The Use of Bodies
By Richard BFor some writers, thoughts are distilled within a paragraph, or bound tightly within a single sentence, the final clause wrapping the whole within itself. Agamben's prose unfolds across books. It is the last sentence of each chapter which unveils the intended significance of the title, the last pages of a book which reveal the line of thought you have been following for the past few weeks.
This is his primary device of rhetorical persuasion, lending a sense of grandeur to his publications, not least to the Homo Sacer series, of which this is the ninth and apparently final volume. But what this voluminous breadth achieves in terms of ambition, it often sacrifices in terms of the kind of intimate observations which one finds in the tightly constructed sentence or phrase, the staccato texture of criticism. Indeed, Agamben rarely (never?) argues against himself, never allows the reader to witness the tears and knots in the fabric. Thus, as a work of philosophy, The Use of Bodies feels, in a sense, flat. Not flat like a desk, but like something which has been flattened out – a fan perhaps, or a radiator. Its texture has been smoothed over. The ridges of historical time are pushed down so that the transition of ideas can be more adequately pursued. Every moment of unfolding thus reveals a new flattened surface. Traces of those flattened obstacles which remain catch the eye.
The employment of the argument of the 'instrumental cause' by Aquinas in the middle ages is connected, loosely but engagingly, to changes in technology in that period (p. 105). The development of Kant's thought, the secularisation of otherwise theological problems, is identified as concurrent with the beginning of modernity and its crises: the old banners of the Jacobins flutter momentarily off-stage. Such actors, however, always remain in the wings.
Agamben's sympathies reside, clearly, with a left of a kind; the book pointedly ends with a reflection on the word 'anarchism'. His prominence in the left academy surely relies on his commentary on Guantanamo Bay in The State of Exception, the second instalment in his Homo Sacer series, which appeared in 2003. The first part was published in 1995, and should be read as a close, profound work on the ambivalence and impossibility of modern politics. As with Gillian Rose's work from the same period, the object of criticism is politics in general, the new politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall...link