to think about political sovereignty in a way which broke the dialectic between constituting and constituted power. For example, the Queen or Tony Blair or whoever could be called 'sovereign' because of the position she/he occupies in the state of Britain - a position which is already constituted. By contrast, when Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence or when Romulus killed Remus, those were acts of constituting power, since they brought into being a new State form and a new basis of authority. In European political thought, constituted power is usually thought as an application of the Law (on the side of culture) and constituting power as a violent breach in the Law (on the side of Nature, cf Hobbes's 'state of nature' as 'the war of all against all', where one is not fighting on the basis of an already-legitimated cultural form). Now, for Schmitt - and Agamben takes this up in a nicely complicated way - the sovereign is neither simply the entity with the most 'natural', violent or warlike power, nor is he simply the person who occupies the position of 'sovereign' in an already-constituted State. The sovereign is sovereign because he (or she, or it if it's a body like a council or government etc) has the power to suspend the law and declare a state of emergency/state of exception (He draws on the practice of the Nazi party again here but I don't have my notes with me so I can't give you chapter and verse). So 'the sovereign is he who/that which has the power to decide on the state of exception' is simply a definitional statement, and I think a very convincing one. Could you say a bit more about your problems with Agamben's take on sovereignty, Crunchy? You say:

i'm disinclined to accept the idea that there's any consistency in the application of 'The Law', such that it's 'suspension' is particularly meaningful.

and I think I sort of get that - but, for example, it is surely politically necessary to fight against, for (topical-ish) example, the 'suspension' of civil liberties on the basis of a sovereign decision that 'the war on terrorism' justifies the State's giving itself the power to, to take up Mister Disco's example, imprison its citizens indefinitely and not be legally accountable in any way? Not that the existence of the Law prevents abuses, certainly, but I think there is a significant difference when there is no legal framework in place to cap or trammel State power...

but I think I might be rambling now...

(Ooh, and my knowledge of Foucault is horribly skimpy so could you explain where he misses the point of Foucault's biopower, as well, Crunchy?)

(There are tons of interesting overlaps with my adored Walter Benjamin here, by the way, and his distinction between 'the state of exception in which we all already live', decided upon and practiced by nation states & the forces of global capital, etc, and the 'good' state of emergency which we should all declare in the name of some new political form which can resist sovereign power as it now stands...)
 
 
Jackie Susann
23:26 / 13.05.03
On Foucault and biopower - it isn't that I have a problem with Agamben's concept of biopower, it just irks me kinda that he claims to be using Foucault's concept, which is something entirely different. In HoS v 1, biopower refers to techniques for managing populations - things like statistics, distribution mechanisms. Foucault describes the object of biopower as the species body, whereas disciplines (as in D&P, etc.) are aimed at the individual body. Obviously, Agamben's biopower refers to the individual body (although not in the same way as disciplinary power, but that is neither here nor there).

But anyway - doesn't the concept of the 'good' state of emergency (which I assume Agamben is at least alluding to in his 'state of exception', since he's written on Benjamin's concept) trump any idea that we can fight whatever injustice on the basis of juridical norms? Isn't it law-preserving violence whether it acts for or against, say, human rights; and isn't it law-preserving violence even if it takes the form of a violation of the putative rule of law?

In any case, I don't think Agamben holds out much hope that laws or The Law can effectively cap or trammel state power. Isn't part of the point of Homo Sacer that the law can only ever be founded on the violent exceptions which maintain its consistency? But then maybe I've argued myself into agreeing with it.
 
  
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