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Giorgio Agamben ( ; ; born 22 April 1942) is an Italians philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception,Generally speaking, "state of exception" includes German Notstand, English state of emergency and others martial law. Agamben prefers using this term as it underlines the structure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously of inclusion and exclusion. "Ex-ception" can be opposed to the concept of "example" as developed by Immanuel Kant. form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (carried forth from the work of Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings.
Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" (in The End of the Poem) and "Parody" (in Profanations). He has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he collaborated, for a short while, as advisor to the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and many, many others.
His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. Agamben edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and called Benjamin's thought "the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger".Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009), p. 53. In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agamben's own later work were Benjamin's manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History.See de la Durantaye, pp. 148–49. Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in the study State of Exception (2003). His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, whom he calls "a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years". The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone, 2009), p. 7.
Agamben's political thought was founded on his readings of Aristotle's Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and treatise On the Soul, as well as the exegetical traditions concerning these texts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In his later work, Agamben intervenes in the theoretical debates following the publication of Nancy's essay La communauté désoeuvrée (1983),Nancy's essay responded to a proposal by Jean-Christophe Bailly, who put the word and concept of community, then relatively neglected in French philosophical discourse, up for discussion. Bailley's contribution was "The community, the number," a topic for an issue of the French magazine Aléa, which was then-edited by Christian Bourgois. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1983). In English transl., The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). and Maurice Blanchot's response, La communauté inavouable (1983). These texts analyzed the notion of community at a time when the European Community was under debate. Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community (1990).Cf. Greg Bird. Containing Community: From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy (Albany, SUNY Press, 2016). At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who "prefers not" to write.
Currently, Agamben is teaching at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Università della Svizzera Italiana) and has taught at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy.See: Giorgio Agamben Faculty profile at European Graduate School He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, and at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006. Fondation Charles Veillon Prix Européen de l'Essai. 2006
In 2013 he was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen for his work titled Leviathans Rätsel (Leviathan's Riddle, translated into English by Paul Silas Peterson).
In 2017, these works were collected and published as The Omnibus Homo Sacer.
In the final volume of the series, Agamben intends to address "the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles." "What I call a form-of-life," he explains, "is a life which can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something like bare life. … Here too the concept of privacy comes in to play."Ulrich Rauff, " An Interview with Giorgio Agamben," German Law Journal 5.5 (2004): 613.
The reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of a homo sacer, reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept of the homo sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between "bare life" ( la vita nuda or zoê ; Gk. ζωή zoê) and "a particular mode of life" or "qualified life" ( bios , ; Gk. βίος bios). In Part III, section 7 of Homo Sacer, "The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern", he evokes the concentration camps of World War II. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule." Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The conditions in the camps were " conditio inhumana," and the incarcerated somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the exception laws of Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct.
In the process of creating a state of exception these effects can compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his/her voice and represent themselves. The individual can not only be deprived of their citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. "Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life."Jacques Ranciere. Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? South Atlantic Quarterly, 2004, 103(2–3):297–310.
Within the state of exception, the distinction between bios (the life of the citizen) and zoê (the life of homo sacer) is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9/11.
Agamben mentions that basic universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside the law he or she is, according to Agamben, reduced to "bare life" in the eyes of the judicial powers. Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has deprived the individual of power, and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. "The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious."Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984, p. 116 Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one's humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception, as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison, also operate outside the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding not allowing them to die. During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February 2006, The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC, "Doctors attack US over Guantanamo" voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breach of the government's power and was against the rights of the prisoners.
Agamben starts off by describing the "lovable":
Similarly, Agamben discusses "ease" as the “place” of love, or more precisely, love as the encounter with a unique moment (“love as the experience of taking-place in a whatever singularity"), which resonates with his utilization of the concept of "use" in his later writings.
Following the same trend, he employs, among others, the following to describe the "watershed of whatever":
Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.
Unlike other continental philosophers he does not reject the dichotomies of subject/object and potentiality/actuality outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable.
The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors,Tony Simoes da Silva. Strip It Bare – Agamben's Message For A More Hopeful World. Book Review. 2005 he nonetheless shows a concrete example of whatever singularity acting politically:
Although Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a Homo sacer, they remained "under the spell" of law. This means that "human life" is "included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer was therefore both excluded from law and included at the same time. This paradoxical figure of homo sacer is the exact mirror image of the sovereignty ( basileus) – a king, emperor, or president – who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and outside the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).
Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated.
Agamben argues that laws have always assumed the authority to define "bare life" – zoe, as opposed to bios, or 'qualified life' – by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Ancient history to Modernity – literally from Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (Gk. ζῆν, zen), but existing with regard to the Eudaimonia (εὖ ζῆν, eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Homo Sacer, Stanford UP, 1998, p. 66. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord with its bios) by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception) of what is to remain outside the political body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition ( zoe)."Sovereign violence is in truth founded not on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state." ( Homo Sacer, Stanford UP, 1998, p. 107) According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.Of course, this understanding of "biopower" is distinct from Foucault's use of the term.
Agamben's text State of Exception investigates the increase of power by governments which they employ in supposed times of crisis. Within a state of emergency, Agamben refers to the states of exception, where constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government.
The state of exception invests one person or government with the power and voice of authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the past. "In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" (Agamben, pg 40). Agamben refers a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler's rule. "The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system" (Agamben, p. 2).
The political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government—or one form or branch of government—as all powerful, operating outside the laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall be privileged and accepted as true and certain voices shall be heard as valued, while of course, many others are not. This oppressive distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within a time of crisis.
Agamben's State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President George W. Bush on 13 November 2001, Agamben writes, "What is new about President Bush's order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW's (prisoner of war) as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws" (Agamben, pg 3). 780 Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan were held at Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed "enemy combatants." Until 7 July 2006, these individuals had been treated outside the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration.
While potestas derives from social function, auctoritas "immediately derives from the patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charisma. This is why the tradition ordered, at the king's death, the creation of the sovereign's wax-double in the funus imaginarium, as Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated in The King's Two Bodies (1957). Hence, it is necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure the continuity of dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas). Moreover, in the person detaining auctoritas—the sovereign—Public sphere and Private sphere have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes. In his theorization of thanatopolitics (the politics of death), Agamben uses the English and Roman examples to show how the sovereign justifies authority by his claimed ability to control or manage his own death. Agamben writes that the rituals of two deaths by the sovereign (as an ordinary human and then as effigy) demonstrate that death rituals show the people that the sovereign is in control of both lives.
The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and Nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben:
Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of "ex-ception", which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.
Agamben concludes his chapter on " Auctoritas and potestas" writing:
Agamben's thoughts on the state of emergency leads him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is thin indeed,or even ontologically non-existent, as rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance. Agamben often reminds that Hitler never the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the duration of the Third Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933. Indefinite suspension of law is what characterizes the state of exception.
However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he argues in State of Exception (2005), rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been since then generalized and abused. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has become a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the Jews deportation in Vichy France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from identity cards. Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he argues is intrinsically related to the state of exception.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> The "Latin Empire" should strike back. 15 March 2013, La Repubblica. 24 March 2013, Libération.
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