Agamben and Political Theory

 

Giorgio Agamben’s recent contributions to political theory have profoundly influenced contemporary thought, drawing directly from his engagements with metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His most well-known and controversial work, "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life," provides a comprehensive analysis of biopolitics, a concept initially developed by Michel Foucault in his "History of Sexuality" series. Foucault argued that modern power is characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than sovereign power, which was typified by the right over life and death, summarized by the dictum “killing or letting live.” In contrast, modern biopower is characterized by a productive relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum “fostering life or disallowing it.” According to Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” was reached with the transition from sovereign power to biopower, as the new political subject, the population, became the target of a regime of power that governs biological life itself. He wrote, “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).

 

Agamben engages with Foucault’s thesis in "Homo Sacer," aiming to “correct or at least complete” it, although he ultimately rejects several of Foucault’s historical and philosophical commitments. Agamben argues that Foucault fails to elucidate the points at which sovereign power and modern techniques of power coincide, rejecting the thesis that the rise of biopower marked the threshold of modernity. Instead, Agamben asserts that biopower and sovereignty are fundamentally integrated, suggesting that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (HS, 6). Modern democracy is distinguished not by the integration of biological life into politics but by the fact that modern State power exposes the nexus between sovereignty and the biopolitical body in an unprecedented way. This is because, in modern democracies, what was originally excluded from politics as the exception that founds the law has become the norm. Agamben writes, “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (HS, 7).

 

Several theoretical innovations inform Agamben’s thesis, two of which are particularly important. The first is a re-conception of political power through a reflection on Aristotelian metaphysics and the concept of potentiality, alongside a critical engagement with Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, developed through Walter Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt. The second innovation is Agamben’s theorization of “bare life” as the central protagonist of contemporary politics.

 

Agamben’s motivation in "Homo Sacer" extends beyond correcting Foucault’s account of biopolitics; it seeks to complete Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt. In "Political Theology," Schmitt, the German jurist who joined the Nazi party, summarizes his decisionistic account of sovereignty by claiming that the sovereign decides on the exception. Schmitt argues that sovereignty manifests in the capacity to decide whether a situation is normal or exceptional, and thus whether the law applies or not—since the law requires a normal situation for its application. Against this formulation, Benjamin posits in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the state of emergency has become the rule. To combat Fascism, understood as a nihilistic emergency that suspends the law while leaving it in force, Benjamin advocates for the inauguration of a real state of exception.

 

Agamben argues that in contemporary politics, the state of exception identified by Schmitt, where the law is suspended by the sovereign, has become the rule. This condition, which he identifies as one of abandonment, means that the law is in force but lacks substantive meaning—it is “in force without significance.” Agamben draws on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the ban, in which the law applies by no longer applying, leaving the subject simultaneously turned over to and bereft by the law. The figure Agamben uses to illustrate this condition is homo sacer, a term from Roman law indicating someone who “can be killed but not sacrificed.” For Agamben, the sacredness of homo sacer reflects the abandoned status of sacred man in relation to the law. The sacred man is excluded from both divine and profane law, abandoned by them. Importantly, the fact that the exception has become the norm means that in our age, “we are all virtually homines sacri” (HS, 115).

 

Understanding this claim requires appreciating Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” developed from the Ancient Greek distinction between natural life (zoe) and a particular form of life (bios), especially as articulated in Aristotle’s account of the polis. This distinction relegates natural life to the domain of the household (oikos), while the good life characteristic of participation in the polis (bios politikos) remains distinct. For Agamben, Western politics is founded on the exclusion of natural life from politics, implicating it within bios politikos. The politicization of natural life occurs through its abandonment to sovereign power, exposing life to death and sovereign violence. Bare life is not natural life per se but the politicized form of natural life, emerging from within the distinction between bios and zoe as “life exposed to death.”

 

The historical rise of the concentration camp constitutes the empirical point of convergence for these theses on the exception and the production of bare life. Agamben argues that the camp reveals the “nomos of the modern” and the convergence of democracy and totalitarianism. The camp is the space where the exception becomes the rule, as was the case in Nazi Germany. In the camp, law and life become indistinguishable, with bare life as the “threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and fact into law” (HS, 171). This indistinction undercuts the transcendence or independence of the law as a source of legitimacy, contributing to a normative crisis. If camps are the “hidden matrix” of modern politics, then the normative crisis they reveal is characteristic of our present condition, which Agamben describes as “imperfect nihilism.”

 

Agamben’s work suggests that metaphysics and politics are fundamentally intertwined, with the disjuncture between voice and speech in Aristotle’s account foundational for biopolitics. Aristotle’s distinction between voice and language as the founding condition of political community implies that the transition from voice to language makes possible the distinction between the just and the unjust. Agamben argues that the question of how natural life dwells in the polis corresponds to how a living being has language. In both cases, the living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice, dwelling in the polis by letting its bare life be excluded within it. This disjuncture allows the human to be reduced to bare life in biopolitical capture, demonstrating the entwinement of metaphysics and politics.

 

Despite this damning diagnosis of contemporary politics, Agamben does not succumb to political despair. He sees the crisis of contemporary politics as an opportunity to overcome present dangers. Agamben’s theorization of the “coming politics” relies on a logic of “euporic” resolution to the aporias of modern democracy, including the aporia of bare life. In "Means without End," he argues for a politics of pure means, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s ideas. Agamben writes that “politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought” (ME, 117). Agamben’s vision of the coming politics involves a reckoning with the post-Hegelian theme of the end of history and the Heideggerian theme of Ereignis, aiming to formulate a new life and politics where both history and the state come to an end simultaneously. This new politics would be an “experiment” without reference to sovereignty or related concepts such as nation, people, and democracy. It would entail a “happy life” where bare life is never separable as a political subject, and where communicability itself is the central experience.

 

Agamben’s work in "Homo Sacer" and related texts integrates his metaphysical inquiries with political theory, providing a critical analysis of biopolitics and sovereignty. By exploring the intersections of power, law, and life, Agamben offers a profound critique of contemporary political structures and opens the possibility for a transformative politics that transcends the limitations of current frameworks. His vision challenges us to reconsider the foundations of political community and the role of language and metaphysics in shaping our political realities.