BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Life-life: Sovereignty.

  
 
multitude.tv
13:24 / 11.05.06
Agamben, Foucault (a dash of Schmitt and an invitation to Deleuze). Or a question on: many biopowers? (what is Agamben getting at with bios/zoe): or “zoe what’s the big deal?” Furthermore, is there a way in which the suggestions of Agamben (the ambiguities and the in-betweens) can be reconciled with the possibilities offered up by Foucault (and Deleuze/Guattari), ethics or micropolitics… and where does the notion of sovereignty fit into this mess.

Giorgio Agamben concludes Homo Sacer with the exhortation that "this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the contestation and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe" (188). What precisely is Agamben suggesting here and how does this conclusion (or does it?) cohere with his development of the concepts of biopower (borrowed from Foucault) and sovereignty (borrowed from Schmitt)? Is Agamben renouncing sovereignty and, if so, in favor of what? Can such a renunciation resolve the conundrums of biopower or might it not be the full realization of biopower? What "form of life" is he gesturing toward? In answering this question you will want to think about how biopower and sovereignty are defined, their relationship to one another, and the ways in which Agamben both develops and diverges from Foucault's conceptualizations.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:18 / 17.05.06
Ammonius, if you're interested in these issues and theorists you might also like to contribute to this thread on sovereignty, bodies and biopowers, which could do with some Agamben-flavoured thinking.

In terms of this thread, could you post some of your own thoughts and responses to the questions you raise, just to get us started? In particular I'm thinking of this:

how the suggestions of Agamben (the ambiguities and the in-betweens) can be reconciled with the possibilities offered up by Foucault (and Deleuze/Guattari), ethics or micropolitics… and where does the notion of sovereignty fit into this mess.

Could you explain what Agamben's ambiguities and in-betweens and Foucault's possibilities are, as you see them, and what you see as the contradictions between sovereignty and biopower? I've done some work in this area and would be interested to talk more about it, but I'm struggling to find a way in to this thread as it's framed.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
15:12 / 17.05.06
I second Deva's suggestion. This thread seems to be phrased as a kind of informal essay question, and it's a bit... well, contextless. I don't know if you'll get many responses unless you write about your own thinking on Agamben and why you think it's important.

(When you do, I'll do my best to respond.)
 
 
astrojax69
08:45 / 21.05.06
what's a 'zoe'? my oxford doesn't have this word.
 
 
nighthawk
12:58 / 21.05.06
what's a 'zoe'? my oxford doesn't have this word.

I think its a transliteration from the Greek, meaning 'life' or 'a living? Could someone outline how Agamben employs it?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
20:29 / 21.05.06
How much of Agamben have you read ? Have you looked at any of the critiques ?
 
 
astrojax69
22:13 / 21.05.06
What precisely is Agamben suggesting here

given nighthawk's post - thank the link site! - i think this, ammonius, is an excellent question. what, in simple terms, is he asking at all?

what is it to be transformed, whose responsibility is it for ensuring the transformation occurs and just what is it that this transformed thing will become?
 
 
Cat Chant
10:09 / 22.05.06
I can do you the difference between bios and zoe, I think. They're both Greek words meaning 'life': bios means 'the form of life appropriate to a particular animal' and zoe is what Agamben translates as 'bare life' (I think this is also what ammonius calls 'life-life' in the title, but I may be wrong), simply being alive as opposed to dead.

Agamben's work is on the relationship between sovereignty (where he takes many of his ideas from a Nazi political theorist called Carl Schmitt, who's been taken up a lot by left-wing thinkers in the last few decades, I think following Laclau & Mouffe) and what Foucault called 'biopower'. The idea of 'biopower' is a counterpoint to Persephone's ideas in the 'Body Sovereign' thread, perhaps: far from the boundaries of our bodies being the point where power stops, political and discursive power actually works on or in our bodies. Our experience of our bodies is not something which is simply resistive to power, then; instead, it's actually constructed within a field of discursive and political force. So power works on us as bios, living/embodied animals, not just as rational subjects. Now Agamben's point is that power works not just on bios - on human life as human, socially constructed, etc - but also on zoe, our bare, animal life. He talks about the Nazi concentration camps as an 'experiment' in stripping away all of bios from the inmates - all the specifically human qualities of their lives - so that they were pure zoe; and he argues that this lays bare the conditions of sovereignty in the modern and postmodern period.* (He talks about how the limits of sovereignty are often tested, at the moment, around the boundaries of life and death: who has the right to keep people alive - cf Baby Charlotte and other similar cases where the state intervenes in the bodies of its citizens. That's why I mentioned him in Persephone's thread, btw: I heard a really interesting conference paper about how his theories are flawed because they don't take foetal 'life' into account, so although the issue of abortion is clearly very relevant and important to his theories, it's very hard to think about it in his terms. I think this is one of those things alas has been talking about in the abortion threads, including Persephone's, about how thinking of 'life' as neutral=male is philosophically and legally dodgy, because pregnancy as a condition of a body is always going to be impossible to think within those terms.)

Anyway, Agamben makes a complicated argument about how bare life (zoe) is included in sovereignty by being excluded from it: that is, I think, though I may be oversimplifying or simply misunderstanding, modern sovereignty justifies its hold over our bodies by producing 'bare life' as excluded from that hold. But precisely by doing so, it gives itself the right to define the distinction between 'bare life' and 'social life' (bios), and hence takes hold precisely at the point of 'bare life'.

So when Agamben says:

this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the contestation and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe

I think what he's talking about is the need for a form of resistance which takes into account this indifference between bios and zoe; which invents a new 'form of life' which doesn't depend on a bios/zoe opposition. But I find it very hard to figure out what that might mean in any more specific terms than that.

In the absence of any response from ammonius, it might be an idea to treat this as a general Agamben thread? I'd certainly be interested to hear people's responses to the way I've characterized his thinking above, as well as to hear other people's takes on him (I've read Remnants of Auschwitz and Homo Sacer, and some bits and pieces by and about Carl Schmitt and by and about Foucault, but not much else in this area). It seems to me that he's important because his theory allows us to link, say, the story of Baby Charlotte (only possible in one of the richest countries of the world) with the story of the inmates of refugee camps, and think about the form of global sovereignty/biopower which has us all - in highly differentiated ways, of course - in its grip.

And ammonius, when/if you get back to this thread, you can maybe let us know what direction you hoped the conversation would take, and what your ideas are about the questions you raised in your first post?

*Actually, he says there's a secret bond between modern and classical sovereignty here, which is one of the things I'm most interested in - he draws on Aristotle a lot, but also on early Roman law/religion, to illuminate the contemporary situation.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:15 / 22.05.06
Actually, I've just found a similar thread on Agamben and resistance here, which might be a useful cross-reference. And here's an old one, where Jackie Susann defines the bios/zoe distinction more succinctly and subtly than me.
 
 
astrojax69
23:56 / 22.05.06
thanks for such a clear account, deva!

i'm not sure how my own views on bare life itself and existence as a member of a class of beings accord with ideals of sovereignty and power; shall muse...


it was john stuart mill's 200th birthday last saturday, btw... on philosophies of power invested in individuals!
 
 
multitude.tv
22:54 / 04.06.06
First off, sorry for abandoning my own thread, I have been extremely busy with moving as of late. Also, the question was a sort of exam question (a question developing out of adiscussion with some friends over Agamben), I am in the middle of working out the difference between Biopower and Biopolitics as related in Foucault and Agamben, as well as the relationship between sovereignty and Biopower. What I am essentially interested in is the ways in which this notion is related to the kind of dissolution of the “state-form” that Hardt/Negri write about; and what’s left. That is what does a Biopolitics (or a biopolitical general intellect) without sovereignty mean? This post is going to be excessively long, and with lots of problems that I am sure anyone can point out.

I want to thank everyone here for writing what they have, and I would love to see this discussion develop in the way it was independent of my silence.
***

Agamben begins Homo Sacer with a central challenge to Foucault’s genealogy of power relations. Agamben insists that biopolitics appears in history much earlier than what Foucault presents in his work. Foucault’s biopower is a particular strategy of power, a particular management of power relations wherein the principal focus of power is on the regulation and maintenance of life. Power, for Foucault should be conceived in terms of the “multiplicity of force relations” immanent to the plane in which they operate. This is in contrast with the strategies of sovereign power; power focused (though not encapsulated) by a single individual who had the power of death. The Sovereign occupies the space of power however power is principle relational between the sovereign and his/her subjects. Foucault conceives sovereignty as the unequal investment of power in particular individuals (such as a King) or institutions (such as the law), which have the ability to decide death.

Biopower, however is the power over life, rather than death. Agamben is in agreement with Foucault on this point. However, for Foucault, biopower is a particular strategic deployment of power relations that emerges in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It is an arrangement that is the result of a number of shifts, mutations or redeployments of power. Biopower, for Foucault arises out of particular strategic arrangements and shifts in sovereign power (the move from a particular sovereign to that of juridical sovereignty, the rule of contracts and law). Agamben, however, asserts that biopower, as the particular techniques of disciplining and managing populations, health and well being is evidenced in the ancient world. For Agamben sovereignty and biopower are genealogically emergent together in history.

Biopower, for Foucault, has as its object the body, particularly through medical, educational, scientific and punitive institutions. Furthermore biopolitical institutions begin by asserting entire discourses on health aimed at populations. Agamben, in casting biopower into the Roman world is compelled to present a new genealogy for biopower, other than Foucault’s.

Agamben draws on the distinction in Ancient Greek between bios and zoe. Here bios refers, to put simply, qualitative life, the standard of living, how one lives in the world; the rational of the rational-animal, the political. Zoe, in contrast is bare life, which is the embodied subject of law, punishment, discipline, education, training, employment, etc. Zoe is close to Foucault’s notion of the body (however, I think Foucault would say that bios is immanent to zoe). Bio is the life of the citizen; zoe is the life of the governed. The determination of zoe and bios, are for Agamben, the principle function of sovereignty. This notion of sovereignty, drawn from Schmitt’s articulation of sovereignty as the position that declares the state of exception (where the citizen ends and the subject of law begins) ties zoe to the state of the body (the subject) in the state of exception. It is zoe that is the subject of violence in the state of exception, that is life as bare life (without quality). Agamben’s notion of sovereignty is, in my sparse reading of Schmitt, lifted more or less directly from Schmitt’s “state of emergency.” Agamben’s appropriation of Foucault diverges greatly from the formulations of the original author.

Foucault’s biopower emerges much more recently within certain disciplinary régimes and asserts itself over the masses by the mechanisms of population control (disciplinary institutions). Biopower is contrasted with sovereignty that it coexists with and overtakes. For Foucault sovereignty and biopower are two specific strategies of power’s dispersion. Agamben agrees with Foucault that biopower (as exercised in biopolitics) will (should?) overcome sovereignty, he writes, “this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site of contestation and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe?” It seems that Agamben is championing the usurpation of sovereignty (along with it juridical sovereignty of law) in favor of biopolitical deployment. It is my view that such a reading of this text can be nothing less than a call to usher in a full affirmation of biopower, as if Agamben thinks there is no hope unless we are in a global camp.
However it seems to me Agamben is posing something much less profound, I read this as Agamben simply reaffirming that it is the body of those that occupy the state of exception (prisoners, students, employees, migrants, criminals, etc) that the political contestations will take place, or rather when political discourse, or power relations are concerned exhaustively with the utter transformation of the concern of bios completely invested in zoe that a transformation in sovereignty will take place. In either case I think that indeed there is a call for the full realization of a biopolitical deployment of power.

On whatever reading Agamben is essentially calling for a usurpation of all sovereign discourse (including juridical). Perhaps it is an old Marxist shout, a call to listen to the materiality of the law, that the law originates in and is concerned with bare life, and that this materiality must be addressed fully in order for a transformation (class consciousness) to occur. In drawing our attention to illegal immigrants; to those bodies that occupy the state of exception, perhaps Agamben is gesturing towards something like a political body akin to Hardt & Negri’s “flesh of the multitude.” That is the management (or inability to manage) flows of bodies over sovereign borders. That is, that bare life, like the multitude calls attention to the materiality of bodies in space without regard (or at least little) for abstract notions of sovereignty or law. The question of how this “form of life” may be understood is not presented in Homo Sacer, in any way that comes to my mind. However one could imagine, like Hardt & Negri’s multitude, a global body that moves freely over the space of the planet, a permanent global diasporas, with no boarders (the sovereignty of the nation-state is obvious dissolved) simply location in relation to other bodies. This material reading of Agamben’s suggestion; however it makes the suggestion itself no clearer, rather articulates a discourse to which the suggestion may appeal.
 
  
Add Your Reply