philosophy and politics
biopower
The most influential dimension of Agamben’s work in recent years has been his contributions to political theory, a contribution that springs directly from his engagements in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Undoubtedly, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is Agamben’s best-known work, and probably also the most controversial. It is in this book that Agamben develops his analysis of the condition of biopolitics, first identified by Michel Foucault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality series and associated texts. In this volume, Foucault argued that modern power was characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than that of sovereign power. Whereas sovereign power was characterized by a right over life and death, summarized by Foucault in the dictum of “killing or letting live,” modern power is characterized by a productive relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum of “fostering life or disallowing it.” For Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” was reached with the transition from sovereign power to biopower, in which the “new political subject” of the population became the target of a regime of power that operates through governance of the vicissitudes of biological life itself. Thus, in his critical revision of Aristotle, Foucault writes that “for millennia, man remained…a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (HS1 143)...
state of exception
...In addressing this conflict between Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben argues that in contemporary politics, the state of exception identified by Schmitt in which the law is suspended by the sovereign, has in fact become the rule. This is a condition that he identifies as one of abandonment, in which the law is in force but has no content or substantive meaning—it is “in force without significance.” The structure of the exception, he suggests, is directly analogous to the structure of the ban identified by Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Abandoned Being, in which Nancy claims that in the ban the law only applies in no longer applying. The subject of the law is simultaneously turned over to the law and left bereft by it. The figure that Agamben draws on to elaborate this condition is that of homo sacer, which is taken from Roman law and indicates one who ‘“can be killed but not sacrificed.” According to Agamben, the sacredness of homo sacer does not so much indicate a conceptual ambiguity internal to the sacred, as many have argued, as the abandoned status of sacred man in relation to the law. The sacred man is “taken outside” both divine and profane law as the exception and is thus abandoned by them. Importantly, for Agamben, the fact that the exception has become the norm or rule of contemporary politics means that it is not the case that only some subjects are abandoned by the law; rather, he states that in our age, “we are all virtually homines sacri.” (HS 115).
-IEP
Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy
Giorgio Agamben
Stanford, 1999
195 A259p