The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben

7/27/2019 The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben

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an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text

and image Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112

The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben

Colin McQuillan

One of the reasons the work of Giorgio Agamben has been so

tremendously appealing is its contribution to contemporary debates concerning

the nature of sovereignty and its relation to the processes of political

subjectification. However, there is another aspect of Agamben‟s thought,

concerning the ontology of potentiality, which, while closely related to the first,

has been less emphasized in the reception of Agamben‟s work.

In the introduction to Homo Sacer , where these two aspects of his work

come together most powerfully and define the problematic of all of his more

recent work, Agamben tells us that he had not understood their relation when he

began the book. Politics, subjectivity, and potentiality were bound together, so

much so that the meanings they acquired in the social sciences –and,

presumably, in contemporary theoretical and philosophical discourse –could no

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longer be taken for granted. Indeed, he says that they must be “revised without

reser ve.”1 The results of his revision have, however, been widely contested.

Judith Butler seems to think that Agamben argues for the expansion of

the concepts of “humanity” and “politics” to include marginalized and excluded

elements of the community.2 Yet she fails to realize that, for Agamben, it is life

itself which is at stake. That Butler has not appreciated this is evident in her new

book Precarious Life, where she fails to explain why it is life –bare life –which is

precarious, excluded, and imperiled, even as she considers the fragility of human

rights and the rights of citizens, and a host of other critical political categories.3 Slavoj Zizek, reads something different in Agamben, when he says that

Agamben shows that liberal democracy is a mask hiding the fact that “ultimately,

we are all homo sacer ,” that is, in Zizek‟s understanding, we are all subject to

totalitarian domination and the mechanisms of biopolitical social control. He uses

Agamben to make the further claim that there is no democratic solution to this

problem.4 However, inasmuch as he equates bare life merely with the subject of

domination and control, Zizek has failed to grasp the potentiality of bare life, that

is, life itself, that Agamben develops, in Homo Sacer and elsewhere. This

leads Zizek to abandon the intricacies of Agamben‟s analyses, and to champion

a heroic politics of decision –a politics that Agamben clearly does not share.

In Welcome to the Desert of the Real , for instance, Zizek argues that the only

way out of the contemporary “state of emergency” is in “the magical moment

when the infinite pondering crystallizes itself into a simple yes or no,” …a gesture

of radical and violent simplification”–a decision –which Agamben thinks leads

back to the logic of sovereignty and subjection –the sacrifice by which bare life is

both included and excluded by the “bloody mystifications” of the planetary order .5 Antonio Negri –whose review of Agamben‟s The State of Exception is one

of the most insightful commentaries on Agamben there is, and who seems to be

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the only commentator to have really understood what is at stake for Agamben –

celebrates Agamben‟s attempt to formulate a “fully immanent redemption”

through a critical ontology.6 He claims, however, that there are two Agambens.

He accuses the first, Heideggerian Agamben of holding onto “an existential,

fated, and horrific background,” where he is forced “into a continuous

confrontation with the idea of death.” For Negri, this amounts to a kind of

mysticism, an obsession with the margin and the limits, which “always stinks of

the boss.”7 It is this Agamben who declares “bare life” to be the protagonist of his

political project. In Negri‟s eyes, this is a concession to passivity and

powerlessness, a denial of the posse de potentia of life. However, Negri sees the

second Agamben –the Spinozist Agamben who “seiz[es]... the biopolitical horizon

through an immersion into philological labor and linguistic analysis”–as being

much closer to his own project of a wholly positive metaphysics, and so more

capable of grasping the “ripe fruit of redemption,” that is, the productive or

constitutive power of life itself .8 For Negri, this power is the power of living labor.

While I do not think the “two Agambens” are as different as Negri

suggests, the division he proposes brings forward a feature of Agamben‟s work

that has not been appreciated as much as his work on the relation between

sovereignty and bare life –the inclusive exclusion which captures life and subjects

it to the “bloody mystifications” of the modern state form at the same time as it

abandons life and exposes it to the lawless violence of sovereign decision. Bare

life, however, is not simply the subject of this political formation. It has a form of

its own. A form, which Agamben will call “form-of-life,” and a power, which

Agamben will discuss in terms of the power to be, and the power not to be.

Where these powers intersect, there is the potentiality of life, of life itself, bare

life.















While Agamben does not propose any kind of “state of nature” or “natural

right” or “natural law” attendant to this life, he does attempt, in several places, to

lay out the politics appropr iate to this life, to what he calls the “bios of zoē,” or

“form-of-life,” and I will simply call “the political life.” He defines this politics in

terms of “a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form -

of-life” in which “the single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply

facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always above all power.” My

contention, in this paper, is that Agamben‟s conception of the political life is the

result of a radical rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as potentiality.9 To begin to explore this theme in Agamben‟ work, I think it is important to

note the Heideggerian matrix of Agamben‟s thought. It is important to realize,

against Negri, that Spinoza is not the only philosopher of the positivity

of potentia and its necessarily political character. These can also be found in

Heidegger. For Heidegger, possibility stands higher than actuality. This carries

through from Being and Time to the Letter on Humanism, where Heidegger

defines Being in terms its “favoring-enabling”–or possibilizing –human existence,

inasmuch as man‟s essence is existence. Agamben‟s thinking of potentiality

follows Heidegger‟s in this regard, but generally takes Heidegger‟s analysis of

Dasein‟s facticity as its starting point. In Homo Sacer , Agamben says Heidegger‟s “philosophical genius” lay in

having elaborated “the conceptual categories that kept facticity from presenting

itself as fact.” Whereas sovereign power decides on life, dividing it between bare

life and the various forms of life –the “concrete sciences” of race, nation, and

class –Dasein‟s existence, as factical, is always in question, always at issue for

itself. Its life can never be separated from its world, or its way of life. It is

engendered by and as this “essential context” or “indissoluble cohesion,” even

though it is always in question and at issue. Dasein simply “is its mode of being,”







as its own possibility, its own potentiality.10 In The Coming Community , Agamben

calls this the “infinite omnivalence of whatever being,” and calls ethics the “free

use” of this potentiality, inasmuch as he says “the only ethical experience (which,

as such, cannot be a task of a subjective decision) is the experience of being

(one‟s own potentiality), of being (one‟s own) possibility–exposing... in every form

one‟s own amorphousness and in every act one‟s own inactuality.”11 Further, Agamben understands thought, as Heidegger did, as the

appropriation that lets beings be, which lets there be a world. Agamben even

calls thought “the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable

context as form-of-life,” so that only where there is thought can there be a form -

of-life “in which it is never possible to isolate something like [bare] life,” clearly

echoing Heidegger‟s claim that thought is a way of dwelling whose essence is

“being-in-the-world.”12 World is the “abode” or “dwelling” of Dasein, its essential

context –there is no Dasein without a world, the world is the da- of Dasein, its

place. For Agamben, this “essential context” or “indissoluble cohesion” is the

“inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities.” And this

“inseparable unity” is the potentiality of bar e life, comprising both its power to be

and its power not to be. This bears some explaining. Agamben reads Aristotle‟s claim that “all

potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same”–as

meaning that potentiality “maintains itself in relation to its own privation... its own

non-Being.”13 In the Arabic tradition, this was known as “perfect potentiality.”14But

it has the curiosity of understanding potentiality only with respect to impotence.

Thus, to be a potentiality or to have potential means “to be in relation to one‟s

own incapacity” and “to be capable of [one‟s] own impotentiality.” “Other living

beings are capable only of their specific potentiality,” Agamben writes, “they can

only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their






















own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the

abyss of human impotentiality,” by what Heidegger and Agamben will call

“poverty.”15 It is only on the edge of the abyss of this impotence, in poverty, then, that

“the two terms distinguished and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and

form of life) abolish each other and enter into another dimension.”16 In rendering

the very opposition of these terms ineffective, Agamben thinks impotentiality

opens a space –a margin, a threshold –on which life can survive, free from the

sovereign decision, unhinging and emptying the “traditions and beliefs, ideologies

and religions, identities and communities” which have borne it.17 This impotence

does not, however, negate the potentiality of life. Rather, impotence is an integral

part of potentiality –it is that part of potentiality that makes “a life directed toward

the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life”–in which “the single ways,

acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all

possibilities of life, always above all power”–possible.18 It is the power of thought.

As Agamben writes in The Coming Community :

…thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the

potentiality to not think... Thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought

can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the

thought of thought... What it thinks here, however, is not an object, a

being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but

its own passivity, its own pure potentiality... In the potentiality that thinks

itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself, or,

rather, writes its own passivity.19






















It is for this reason that, in Language and Death, Agamben calls thought

“the movement that, fully experiencing the unattainable place of language, seeks

to think, to hold this unattainability in suspense, to measure its dimensions,” and

claims that it is in thought that “the figure of humanity‟s having emerges for the

first time in its simple clarity: to have always dear as one‟s habitual dwelling

place, as the ethos of humanity.”20 In other words, thought is, for Agamben, “the

nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life,”

and the key to an ethics of human potentiality, which is what Agamben‟s talk of

form-of-life constitutes.21 I have already argued that this ethics is basically Heideggerian in

inspiration. It flies in the face of the history of metaphysics, which has understood

potentiality as the way those things which are not and cannot be are, in some

sense –as poverty, privation, or even evil. In this history, potentiality is the proper

existence of a thing –its actuality –deprived of itself. To take hold of potentiality, to

appropriate it for an ethics, then, is to “appropriate the improper”–the exterior,

excluded, and exceptional –not as unreal, poor, or evil, but as “perfectly

analogous” to the interior–that is, as possible. In this sense, the “poverty” of

human happiness is the perfect “appropriation of all possibilities,” achieved by an

ethics of “the simple fact of one‟s own existence as possibility or

potentially.”22Indeed, this ethics is precisely the experience of being human,

according to Agamben, the enjoyment of “the experience of being (one‟s own)

potentiality, of being (one‟s own) possibility.”23 This is, again, Heidegger‟s

conception of the factical life of Dasein. To recover this experience and appropriate its possibilities, Agamben

insists that “a new and coherent ontology of potentiality (beyond the steps that

have been made in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and

Heidegger)” must replace “the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and



















its relation to potentiality.”24 In order to do this, it must be able to “think the

existence of potentiality without any relation to Being in the form of actuality... not

even... actuality as the fulfillment and manifestation of potentiality... and think the

existence of a potentiality even without any relation to being in the form of the gift

of the self and letting be.”25 It is here that Agamben parts with Heidegger. Agamben says that talk of

“being,” of human beings or being human “is not up to the level of the simple

mystery of humans‟ having, of their habitations or their habits.”26 And though this

seems to mirror the movement by which Marx says “everything solid melts into

air” and “all being is reduced to having,” Agamben will say that having language

is the peculiar nature of the human being. This capacity, which the human being

has, does not define what it is. Rather, it tells us what a human being is capable

of –namely, language (logos). If we understand this as the “poverty” of the human

being –the lack of a specific nature or identity, the impossibility of a specifically

human existence –we can understand the possibilities of human capacities as

“his ethos, his dwelling.”27 For Agamben, this allows the human being to live –

unencumbered by the metaphysical primacy of actuality –by and as his own

potentiality. This, however, leaves the human being exposed to his own

groundlessness –that is, to his own violence. If it is not by virtue of metaphysical

necessity that human life is divided between zoē and bios, then it must be a

function of a human capacity, human action. Indeed, Agamben will say “man is

the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own life

that he at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that life in an inclusive

exclusion.”28 And he will say that this is the daimon that “threatens humans in the

very core of their ethos, of their habitual dwelling place, that philosophy has

always to think and to „absolve‟.”29



























Unlike Heidegger, Agamben will not retreat into a kind of mysticism of

fundamental thinking. Absolution concerns not only thinking, but also living. This

is why the philosophy is always already political for Agamben. Interestingly, this

seems to be derived from Heidegger as well. Heidegger says that the

polis “signifies the place, the da-, where and how Dasein is,” so that the polis is

“the ground and place of human Dasein itself, the spot where all these routes

cross.”30 It is possible, then, to establish an identity between being-in-the-world

and being-political. Insofar as Dasein is its da-, insofar as man dwells, his is a

political life. Agamben takes Heidegger further on this point than he himself was

willing to go. And this is, perhaps, why Agamben disagrees with Heidegger in

one crucial regard. Where Heidegger says the polis is the site of the most

extreme conflicts, where “there has to hold sway all the most extreme counter -

essences, and therein all the excesses, to the unconcealed and to beings, i.e.,

counter-beings in the multiplicity of their counter-essence,” making the polis a

frightful, horrible, atrocious place, Agamben will claim that there is a form-of-life

“over which power has no hold,” a politics in which a life, withdrawn from decision

and sovereignty, can survive.31 Though obscured by the “absolute political space of the camps” in

Modern thanato-politics, the factical life of Dasein is, according to Agamben, the

“inseparable unity of Being and ways of being, subject and qualities, life and

world... in which it is never possible to isolate something like bare life.”32 As such,

it is an existence, a form-of-life, “over which power no longer seems to have any

hold.”33 And this opens the door to a different politics, one more in keeping with

the ethics of human potentiality as Agamben understands them. Following Walter

Benjamin, he insists that this other politics be purely profane –that is, not resting

on a secularized theological concept, as Carl Schmitt claims all truly political

ideas do –and must be constructed on the idea of happiness. 34 This is another























condition of the political life –Agamben says it must be a happy life, a “life well-

lived” or “sufficient.” Conceiving of human happiness in terms of potentiality requires a new

understanding of the relationship between possibility and actuality. This is, I

believe, the key to linking Agamben‟s political theory, his analyses of sovereignty

and the processes of political subjectification, to his ontology of potentiality. The

site is of this linkage is ethics, the ethics of human potentiality, and their proper

end, eudaimonia, happiness. Aristotle defined happiness as the “most complete

end” for human beings, an activity which “lacks nothing.” Happiness must thus be

defined in view of the best things –because “nothing incomplete is proper to

happiness.”35 This makes it impossible for happiness to be the “human good,” as

Aristotle claims at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics. Human beings can

experience happiness only for a short time, according to Aristotle, because

human things are not best things –being generated, and, more importantly, being

incapable of continuous activity, and so true happiness, defined as pure self-

sufficiency and actuality. Because this power belongs only to God, true

happiness belongs only to God –to self-thinking thought. As human beings do not

exist in the sense of Aristotle‟s God –perfectly, simply, eternally –being marked by

the daimon that “separates and opposes himself to his own life.” Agamben explains this process by which “man... separates and opposes

himself to his own life” in terms of sacrifice. At the end of Language and Death,

he writes that what is essential to sacrifice is that “in every case, the action of the

human community is grounded only in another action.”36 This establishes

sacrifice as the “ungroundedness of all human (linguistic) praxis” which hides

“the fact that an action (a sacrum facere...) is abandoned to itself...”37Sacrifice

serves as “that (linguistic) action which, remaining unspeakable (arreton) and

intransmissible in every action and in all human language, destines man to











community and tradition.”38 It is thus “the foundation for all legal behavior,” and a

new kind of (linguistic) praxis, in which “every facere is a sacrum facere.”39 Because Agamben says the original meaning of sacer is “doomed to

death,” he will locate the sovereign right “to let live and make die” in sacrifice –in

this “sacrum facere.” In Homo Sacer, Agamben explains this with reference to

the archaic Roman vitae necisque potestas, the absolute right of the father over

the life and death of his sons. This is the power that makes the pater –the father –

domus –head of the household, dominator. Here, life –vita, zoē –is only a correlate

of the power to kill –nex . It is what the law presupposed in granting the father his

right –there must be something for him to kill, namely, the life of his sons. And

because the Romans thought there to be an “essential affinity” between this right

and the power of imperium, exercised by the sovereign, man –as citizen, as bios

politikos –was subject to sovereign decision regarding life and death, just as were

the father‟s sons. Here, man becomes homo sacer, sacred life –but this is simply

life that can be killed. Because human life –zoē, the bare life of man – is, according to the law,

merely the correlate of the power to kill, Agamben says life becomes the sacred,

though unspeakable, ground of political order –as that which can be killed.40 The

power of imperium –which came to be exercised by Roman consuls –comes from

the sacrificial ax carried by their lictors –the fasces, used to perform

executions.41 Imperium –sovereignty –is simply the power to execute –to kill. That

this definition holds even in modern political philosophy is evident from

Hobbes‟ Leviathan –where the sovereign retains the power to punish by the

“infliction of death; and that either simply, or with torment”–to Carl

Schmitt‟s Political Theology –where the sovereign is said to be the one who

“decides the exception.”42























Inasmuch as, for Agamben, bare life is what is excluded from –and so in

exception to –the various forms of life –as their sacred, unacknowledged ground –

Schmitt‟s attempt to strike the word “man” from the German Civil Code–in 1935,

as he was attempting to reformulate the principles of jurisprudence in light of the

Nazi revolution –suggests the danger of the “division and opposition” of life and

forms of life that so concerns Agamben. Schmitt claimed that

The legal concept of „man‟ in the sense of Article 1 of the Civil Code

conceals and falsifies the differences between a citizen of the Reich, a

foreigner, a Jew, and so on. Replacing scientific abstraction as something

remote from reality, thinking in concrete terms, seeing equal as equal and

above all unequal as unequal, and emphasizing the differences among

men of different races, nations, and occupational estates in the sense of

God-given realities –that is the goal of National Socialist academic jurists,

not just those who are organizationally led by Carl Schmitt.43

Agamben argues, on the contrary, that it is precisely the politicization of life –

particularly as Schmitt advances it here, in terms of a concrete science of the

“God-given realities” of race, nation, and class–which has led to the “bloody

mystifications of a new planetary order.”44 To overcome these “bloody

mystifications” requires an investigation of the possibilities of the human life–that

is, an ethics –a political life freed from sovereign power. This ethics –an ethics of

form-of-life –means the end of the separation and opposition of forms of life and

bare life, of sacrifice, and sovereign power, insofar as it appropriates the process

of exclusion and inclusion that constitute the exception. It designates an

exemplary life, a life that is the “impotent omnivalence of whatever being,” in that

it is “a single object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity,” and











allows for the possibility of community “without being tied to any common

property, by any identity.”45 For Agamben, this is the very idea of the happy,

political life.

an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text

and image Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112

Notes

1. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-

Roazen. Stanford: Stanford, 1998. pg. 12. 2 Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia, 2000.

pp. 81-82.

3. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.

pp. 67-68. 4. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real . New York: Verso, 2002. pg. 100. 5. Welcome to the Desert of the Real , pg. 101. 6. Negri, Antonio “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption.” Translated by Arianna Bove. www.generation-

online.org/t/negriagamben.html 7. Negri, Antonio. T ime for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. New York: Continuum,

2003. pp. 112-113. 8. “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption.”




http://intertheory.org/mcquillan.htm#_ednref1









http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriagamben.html.








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9. Agamben, Giorgio “Form-of-Life.” Included in Means Without End: Notes on Politics.

Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000. pg. 11. 10. Agamben, Giorgio. T he Coming Community . Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis:

Minnesota, 1993. pg. 28. 11. The Coming Community , pg. 44. 12. “Form-of-Life,” pg. 9. Also, Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” Translated by Frank A.

Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray. Included in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition) . Edited

by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. pp. 259-260. 13. Agamben, Giorgio. “On Potentiality.” Included in Potentialities: Collected Essays in

Philosophy . Edited and Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford, 1999. pg. 182. 14. Homo Sacer , pg. 45. 15. “On Potentiality,” pg. 182. 16. Homo Sacer , pg. 55. 17. The Coming Community , pg. 83. 18. The Coming Community , pg. 40. 19. The Coming Community , pp. 36-37. 20. Language and Death, pp. 80-81. 21. “Form-of-Life,” pg. 9. 22. The Coming Community , pg. 43. 23. The Coming Community , pg. 44. 24. Homo Sacer , pg. 44. 25. Homo Sacer , pg. 47. 26. Language and Death, pg. 94. 27. Language and Death, pg. 96. 28. Language and Death, pg. 94. 29. Language and Death, pg. 93.



























































30. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-

Roazen. Stanford: Stanford, 1998. pg. 153. Also, Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics.

Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale, 2000. pp. 162-163. 31. Homo Sacer , pg. 153. Also, Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer

and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana, 1998. pg. 90. 32. Homo Sacer , pg. 153. 33. Homo Sacer , pg. 153. 34. Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Politics.” Included in Means Without End: Notes on Politics.

Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000. pg. 114. 35. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.

1177b20-27 36. Language and Death, pg. 105. 38. Language and Death, pg. 105. 39. Language and Death, pg. 105. 40. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford, 1998.

pp. 81-90. 41. Agamben, Giorgio. “Sovereign Police.” Included in Means Without End: Notes on Politics.

Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000. pg. 104. 42. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1985. pg. 357 (II.28). Schmitt,

Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty . Translated by George

Schwab.Cambridge: MIT, 1988. pg. 5. 43. See Balakrishnan, Gopal. T he Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt . New York:

Verso, 2000. pg. 188. 44. Homo Sacer , pg. 12. 45. The Coming Community , pg. 11.




































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The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben