Giorgio Agamben

Infobox Philosopher
region = Western Philosophy
era = Contemporary philosophy
color = #B0C4DE


name = Giorgio Agamben
birth = 1942
school_tradition = Aesthetics
main_interests = Aesthetics· Political philosophy
notable_ideas = "Homo sacer" "State of exception" "Whatever singularity"
influences = Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Heidegger, Arendt, Nietzsche, Aby Warburg, Carl Schmitt
influenced =

Giorgio Agamben (born 1942 in Rome) is an Italian philosopher who teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He also teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and previously taught at the University of Macerata in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. Agamben's best known work includes his investigations of the concepts of state of exception and "homo sacer". [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 Kant.]

Agamben received the [http://www.fondation-veillon.ch/prix/g_agamben.php Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon] in 2006.

Biography

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and medievalist topics, where he began to elaborate his primary concerns, though without as yet inflecting them in a specifically political direction. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he wrote "Stanzas" (1979).

Close to Elsa Morante, on whom he has written, Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, his strongest influences include Walter Benjamin, whose complete works he edited in Italian translation, and the German jurist Carl Schmitt, whom he frequently cites. Agamben's political thought draws on Michel Foucault and on Italian neo-Marxist thought. While sometimes cryptic in his published writings, in interviews he represents himself as a public thinker interested in language and social conflicts on a global scale.

Work

In "The Coming Community" (1993), Giorgio Agamben writes:

This potentiality of life would become one of Agamben's main threads, throughout his critical conception of an "homo sacer", reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between 'bare life' ("la vita nuda", Gk.ζωή: "zoê") and 'a particular mode of life' or 'qualified life'(Gk.βίος, bios) of a group or a single individual ['the form or manner of living proper to an individual or a group', G.Agamben, "Homer sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda", Einaudi, Turin 1995 p.3'] . His analysis will henceforth aim to think through a kind of 'subjectivity without subject': humans are 'an effect', 'but this is not an essence nor properly a thing', but the 'simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality'. This 'coming community' opposes itself to sovereignty, which reduces through the state of exception qualified life ("bios") to bare life ("zoe").

“In United States criminal law, people accused of committing crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves verbally, but can be compelled to incriminate themselves physically.” In the state of exception this becomes an even greater heightened state. This addresses the distinction Agamben makes when turning to the theories of Hannah Arendt and her followers on "zoe", bare life, and "bios", referring to actions in the “form of life,” and notably the "bios politikos": “the life of great actions and noble words.” One who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his voice and represent him- or herself: the individual has not only been deprived of his citizenship, but also of any form of agency over his own life. “Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life.” Within the state of exception, the distinction between "zoe" and "bios" is made by those in power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay operates within the terms of the state of exception in the United States following 9-11.

Agamben mentions that basic human rights were revoked from Taliban individuals, captured in Afghanistan in 2001, who were then held within Guantánamo Bay. 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 prisoner has been removed of their rights and placed within a state of being mere "zoe", bare life, then what actions of dissent do the individuals have besides that of their own body? 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 removed 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 that can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” 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 of 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 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4790742.stm|BCC] , 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.

"The Coming Community" (1993)

In "The Coming Community", published in Italian in 1990 and English translation by Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. The beauty and brevity of the text is augmented by the book layout, filled with design, white space and random dots. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of “whatever singularity” as that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”. It is important to note his understanding of “whatever” not as being indifference but based on the Latin translation of “being such that it always matters”

He starts off by describing "“The Lovable”"

Following the same trend, Agamben employs, amongst others, the following to describe the “watershed of whatever”:

*Example – Particular and Universal
*Limbo – Blessed and Damned
*Homonym – concept and idea
*Halo – Potentiality and Actuality
*Face - common and proper, genus and individual
*Threshold – inside and outside
*Coming Community – State & Non-state (humanity) ["The Coming Community" (1993)]

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 age-old dichotomies of subject – object, potentiality - actuality etc 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 [ [http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol2_2/dasilva.htm IJBS ] ] , he nonetheless shows a concrete example of "whatever singularity" acting politically:

"Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998)

In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody -- while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.

Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a "Homo sacer", although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". "Homo sacer" was therefore "excluded" from law itself, while being "included" at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign ("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 of" the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).

Indeed, Giorgio 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. But if Schmitt's aim is to include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on the contrary demonstrates that all life can't be subsumed by law. As in "Homo sacer", the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" ("zoe", as opposed to "bios": qualified life) is 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 Antiquity to Modernity -- from, literally, 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 ("zen"), but existing with regard to the good life ("eu zen") which can be achieved through politics. 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 a state of exception. 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 would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading "State of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture describing the eclipse that politics has undergone. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State [Video clip of Agamben's lecture: On the State of Exception, Saas-Fee, Switzerland (2003) is available [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5hl0-w7P8 here] or a smaller file [http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben-resources.html here] ]

"State of Exception" (2005)

In this book, Agamben traces the concept of 'state of exception' ("Ausnahmezustand") used by Carl Schmitt to Roman "justitium" and "auctoritas". This leads him to a response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to proclaim state emergency.

Giorgio Agamben’s text "State of Exception" investigates the increase of power structures governments employ in supposed times of crisis. Within these times of crisis, Agamben refers to increased extension of power as states of exception, where questions of citizenship and individual rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government. Agamben explores the effect of the state of exception on the individual by looking at the ideas of "bios" and "zoe".

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, pg 2). However simplistic and obvious it is to mention, one must acknowledge the state of exception is a dangerous and violent place of operation.

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 of 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 remove individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President George W. Bush on November 13, 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 unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s 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). Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until July 7, 2006, these individuals had been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration.

"Auctoritas", "charisma" and "Führertum" doctrine

Agamben shows that "auctoritas" and "potestas" are clearly distinct - although they form together a system". [Giorgio Agamben, "State of Exception" (2005)] He quotes Mommsen, who explains that "auctoritas" is "less than an order and more than an advice". [Theodor Mommsen, "Römisches Staatsrecht" ("Roman Constitutional Law", volume III) (Graz, 1969)]

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 did Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrate 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 life and private life 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.

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, 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 "abrogated" the Weimar Constitution: he "suspended" it for the whole duration of the 3rd Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on February 28, 1933. Indefinite suspension of law is what characterizes the state of exception. Thus, Agamben connects Greek political philosophy through to the concentration camps of 20th century fascism, and even further, to detainment camps in the likes of Guantanamo Bay or immigration detention centers, such as Bari, Italy, where asylum seekers have been imprisoned in football stadiums. In these kinds of camps, entire zones of exception are being formed: the state of exception becomes a status under which certain categories of people live, a "capture" of life by right. Sovereign law makes it possible to create entire areas in which the application of the law itself is held suspended, which is the basis of Bush administration's definition of an "enemy combatant".

"Interregnum", "justitium" and "nomos empsuchos" (the sovereign as "living law")

In the chapter preceding "Auctoritas" and "potestas", Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of "justitium", a technical term referring to the state of exception, declared to cope with "tumultus" state (rebellion, uprising, riots...), at the end of the Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during "interregnum" periods:

The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treatise "On law and justice" by pseudo-Archytas, conserved by Stobaeus with Diotogene's treatise on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of legitimacy. This theory must be radically distinguished from natural rights theory or Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" to which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion).

Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign ("basileus"), who is the law, from the magistrate ("archōn"), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law ("nomos empsuchos"), hierarchically superior, and a written law ("gramma"), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's "Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne" (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas:

:"I say that all communities are composed of an "archōn" (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign ("ho men empsuchos ho basileus"), and the inanimate one is the letter ("gramma"). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."

Criticism of US response to "9-11"

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to September 11, 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" ("zoe") and was akin to the tattooing that the Nazis did during World War II. [fr iconcite news |title="Non au tatouage biopolitique" "No to Bio-Political Tattooing" |date=2004 January 10 |publisher=Le Monde|url=http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=834932] [ [http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/3249|"No to Bio-Political Tattooing" By Giorgio Agamben, Le Monde, Saturday 10 January 2004]

However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he points out 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 became a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the Jews deportation in France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from identity cards. [fr iconcite news|title="Non à la biométrie" ("No to Biometrics")|date=2005 December 5|publisher="Le Monde|url=http://www.lemonde.fr/web/imprimer_element/0,40-0@2-3232,50-717595,0.html ( [http://souriez.info/article.php3?id_article=283 also available here] )] Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he explains is intrinsically related to the state of exception.

Endnotes and references

Bibliography

Only English translations are listed here; there are translations of most writings to German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There also is an updated list of publications including translations to other languages and links to texts [http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgioagamben.html here] and a more [http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/eyeghiay/Philosophy/Colloquia/agamben.html complete bibliography here] .
*
* "Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience" (1993) ISBN 0-86091-470-4 ISBN 0-86091-645-6
* "The Coming Community" (1993) ISBN 0-8166-2235-3
* "Idea of Prose" (1995) ISBN 0-7914-2379-4 ISBN 0-7914-2380-8
*cite book |title=Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life |publisher=Stanford University Press (1998) |id=ISBN 0-8047-3218-3
* "The Man without Content" (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3553-0 ISBN 0-8047-3554-9
* "The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics" (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3021-0 ISBN 0-8047-3022-9
* "Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy" (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3277-9 ISBN 0-8047-3278-7
* "Means without Ends: Notes on Politics" (2000) ISBN 0-8166-3035-6 ISBN 0-8166-3036-4
* "Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive" (2000) ISBN 1-890951-16-1 ISBN 1-890951-17-X
* "The Open: Man and Animal" (2004) ISBN 0-8047-4737-7 ISBN 0-8047-4738-5
* "State of Exception" (2005) (excerpt available [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html here] ) ISBN 0-226-00924-6 ISBN 0-226-00925-4
* "The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans" (2005) ISBN 0-8047-4382-7 ISBN 0-8047-4383-5
* "Profanations" (2007)
* Various articles published by "Multitudes", available [http://multitudes.samizdat.net/auteur.php3?id_auteur=304 here] .
* "The State of Emergency", [http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm extract from a lecture] given at the Centre Roland Barthes-
* cite news|title="Nei campi dei senza nome"|date= 1998 November 3|publisher=Il Manifesto|url=http://www.ilmanifesto.it/g8/archivio/lavoro_e_migranti/3b333676a4b9c.html
*cite news|title="Gênes et la peste" ("Genoa and the plague")|date=2001 August 27|publisher=L'Humanité|url=http://www.humanite.fr/journal/2001-08-27/2001-08-27-249331

See also

*Agamben's explanation of Auctoritas
*Agamben's response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to decide state exception
*"Basileus"
*"Homo sacer"
*"Interregnum"
*"Justitium"
*Unlawful combatants

External links

* [http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/agamben.htm Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Agamben]
* [http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXVII5.htm On Giorgio Agamben's "Profanations"] Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
*" [http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=437 Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life, German Law Journal, Vol. 5 (1 May 2004)] "
* [http://www.nplusonemag.com/agamben.html "Apocalypse Deferred"] A review of Agamben's work in n+1 magazine, by Mark Greif (Fall 2005).
*" [http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg00974.html Review of State of Exception] "
*" [http://formoflife.blogspot.com/2005/11/review-of-giorgio-agambens-time-that.html Review of The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans] "
*" [http://formoflife.blogspot.com/2006/01/lost-dress-of-paradise-theology-of.html The lost Dress of Paradise, by Giorgio Agamben] "
*/it icon [http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriagamben.htm "The Ripe Fruit of Redemption", Toni Negri reviews Agamben]

French

* [http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1135 "État d'exception" de G. Agamben"] by Sandra Salomon in "Multitudes", 2003, August 8.
*cite news|title="L'État d'exception" ("State of Exception")|date=2002 December 12|publisher=Le Monde|url=http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=784885
*cite news|title="Une biopolitique mineure" ("A minor biopolitic", interview with Agamben)|date=1999 December|publisher=Vacarme|url=http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article255.html

Italian

* [http://www.filosofico.net/agamben.htm filosofico.net Italian page dedicated to Agamben]

Hebrew

* [http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?contrassID=1&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&itemNo=648194 Review of "State of Exception"] , Yehouda Shenhav, Sfarim Haaretz, 23.11.2005.