Agamben and Baudrillard

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International Journal of Baudrillard Studies

ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)

Intersections and Divergences in Contemporary Theory: Baudrillard and Agamben

On Politics And the Daunting Questions of Our Time

Form of Life1

Giorgio Agamben

(Collge In International de Philosophie, Paris, France)

Translated by Vincenzo Binetti

(Department of Romance Languages, University of Michigan, USA), and

Cesare Casarino(Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, USA)

With an Introduction by

Gerry Coulter

(Bishops University, Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada).

I. Introduction

There are some interesting writers I like what Agamben writes2

We are now in the transpolitical sphere the zero-point of politics, astage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endlesssimulation. politics will never finish disappearing nor will it allowanything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the politicalreigns.3

Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse4

Why does Baudrillard enjoy reading Agamben? One reason is that while there are

few direct conceptual overlaps there are many thematic ones as each, in his own way,

attempts to push us beyond contemporary understandings of the state and politics. Both

share a deep mistrust of media and political elites, the nation state, technology, and are
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strong proponents of thought and writing as powerful forms of resistance. Both are also

deeply concerned about terrorism but more so with the terrorism perpetrated by states

than rogue groups. Both thinkers also share a kind of optimism although if there is a

difference between the two, it may reside in Baudrillards understanding that the

catastrophe that Agamben seeks to avoid, may have already taken place. Finally, both

thinkers have suffered a certain marginalization which speaks to the depth of the banality

of our institutions of higher learning given that Agamben and Baudrillard press us to

examine some of the most daunting questions humans have ever faced.

The reappearance of Agambens 1993 essay Form of Life which follows, and

this introduction, are intended to serve two purposes: 1) To provide Baudrillard scholars

with one of Agambens most important earlier writings one in which he deploys many

of the concepts he has been working with since; and 2) to stimulate those interested in

Baudrillards writing to consider some of the points of intersection and possible points of

divergence between these two important contemporary theorists.

Agambens essay anticipates key aspects of our current hysteresis of the

political5 by a decade, especially the current effort to replace discourses of progress and

freedom with discourses of catastrophe and security. Critical thought on terrorism and

security is now dominated by mainstream analyses such as Michael Ignatieffs The

Lesser Evil.6 Such books, which provide little more than scholarly justification for U.S.

government actions, are accompanied by the painful appearance of a leading American

civil libertarian, Alan Dershowitz, in the national mainstream media delineating the

acceptable (legal) way for the U.S. government to implement torture in interrogations.7
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And so the Americans run their camp at Guantanamo Bay, Tony Blair emerges from

the British election cleansed of the misleading statements that took Britain to war in Iraq,8

and everywhere people doubt the trustworthiness of their leaders (Enron, the Canadian

sponsorship scandal,9 the War in Iraq, Food for Oil, the European Constitution,

Berlusconi, etcetera). In such times, it is useful to look at the thought of Agamben and

Baudrillard in concert as we attempt to think beyond the present. This leads to complex

and disconcerting questions as we enquire into an other side of the current morass and

wonder if we may have entered into a terminal phase of humanity?

The work of Agamben and Baudrillard shares a deep and necessary distrust of the

contemporary nation state. In Form of Life, we find Agamben, like Baudrillard,

uncomfortably at home in the uncertainty of our times, attempting to provide a challenge

to the system which envelopes us. Agamben is a proponent of thought and writing against

the systemic forces of science and technology. For Agamben a political life is aimed at

the one thing that makes us human the fact that happiness is always at stake in ourliving essential to our form-of-life as humans. For Agamben life can never be separated

from its form-of-life but this is precisely what political power attempts to do today as

what Agamben terms pseudo-scientific ideology has invented the term biological life

as the secularized term for naked life. Naked life, for Agamben is now the dominant

form of life everywhere because political power has succeeded in founding itself on a

separation of naked life from form-of-life.10

I think of Agamben when Baudrillard speaks of his own virtual state of rupture

with the political world11 and it is precisely this break, the lack of system commitments,
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that make both he and Agamben such acute commentators on the (trans)political today.

Baudrillard has long identified the state with the management of the epidemic of

consensus from which terrorism, ridiculous and destined to failure as it is, protects us.

Indeed, the state and terrorism both serve the system well. The state has held us nuclear

hostages since the end of World War II,12 and now the entire planet is reduced to a

battleground for the war against terrorism. Today terrorism and the state have become

accomplices in a circular set-up where terrorism makes no more sense than the state

does.13

Taken together, the thought of Agamben and Baudrillard anticipates a kind of

escape velocity from the tired formulas and repressing structures of the present and its

seeming slide into the inhuman.14 Agamben recognizes not only that the state of

emergency is not the exception but the rule in modern political power,15 while

perceptively pointing out that political power works very hard to produce emergency and

in so doing attempts to construct naked life as the dominant form of life everywhere(which is the hidden foundation of modern political power). This is not far from

Baudrillards focus on the police state globalization and total control of the terror

of economic deregulation and liberal globalization which ends up in a maximum of

constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society.16 For Baudrillard,

a survivor of the twentieth century, the century of the camps, of Stalin, and of the

stillborn but enforced consumer freedoms of the West, terrorism is still a lesser evil than

a police state capable of ending it.17 As he wrote over two decades ago:

...what kind of state would be capable of dissuading and annihilating allterrorism in the bud...? It would have to arm itself with such terrorism and
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generalize terror on every level. If this is the price of security, iseverybody deep down dreaming of this?18

Here we find Baudrillards position very close to Agambens assessment of the state of

exception: If the terms were not contradictory, one would say that security has become

our destinyan overprotected species which, in their domestication, are dying of too

much security.19

Agamben and Baudrillard each seize upon the faked [and much televised]

massacre at Timisoara, Romania over a decade ago to illustrate the way in which the

media compounds the depths of uncertainty. For Agamben Timisoara is the

Auschwitz of the age of the spectacle: and in the same way in which it has been said that

after Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, it will no longer be possible

to watch television in the same way.20 As Baudrillard expresses the problem of

Timisoara: ...this Romanian affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses Never again will

we be able to look at a television picture in good faith21

In this, and elsewhere, thewriting of both Agamben and Baudrillard is refreshingly devoid of mediated platitudes

about the roles of Europe and America in the world. Agamben sounds quite like

Baudrillard when he speaks of a Europe whose catastrophe one can already

foresee.22

Despite (or because of) their loss of faith in politicians and the media, and the

shared understanding that the greatest threat to civil liberties and freedom emerges from

the very state institutions whose role it is to protect and uphold them, there is a hopeful

and optimistic tone in both Agamben and Baudrillard. Agamben has a faith in people as
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(essentially) political animals to reach new solutions while Baudrillard privileges

ruptures, backfires and reversals in the operation of the system that he believes are more

likely to provide momentary relief it not solutions.23 Throughout Agambens writing

since 1993 one finds a consistent pessimism of mind (his understanding of history)

tempered with an optimism of heart (his belief in human kind to overcome the limits it

has placed on itself). As in Arendt, thought always remains our hope for Agamben. For

Baudrillard the task of thought is to press beyond the conceptual confines of the system:

the task of philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and

processes, even if they are catastrophic. The only justification for thinkingand writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyondthe discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking.For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear:we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.24

Baudrillard appears more willing than Agamben to look over the edge of the

political abyss we face at present and he, like Virilio, has a well honed sense of

catastrophe. For Agamben, what Baudrillard terms the transpolitical is the protracted

eclipse politics is undergoing in which it appears in a subaltern position with respect to

religion, economics, and even the law, because it is losing sight of its own ontological

status: it has failed to confront the transformations that have gradually emptied out its

categories and concepts.25

If there is a significant difference between Agamben and Baudrillard, it may well

concern the actual level of optimism each holds for the future. Agamben maintains a

vague hope for the future in his understanding of the citizen and community based

essence of politics and language. Baudrillard wants us to examine the possibility (I tend

to take it as a warning more than a forgone conclusion) that the catastrophe has already
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taken place. Agambens project is to contribute to the resuscitation of the ontological

status of politics and to seek genuinely political paradigms in experiences and

phenomena that usually are not considered political or that are considered only

marginally so.26 This approach leads Agamben to investigate what he calls the natural

life of human beings and the state of exception, which takes him to the camps,

refugees, language, and the sphere of gestures as central concepts. Alongside of

Baudrillards use of theory as challenge and his notion of the transpolitical, Agamben

takes his place with important conceptual and methodological questions.

It is possible to think of Agamben writing about a fork in the future road of

humanity. One fork leads to what Baudrillard calls the perfect crime or in Agambens

words, where post historical humans take on their animality and govern it with

technology. The second fork, which Agamben wants us to take, leads us to take on our

animality in such as way that it no longer remains hidden nor is made an object of

mastery27

in a state of bare life.28

It is in this way that Agamben believes we canprepare for a politics to come. Agambens purpose in writing is to constantly force us to

think about the fact that there is no truly human future or animal future if we take the first

fork in the road.

Baudrillards post-catastrophic tone29 forces us to consider that we may have

already taken the wrong fork in the road. If we take Baudrillard (and Agamben) seriously,

while approaching our situation with a Baudrillardian sense of the post-catastrophic, we

may look more clearly into the heart of the (in)human. There we find that Auschwitz was

the destiny of a creature committed both to technology and difference a modern death
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factory as the industrialization of death at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an ultra-

modern form of death dropped from the sky the anticipatory act of Americas current

zero deaths (to US troops) policy. After these catastrophes is it possible that we have

lingered on in a post-catastrophic civilization in varying conditions of the indefinite a

growing uncertainty as the only revolution we know? Perhaps television (and all screens

which may be the greatest catastrophe of all), arrived just in time to spare us

opportunity for reflection on catastrophe while promotional culture accelerates us toward

our appointment with destiny. The culture of self congratulation, promotion, and

advocacy enjoins speed with television, attaining hyper-velocity while reconciling us toour artificial environment of violent images superimposed on fear and the desire for

hyper-security, virtual war, and total triviality. The world becomes an infinite garbage

dump for the consumer processors of the hyper markets. Were we made for this? Are we

the virus to kill the planet?30

For Baudrillard we must enquire into the history of the species which globalizesand ponder the fatal destiny of this human creature. We must understand that before

Europe and America perpetrated the holocaust on cultures around the world they

achieved the same offence on themselves. The mass destruction exported today by the

moderns is a violence emanating from deep in the recesses of our culture. How many

regional dialects were sacrificed on the alters of the French and German national

languages? How many aboriginal cultures savagely destroyed by the European settler

societies? Modern culture is the product of millennia old processes of this kind of ethnic

cleansing. We must recall these holocausts perpetrated first in the modern countries

and see them as further developments in a long chain of globalizing catastrophe.
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Benjamins Angel31is helpless and has long been so. As the pile of wreckage

accumulating at his feet grows higher, as hundreds of cultures and languages become

extinct in the face of promotional modern culture, we must ask ourselves a Baudrillardian

question: what impulse, deep down in the species, lies at the origin of this ruthless

murder, this ruthless suicide.32 It is in a context that takes such questions seriously, and

which no longer attempts to avoid the question of fatal destiny, that we can examine in a

new light the death factories of our time (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Durfur). Baudrillard also

leads us to wonder if the experiment we conduct on ourselves today is merely part of a

longer one we have perpetrated on all the animals:

What did the torturers of the inquisition want? ...confession restored areassuring causality Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered allof divine creation suspect. In the same way, when we use and abuseanimals in laboratories, in rockets with experimental ferocity in the nameof science, what confession are we seeking to extort from them, frombeneath the scalpel and the electrodes? Animals must be made to saythat they are not animals.33

To this has recently been added the torture of ourselves as a species with our

technologies. We have become the subjects of our own experiment our own guinea-pigs

for genetic experimentation, cloning, and Cyborg implants. But the destiny we gamble

with is more than out own, it is the life of all the animals of the planet with whom our

genetic structure is enmeshed. Is self extermination and the ending of all animal life on

the planet our destiny?

...perhaps we may see this as a kind of adventure, a heroic test: to take theartificialization of living beings as far as possible in order to see, finally,what part of human nature survives the greatest ordeal. If we discover thatnot everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically andneurologically managed, then whatever survives could be truly called
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human: some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finallybe identified. Of course, there is always the risk, in this experimentaladventure, that nothing will pass the test that the human will bepermanently eradicated.34

It is an open question whether anything human can survive. If the experiment

goes wrong, like all species we will have arrived and departed. It may be precisely our

purpose to not let be. For Agamben there will be a politics and a philosophy to come

and I can only envy the poet in him who has such faith. I remain uncertain as I ponder the

irony of the publication of Agambens bookThe Open, which takes up these questions in

detail, just as the clock struck twelve in the conquest of our own genetic code and itsprivatization in corporate laboratories.35 If we are however, now our own prisoners one

wonders how a politics and philosophy to come beyond the transpolitical could

emerge? And it is here, on questions concerning our survival and our culpability, that

Baudrillard and Agamben sit side by side so well, pointing us to some of the most

daunting questions humans have ever faced.

Finally we must acknowledge that Agamben and Baudrillard are at the margins of

political analysis today. The mediatized information continuum, the system of corruption

and security, the education system, including Sociology and Political Science (enmeshed

as they are in the banal discourses of policy analysis), function efficiently to protect

citizens and students from Agamben and Baudrillard. This poses a great challenge to

students of contemporary theory more generally. Elsewhere36 I note how an earnest

intellectual like Susan Sontag is pulled, as she admits, into the informational continuum

during her time in Sarajevo despite her efforts to oppose it. We think also of Marshall

McLuhan whose work is constantly reinterpreted and co-opted in the most banal manner.


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Baudrillard and Agamben, for all the contempt they draw, have avoided this fate. Is

contempt and marginalization the best intellectuals can hope for in the current experience

of the transpolitical?37This is another challenging question we may consider while

turning now to one of Agambens earlier writings.

Gerry Coulter is the founder ofIJBS.

II. Form of Life by Giorgio Agamben

The Ancient Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by the

word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms:zo, which

expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, humans, or

gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single in-

dividual or group. In modem languages this opposition has gradually disappeared from

the lexicon (and where it is retained, as in biology andzoology, it no longer indicates anysubstantial difference); one term only the opacity of which increases in proportion to

the sacralization of its referent designates that naked presupposed common element

that it is always possible to isolate in each of the numerous forms of life.

By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be

separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as

naked life. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake

in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life

human life in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply


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factsbut always and above allpossibilities of life, always and above all power.38 Each be-

havior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological

vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary,

repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is,

it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings as beings of power who

can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves are the only beings

for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is

irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the

form-of-life as political life. "Civitatem communitatem esse institutam propter vivereet bene vivere hominum in ea" [The state is a community instituted for the sake, of the

living and the well living of men in it].39 Political power as we know it, on the other hand,

always founds itself-in the last instance-on the separation of a sphere of naked life from

the context of the forms of life. In Roman law, vita [life] is not a juridical concept, but

rather indicates the simple fact of living or a particular way of life. There is only one case

in which the term life acquires a juridical meaning that transforms it into a veritable

terminus technicus, and that is in the expression vitae necisque potestas, which designates

the paters power of life and death over the male son. Yan Thomas has shown that, in this

formula, que does not have a disjunctive function and vita is nothing but a corollary of

nex, the power to kill.40

Thus, life originally appears in law only as the counterpart of a power that

threatens death. But what is valid for thepater's right of life and death is even more valid

for sovereign power (imperium), of which the former constitutes the originary cell. Thus

in the Hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature is defined only by


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its being unconditionally exposed to a death threat (the limitless right of everybody over

everything) and political life that is, the life that unfolds under the protection of the

Leviathan is nothing but this very same life always exposed to a threat that now rests

exclusively in hands of the sovereign. The puissance absolue et perptuelle, which

defines state power, is not founded in the last instance on a political will but rather on

naked life, which is kept safe and protected to the degree to which it submits itself to the

sovereigns (or the laws) right of life and death. (This is precisely the originary meaning

of the adjectivesacer[sacred] when used to refer to human life. The state of exception,

which is what the sovereign each and every time decides, takes place precisely whennaked life which normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of social life is

explicitly put into question and revoked as the ultimate foundation of political power. The

ultimate subject that needs to be at once turned into the exception and included in the city

is always naked life.

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in whichwe live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is

in keeping with this insight".41 Walter Benjamin's diagnosis, which by now is more than

fifty years old, has lost none of its relevance. And that is so not really or not only because

power no longer has today any form of legitimization other than emergency, and because

power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as well as laboring

secretly to produce it. (How could we not think that a system that can no longer function

at all except on the basis of emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an

emergency at any price?) This is the case also and above all because naked life, which

was the hidden foundation of sovereignty, has meanwhile become the dominant form of


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life everywhere. Life in its state of exception that has now become the norm is the

naked life that in every context separates the forms of life from their cohering into a

form-of-life. The Marxian scission between man and citizen is thus superseded by the

division between naked life (ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the

multifarious forms of life abstractly recodified as social juridical identities (the voter, the

worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV positive, the transvestite, the porno

star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that all rest on naked life. (To have mistaken

such a naked life separate from form, in its abjection, for a superior principle

sovereignty or the sacred is the limit of Bataille's thought, which makes it useless tous.)

Foucaults thesis according to which what is at stake today is life and hence

politics has become biopolitics is, in this sense, substantially correct. What is decisive,

however, is the way in which one understands the sense of this transformation. What is

left unquestioned in the contemporary debates on bioethics and biopolitics, in fact, isprecisely what would deserve to be questioned before anything else, that is, the very

biological concept of life. Paul Rabinow conceives of two models of life as symmetrical

opposites: on the one hand the experimental life42 of the scientist who is ill with

leukemia and who turns his very life into a laboratory for unlimited research and

experimentation, and, on the other hand, the one who, in the name of lifes sacredness,

exasperates the antinomy between individual ethics and techno science. Both models,

however, participate without being aware of it in the same concept of naked life. This

concept which today presents itself under the guise of a scientific notion is actually a

secularized political concept. (From a strictly scientific point of view, the concept of life
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makes no sense. Peter and John Medawar tell us that, in biology, discussions about the

real meaning of the words life and death are an index of a low level of conversation. Such

words have no intrinsic meaning and such a meaning, therefore, cannot be clarified by

deeper and more careful studies.)43

Such is the provenance of the (often unperceived and yet decisive) function of

medical-scientific ideology within the system of power and the increasing use of

pseudoscientific concepts for ends of political control. That same drawing of naked life

that, in certain circumstances, the sovereign used to be able to exact from the forms of

life is now massively and daily exacted by the pseudoscientific representations of the

body, illness, and health, and by the "medicalization" of ever-widening spheres of life

and of individual imagination.44 Biological life, which is the secularized form of naked

life and which shares its unutterability and impenetrability, thus constitutes the real forms

of life literally as forms ofsurvival:biological life remains inviolate in such forms as that

obscure threat that can suddenly actualize itself in violence, in extraneousness, inillnesses, in accidents. It is the invisible sovereign that stares at us behind the dull-witted

masks of the powerful who, whether or not they realize it, govern us: in its name.

A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive

with a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting from the emancipation from such a division,

with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty. The question about the possibility of a

non statist politics necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a form-of-life, a

life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of

poweravailable?
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I call thoughtthe nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context

as form-of-life. I do not mean by this the individual exercise of an organ or of a psychic

faculty, but rather an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential

character of life and of human intelligence. To think does not mean merely to be affected

by this or that thing, by this or that content of enacted thought, but rather at once to be af-

fected by one's own receptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought

a pure power of thinking. (When thought has become each thing in the way in which a

man who actually knows is said to do so its condition is still one of potentiality and

thought is then able to think of itself. ")45

Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered to a

possibility and a power, only if living and intending and apprehending themselves are at

stake each time in what I live and intend and apprehend only if, in other words, there is

thought only then can a form of life become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-

life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like naked life.

The experience of thought that is here in question is always experience of a

common power. Community and power identify one with the other without residues

because the inherence of a communitarian principle to any power is a function of the

necessarily potential character of any community. Among beings who would always al-

ready be enacted, who would always already be this or that thing, this or that identity, and

who would have entirely exhausted their power in these things and identities among

such beings there could not be any community but only coincidences and factual

partitions. We can communicate with others only through what in us as much as in
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others has remained potential, and any communication (as Benjamin perceives for

language) is first of all communication not of something in common but of

communicability itself. After all, if there existed one and only one being, it would be

absolutely impotent. (That is why theologians affirm that God created the world ex

nihilo, in other words, absolutely without power). And there where I am capable, we are

always already many, (just as when, if there is a language, that is, a power of speech,

there cannot then be one and one only being who speaks it.)

That is why modern political philosophy does not begin with classical thought,

which had made of contemplation, of the bios theoreticos, a separate and solitary activity

("exile of the alone to the alone) but rather only with Averroism, that is, with the

thought of the one and only possible intellect common to all human beings, and,

crucially, with Dante's affirmation inDe Monarchia of the inherence of a multitude to

the very power of thought:

It is clear that man's basic capacity is to have a potentiality or power forbeing intellectual. And since this power cannot be completely actualizedin a single man or in any of the particular communities of men abovementioned, there must be a multitude in mankind through whom thiswhole power can be actualized [T]he proper work of mankind taken as awhole is to exercise continually its entire capacity for intellectual growth,first, in theoretical matters, and, secondarily, as an extension of theory, inpractice.46

The diffuse intellectuality I am talking about and the Marxian notion of a "general

intellect"47 acquire their meaning only within the perspective of this experience. They

name the multitudo that inheres to the power of thought as such. Intellectuality and

thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate
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themselves, but they are ratherthe unitary power that constitutes the multiple form-of-

life. In the face of state sovereignty, which can affirm itself only by separating in every

context naked life from its form, they are the power that incessantly reunites life to its

form or prevents it from being dissociated from its form. The act of distinguishing

between the mere, massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes

(an inscription that characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the

spectacle) and intellectuality as antagonistic power and form-of-life such an act passes

through the experience of this cohesion and this inseparability. Thought is form-of-life,

life that cannot be segregated from its form; and anywhere the intimacy of thisinseparable life appears, in the materiality of corporeal processes and of habitual ways of

life no less than in theory, there and only there is there thought. And it is this thought, this

form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to "Man" and to the "Citizen," who clothe it

temporarily and represent it with their "rights," must become the guiding concept and the

unitary center of the coming politics.

Giorgio Agamben teaches Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie inParis and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is author of several books including:The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press,1993;Means Without End:Notes on Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2000;Remnants of Auschwitz. ZoneBooks, 2002; The Open. Stanford University Press, 2004; State of Exception. Universityof Chicago Press, 2005.

III. Epilogue

We face a circumstance in which we share the frustration but reject the tools and

means of the terrorists. We know terrorist violence satisfies only the states need for a

violence of its own upon which its legitimacy (and increasing illegitimacy) is based. It is

here that theory comes to a pause to contemplate the emptiness of both terrorism and


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the state, understanding perhaps, that neither terrorism nor the state as we know them,

make sense. Theory remains radical now by refusing to be pulled in either direction by

fundamentalist terrorists, by state terrorism, or the fundamentalism of globalizing

consumerism and all the states endorsing it. Political freedom is held hostage by those

who employ the terror of the law in an effort to accomplish a state capable of ending

terrorism. Theory is a very serious game played while we look for a future of freedom

already being denied us. Writing, writes Baudrillard, has always given me

pleasure.48Agamben and Baudrillard both seek other times and places in their writing

which is lived as a kind of freedom seeking a space beyond the contemporarytranspolitical and the state of exception which constitutes its surveillant life force.

Endnotes

1 Form of Life (1993) appeared as the first essay of Agambens book:Means Without End: Notes onPolitics. University of Minnesota Press, 2000:3-12. Reprinted by permission of the University ofMinnesota Press, 2005.

2 Jean Baudrillard. Interviewed by Paul Hegarty in Paul Hegarty.Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory. London:Continuum, 2004:139.

3 Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil(c1990). New York: Verso, 1993:11.

4 Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception (c 2003). University of Chicago Press, 2005:88.

5 Jean Baudrillard uses this term in the Transparency of Evil(c 1990). New York: Verso, 1993:11

6 Michael Ignatieff. The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics In An Age of Terror. New York: Penguin, 2004. Inthis book Ignatieff provides the always comforting, and never surprising, mainstream academic support of

the university-military-industrial elites reply to terror with a war on terror.

7 Dershowitzs argument is that if the American government is to use torture, they should do so throughlegal structures: Judges should have to issue a torture warrant in each case. Thus we would not bewinking an eye of quiet approval at torture while publicly condemning it.For a longer criticism ofDershowitzs solution see:http://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.htmland for a more detailed look at

Dershowitzs perspective see: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/17/60minutes/main324751.shtml
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_edn48http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_edn48http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref7http://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.htmlhttp://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.htmlhttp://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.htmlhttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/17/60minutes/main324751.shtmlhttp://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_edn48http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref2http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref3http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref4http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref5http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref6http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agambenpf.htm#_ednref7http://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.htmlhttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/17/60minutes/main324751.shtml


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8 For a discussion of the whitewashing and reputation cleansing of politicians in elections, see JeanBaudrillard. The Great Laundering (Liberation) August 7, 1995 In Jean Baudrillard. Screened Out. NewYork: Verso, 2002:70-74.

9 Canadas sponsorship scandal concerns federal government ministries paying for contracts for workwhich was never done. The Commission is the end result of a probe by Canadian Auditor General Sheila

Fraser which found that: $100 million of the $250 million sponsorship program went for fees andcommissions; Widespread non-compliance with contracting rules, involving five crown corporations;Sponsorship funds transferred to crown corporations by highly questionable methods; Methods designedto pay commissions to communication agencies while hiding the source of funds; Rules broken or ignoredat every stage of the process for more than four years. All companies receiving questionable funds werelocated in Quebec and the money (delivered in brown paper bags) came from a special unity fund whichwas to be used to convince Quebecers to remain in confederation. Seehttp://www.gomery.ca/en/index.asp

10 Baudrillard has a different way of positing the relation of happiness and modernity. As he writes in theSingular Object of Architecture:

The question of happiness, like that of freedom or responsibility, and a host of other questions aboutmodernity, the ideals of modernity these are no longer really relevant, at least in terms of expecting a

response. ...If modernity is conceived in this way, which was to subjectively ensure whether it was thesubjectivity of the individual or the group a maximum of accumulation, a maximal number of things, thenmodernity has overshot the goal it set for itself. Maybe it didnt fail at all, maybe it succeeded all too well,it propelled us well beyond our goal and now all the questions are about lost objects (Minneapolis,Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press, 2002:30).

11 Jean Baudrillard. Interview with Gane and Arnaud in Mike Gane,Baudrillard Live. New York:Routledge, 1993:19.

Baudrillards suspicion of the political class and elites more generally is an extension of his thought onseduction, symbolic exchange, and reversibility. It also fits well into his concern that it may be our humandestiny to subject ourselves to an experiment that humanity will not survive:

We are subjecting ourselves as a human species to the same experimental pressure as theanimal species in our laboratories. Man is without prejudice: he is using himself as aguinea-pig He is cheerfully gambling with the destiny of his own species as he is withthat of all the others (Jean Baudrillard.Illusion of the End(c1992). Stanford UniversityPress, 1994:83).

12 Jean Baudrillard.Illusion of the End(c1992). Stanford University Press, 1994:32, 43,

13 Jean Baudrillard. Forget Baudrillard: Interview with Sylvere Lotringer, (1985) inForget Foucault,Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987:121.

14 For an interesting discussion of Agamben on the inhuman see Catherine Mills. Review Essay: An

Ethics of Bare Life: Agamben on Witnessing.Borderlands E-Journal, Volume 2, Number 1, 2003:http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mills_agamben.html

For Baudrillard it is the inhuman which is also being whitewashed and expunged from our society. This ispart of our domestication and whitewashing of history and our species. For Baudrillard this denial of theinhuman may well be part of our species itself commencing its own disappearance either bydisenchantment with orressentimenttowards itself, or out of a deliberate inclination which leads it hereand now to manage that disappearance as its destiny. Jean Baudrillard.Illusion of the End(c 1992).Stanford University Press, 1994:83.
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See also Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer. Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.

15 In a world where the United Kingdom and the United States restrict the civil liberties of their respectivepopulations, while each promises to bring democracy to the world, the state of exception is no longer theexception. See also Tony Da Silvas book review of Agamben in this volume.http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/dasilva.htm.

16 Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002:32.

17 Jean Baudrillard.Fatal Strategies. (c1983) New York: Semiotext(e), 1990:47.

18Ibid.:22. One thinks here that even in Hitlers state of near total control, brutality, and surveillance,where someone on every street watched and listened for the party, terrorist strikes still took place against

NAZI targets. What kind of state apparatus could stop terrorism against itself?

19 Jean Baudrillard. Seduction (c1979). Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990:154-155.

20 Giorgio Agamben.Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of

Minnesota Press, 2000:82.

21 Jean Baudrillard.Illusion of the End(c1992). Stanford University Press, 1994:60.

22 Giorgio Agamben.Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University ofMinnesota Press, 2000:24.

23 See Gerry Coulter. Reversibility: Baudrillards One Great Thought inInternational Journal ofBaudrillard Studies Volume 2, Number 1http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/coulter.htm Further, Baudrillard says the

Perfect Crime is an hypothesis of radiant optimism. Jean Baudrillard. The Vital Illusion (c 1999) NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2000:78.

24 Jean Baudrillard. The Vital Illusion (c 1999) New York: Columbia University Press, 2000:83.

25 Giorgio Agamben.Means Without End: Notes on Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2000:i.

26Ibid.

27 Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press, 2004:80.

28Ibid:38.

29 My impression is that Baudrillards post catastrophic and perhaps apocalyptic tone is his way ofattempting to be heard among all the sources of noise and information in our contemporary.

30 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories II(c1990). New York: Verso, 1996:23.

31 From Walter Benjamin.Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969:

The Angel of History does not move dialectically into the future, but has his face turnedtowards the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophewhich keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at this feet. The Angel wouldlike to stay, awaken the dead, and join together that which has been smashed to pieces,
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but a storm is blowing from paradise and irresistibly propels him into the future towardwhich his back is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows skyward. What we call

progress is that storm.

32 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories IV(c2000). New York: Verso, 2002:53-54.

33 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulations (c1981). The University of Michigan Press, 1994:129.

34 Jean Baudrillard. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000:15-16.

35 See Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal(c 2002). Stanford University Press, 2004. In thisbook Agamben seeks to learn to think of the human as that which results from the practical and politicalseparation of humanity and animality.

36 Gerry Coulter. Passings: Cool Memories of Susan Sontag: An American Intellectual. InInternationalJournal of Baudrillard Studies Volume 2, Number 2, (July 2005).http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/coulter.htm/

37 I wish to express my sincere thanks to Paul Taylor for this insight and question.

38 The English termpowercorresponds to two distinct terms in Italian,potenza andpotere (which roughlycorrespond to the Frenchpuissance andpouvoir, the GermanMachtand Vermgen, and the Latinpotentialandpostestas, respectively).Potenza can often resonate with implications of potentiality as well as withdecentralized or mass conceptions of force and strength.Potere, on the other hand, refers to the might orauthority of an already structured and centralized capacity, often an institutional apparatus such as the state.

39 Marsilius of Padua. The Defensor of Peace, Translated by Alan Gewirth. New York: Harper and Row,1956:15.

40 See Yan Thomas. Vita necisque potestas: La Pre, la cit, la mort, inDu chtiment dans la cit:Supplices corporals et peine de mort dans le monde antique. Rome: Lcole franaise de Rome, 1984.

41 Walter Benjamin. Theses on the Philosophy of History, inIlluminations. Translated by Harry Zohn.New York: Schocken Books, 1989:257. In the Italian translation of Benjamins passage, state ofemergency is translated as state of exception, which is the phrase Agamben uses in the precedingsection of this essay and which will be a crucial refrain in several of the other essays included in thevolume from which this essay is reprinted (see endnote 1).

42 Experimental life is in English in the original.

43 See, for example, Peter Medawar and Jean Medawar.Aristotle to Zoos. Oxford University Press,1983:66-67.

44 The terminology in the original is the same as that used for bank transactions (and thus naked lifebecomes here the cash reserve contained in accounts such as forms of life).

45 Aristotle. On the Soul, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1. Jonathan Barnes (Ed.) PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984:682-83.

46 Dante Alighieri. On World Government. Translated by Herbert W. Schneider. Indianapolis: Liberal ArtsPress, 1957:6-7.
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47 In English in the original. This term is taken from a single reference by Marx, in which he uses theEnglish term. See Karl Marx Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated byMartin Nicolaus. New York: Random House, 1973:706.

48 Jean Baudrillard. Interview withLe Journal des Psychologues (c 1991), in Mike Gane. Baudrillard Live.New York: Routledge, 1993:179.

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From: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agamben.htm

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International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (2005)
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Agamben and Baudrillard