The Sacred and the Unspeakable- Giorgio Agamben's Ontological Politics

7/27/2019 The Sacred and the Unspeakable- Giorgio Agamben's Ontological Politics

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-sacred-and-the-unspeakable-giorgio-agambens-ontological-politics 1/12

The Sacred and the Unspeakable:Giorgio Agamben's Ontological PoliticsDaniel McLoughlin (bio)

"it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of pure Being will we be able tomaster the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power, just as it may be, inversely, that only

if we understand the theoretical implications of bare life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology.Brought to the limit of pure Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics (into reality), just as onthe threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory."

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer 1

In his early work on ontology and language, Agamben's primary philosophical concern is the factumloquendi , the fact that humans are speaking beings, distinguishing the human animal from other living beings and dividing us internally from the "mere fact" of our biology. Agamben's political works,are, by contrast, concerned with the factum pluralitatis , the "simple fact that human beings form acommunity."

2 When, in the Homo Sacer project, Agamben turns to diagnose the way in which political

community has historically been produced, the merely living being once again plays a decisive role:political community is possible, according to Agamben, due to the division between the juridicallyrecognized and protected life of the citizen, and a politically unrecognized "bare biological life" that

may be killed with impunity.

Agamben frequently intimates that there is a close relationship between ontology and politics, andhis explicitly political texts draw on a range of concepts such as potentiality, play, and happy life,developed in his earlier first philosophical thought. Nonetheless, the nature of the relationshipbetween the two remains indistinct, a difficulty that is particularly evident in the ambiguous role that'bare life' plays in Homo Sacer. While the term principally refers to life that is excluded from theprotection of the law, Agamben often also refers to bare life as zoe , natural or nutritive life, a movethat conjoins the juridical problem of sovereignty to the philosophical definition of both the human as aspeaking being, and the political as a linguistic form of life, and reworks the very idea of natureor zoe as it has been inherited from the philosophical tradition. What, then, is the relationshipbetween the ontological fracture between the merely living being and the speaking being, and the juridical division between political and bare life? And between the facts that give rise to these

fractures (speaking, community), and the ontology and political philosophy through which they aretheorized?

Homo Sacer famously opens by noting that the Ancient Greeks had two different terms for life:bios , denoting "the form or way of living proper to an individual or group,"

3 and zoe , which

described "the simple fact of living common to all living beings. "4 This linguistic distinction between

form of life and bare life was reflected in the Greek definition of the bios politikos , Agamben citing apassage from The Politics "that was to become canonical for the political tradition of the West," inwhich Aristotle writes that man is "born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to thegood life."

5 The political articulation of the good life is thus defined by Aristotle as both distinct from

and dependent upon zoe , the simple fact of living. According to Agamben, the focus of the politicaltradition has historically been the inquiry into the form of the good life. This has, however, leftunaddressed a more originary question: "why Western politics first constitutes itself through an

exclusion (that is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. What is the relation between politics andlife, if life presents itself as what is included by means of an exclusion? "

6

Drawing on Carl Schmitt's definition of the sovereign as "he who decides on the exception, "7Homo

Sacer argues that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm is effected by sovereignpower .

8 While, for the most part, law relates to life through juridico-political categories (citizen, minor,

resident alien), Agamben asserts that when the limit of the political is at stake, the law will besuspended to preserve the prevailing order when this aim can no longer be attained through legalnorms. In the exception, then, the application of law to life is suspended, stripping life of juridicalstatus. Agamben's term for the life that dwells in this anomie is "bare life," as, from the perspective of

http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/results?section1=author&search1=Daniel%20McLoughlin

http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.mcloughlin.html#back



http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.mcloughlin.html#f1
































http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/results?section1=author&search1=Daniel%20McLoughlin



the legal system, the withdrawal of legal recognition and protection reduces life to the bare fact of itsexistence. The relation between bare life and law is, like the relation betweenzoe and the bios politikos in Greek thought, one of inclusive exclusion, or relation of non-relation, for bare life isincluded in the law only insofar as it is set outside it. The consequence of this juridical relation is,then, that bare life is absolutely exposed to death, for it may be killed by anyone without legalrepercussion.

While the political philosophical distinction between bios and zoe , and the juridical distinctionbetween law and anomie, are the central subjects of Agamben's study, there is a third form of relationto the "merely living being" at play in Homo Sacer : the metaphysical definition of the human as the"living being with an additional capacity for speech."

9 This human capacity for language has been

Agamben's principal philosophical pre-occupation since his earliest work: as he writes in the 1989Introduction to Infancy and History , "in both my written and unwritten books, I have stubbornlypursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of 'there is language'; what is the meaning of 'Ispeak'?"

10 Between the first publication of that book in 1978, and his next, Language and Death: The

Place of Negativity in 1982, Agamben worked on a project titled The Human Voice , which asked "isthere a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp of a cricket or the bray is the voiceof the donkey? And, if it exists, is this voice language? What is the relationship between voice andlanguage, between phone and logos ? And if such a thing as a human voice does not exist, in whatsense can man still be defined as the living being with language?"

11 Although this work remained

"stubbornly unwritten," the problem of the human voice nonetheless appears at the centreof Language and Death , which casts the human voice as "the model according to which Westernculture construes one of its own supreme problems: the relation and passage between nature andculture, between phusis and logos. "

12

Drawing on the grammarian Gaunilo in his debate with Anselm, Agamben argues that humanvoice, stripped of signification, is qualitatively different from animal phone.

13 When confronted with a

foreign language, we do not hear "mere meaningless sound," for although we do not understand themeaning of the sounds we hear, we are nonetheless aware that they have meaning. The humanvoice in itself, stripped of signification, shows "itself as a pure intention to signify, as pure meaning, inwhich something is given to be understood before a determinate event of meaning isproduced."

14 When referring to the human voice, Agamben then capitalizes it as Voice, in order to

distinguish it from the immediate expression of sensation that is characteristic, for the metaphysical

tradition, of the animal voice or phone.

For the human, there is no immediate voice, for our "meaningless sounds" always indicate thepotentiality for language. This potentiality is, then, the limit between the living being and the speakingbeing. According to Agamben, the metaphysical tradition thinks this potentiality as taking placethrough the removal of the originary, unmediated expression of the living being, an argument stakedon a reading of the role of the gramma , or letter, in Aristotle's de Interpretatione. Agamben arguesthat the distinction between phone and logos was, for the ancient grammarians, one between the"confused voice" of animals, and the "articulated" voice of the human. What articulates the humanvoice is the gramma, which is not, then, simply a sign used to represent things within the world, butalso an element of the voice. It is this ability to record the voice in writing that differentiates itfrom phone , and "in this way, the letter is what always pre-exists within the moatbetween phone and logos , the primordial structure of signification."

15 This means that for Western

thought, it is not the animal voice that is in the originary place, but the gramma. The articulation of thehuman voice differentiates it from the animal voice, and it is only through this that language andknowledge become possible. Through the gramma , however, metaphysical thought renders theoriginary dimension as negativity: to have logos is to have the immediacy of one's voice negated andreplaced by a Voice that can be written, which is no longer the immediacy of phone , but not yet themeaningfulness of logos : "if metaphysics is that reflection that places the voice as origin, it is alsotrue that this voice is, from the beginning, conceived of as removed. "

16 The Voice and

the gramma then anchor language to the living being through the separation of speech from ananimality and immediacy that is always already lost to it: it is "an arthron , an articulation: or rather...adiscontinuity that is also a continuity, a removal that is also a preservation. "

17







































While the Voice is central to Agamben's early works on language, the term disappears in hispolitical works. Instead, the relationship between the living being and language that is at stake inspeech is subsumed under the heading of "sovereignty": "sovereignty is the idea of an undecideablenexus between violence and right, between the living and language - a nexus that necessarily takesthe paradoxical form of a decision regarding the state of exception (Schmitt) or ban (Nancy) in whichthe law (language) relates to the living being by withdrawing from it, by a-bandoning it to its ownviolence and its own irrelatedness."

18 While the terminology shifts from articulation to abandonment

and inclusive exclusion, the relation of sovereignty is structurally identical to that involved in theVoice. In Homo Sacer , sovereignty is not, then, simply the sovereign decision producing a juridicalexception, but rather, the topology of abandonment between the living being and a field of meaning(law/politics/language).

There are, then, three forms of abandonment of the living being at play in Homo Sacer : thedistinction within political theory between politics as the good life and the simple fact of living; the juridical distinction between legally recognized life and a "bare life" that is stripped of legal recognitionproduced through the sovereign ban; and the ontological distinction between the living being andlanguage at stake in the human capacity for speech, which the metaphysical tradition thinks in termsof the Voice. At stake in each of these readings is a reworking of the understanding of origin andground as they have been thought by the philosophical tradition. In his analyses of linguisticpotentiality, for example, Agamben argues against the model of a passage from an originary

immediacy into language as an appropriate model for understanding the existence of language byquoting the linguist Humboldt: "We never find man separated from language, and we never see him inthe act of inventing it...It is a speaking man that we find in the world, a man speaking to another man,and it is language whereby man is defined as man."

19 The "origin" of language is not, then, a

chronological moment in which the human emerged from its animality, but rather, the fracturebetween the speaking being and the living being that has always already occurred insofar as we havethe capacity for language.

It is through this model of an originary fracture that Agamben approaches the origin of the politicalin his Homo Sacer project. In The Work of Man , an essay that elaborates on the distinctionbetween bios and zoe , Agamben glosses a passage in The Nichomachean Ethics that definespolitics as the "work of man" and his highest good. In order to identify the work that is specific to manas man, Aristotle begins by articulating the different forms that life takes, those of nutrition, sensation,

and thought. Nutritive life is "movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth," and is life in itsmost general form, equated by Aristotle, with the "simple fact of living" (to zen ).

20 As zoe is shared by

all living beings, and sensation is shared by both humans and animals, only life in accordance withthe logos can be the uniquely human form of life, and hence the work of man .

21 Agamben's reading of

the role of zoe in Aristotle is not an originary natural condition that is transcended in order to attain tolinguistic and human being. Rather, the "originary" moment of Aristotle's definition of the human is thecaesurae that he inscribes in the "continuum of life," separating out the most general mode of life(nutritive life) as the ground for other, more specific forms. Zoe is, for Agamben, not a pre-politicalnature, but bare life, the product of an operation that inscribes a division within life, and which thenexists in a relation of inclusive exclusion man's rational capacity from which it is separated.

In the same way, Agamben argues against the mythologeme of the state of nature as an originarycondition that is anterior to the law.

22 According to Agamben, the state of nature in Hobbes is in fact

analogous to the state of exception: "Hobbes, after all, was perfectly aware, as Strauss hasunderscored, that the state of nature did not necessarily have to be conceived as a real epoch, butrather could be understood as a principle internal to the State revealed in the moment in which theState is considered 'as if it were dissolved'."

23 The crucial question, in Agamben's analysis of the

"origin" of the political, is not the passage from an originary nature into law, but rather, the principlethat fractures political community between law and anomie: the sovereign exception. As Agambenasserts, "there are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature,and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos , coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical



























machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that pre-exists it, just as law has nocourt in nature or in the divine mind."

24

For Agamben, these forms of division are not, however, simply homological, and throughout hiswork, he suggests a more intimate relationship between law, politics, and ontology. The first and mostobvious of these is the importance of ontology to political thought: "it is not by chance," Agambenwrites, that Aristotle's The Politics "situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice tolanguage."25 While The Nichomachean Ethics defines politics in terms of man's rational capacity,in The Politics it is the capacity for language that differentiates the human from the merely livingbeing, and in so doing, makes politics possible:

Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is whyit belongs to other living beings… But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the justand the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what isproper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling andthe city.26

Political community is, for Aristotle, only possible through language and as such, his definition of politics reproduces the ontological distinction between the speaking being and the living being. Notonly does this exclude the animal and the merely living being from the political, but the biologicalexistence of the human is likewise excluded, politics being defined by drawing "out of the living being

through the exclusion - as unpolitical - of a part of its vital activity."

27

That the philosophical definitionof the political should reproduce the metaphysical definition of the human is, then, unsurprising,insofar as the political is defined as a community of speech. It is less immediately obvious why the juridical fracture between polit ical life and bare life should reflect the metaphysical division betweenthe living being and language. As I have argued elsewhere, however, law and language areanalogous, insofar as both involve the application of signs (laws) to being (life). Just as metaphysicalthought presupposes Being as the ground of the ways in which being is determined through the sign,so too does law presuppose a sphere of pure violence/bare life prior to the categorical determinationof life through law.

28 The similarity between the metaphysical and legal relation to the living being is,

then, explained by Agamben's claim that the potentiality for language at stake in the Voice is also thesphere of "pure Being."

29

Also somewhat puzzling, on its face, is the conjunction that Agamben asserts between law andpolitics, for, as Hannah Arendt argues, the polis was a "special and freely chosen form of political

organization and by no means just any form of action necessary to keep men together in an orderlyfashion."

30 The bios politikos was, as the Aristotelian definition of politics indicates, not simply

government or rule, but a form of association in which free and equal citizens met in public throughaction ( praxis ) and speech (lexis ). While the polis was considered a sphere of equality and freedom,these were not, however, inherent rights. Rather, to be free, meant to be materially free from the willof others and from the compulsion imposed upon one by living (the need for clothing, shelter, foodand the like). Greek thought then distinguished between the freedom and equality of the polis and itsform of life devoted to speech and action, and the household and the despotism, both of whichwere aneu logou , deprived "not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which speech and onlyspeech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other. "

31 For

Agamben, however, the sovereign ban is not the foundation of politics conceived specifically as acommunity of speech, but of politico-juridical community, that is, a people bound together by law.Such a definition therefore encompasses forms of community that are, from the Greek perspective,

anti-political: the polis was opposed to despotism, not only because the latter lacked speech, butbecause it were characterized by rule and hierarchical power relations.

While Agamben's model of the sovereign ban could encompass such "non-political" forms of community, in the Greek origins of the political tradition, we do find a conjunction between the sacred,life that is excluded from the community of speech, and bare life that is excluded from the protectionof the law. Where the public political sphere was held in common through language, the privatesphere was, for the Greeks, sacred, for it was devoted to those things that are impenetrable to humanknowledge, birth and death, the emergence and return of mortals to the underworld.

32 As Arendt







































points out, the law was originally identified with the boundary line between one household andanother, demarcating the public political sphere from the private.

33 Those who were confined to the

private sphere, devoted to the biological and the mortal, were not only excluded from the communityin which speech made sense, but from law and claims to justice,

34 and subjected to the absolute rule

of the head of the household.35

The oikos was, then, a space of juridical exception, for Greek politicswas constitutively dependent upon the (inclusive) exclusion of women and slaves from bothparticipation in the way of life in which speech made sense, and the sphere of the law. This exclusionthen exposed them to the legally unrestricted violence of the head of the household, which was justified precisely in order that he could be a citizen and participate in the sphere of political freedomand equality: "force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means tomaster necessity - for instance, by ruling over slaves - and to become free."

36

The homology between law, political theory, and metaphysics in Agamben's work is dependentupon a complex play of interrelations. The fundamental problem of metaphysics is the factumlinguae , the fact that humans speak, and metaphysical thought defines the human's "additionalcapacity for language" in terms of the removal of the originary immediacy of the voice. Thefundamental problem of political thought is, by contrast, the fact that humans form communities.Greek philosophy defined political community in terms of speech, thereby reproducing themetaphysical fracture between the living being and language: as Agamben asserts, "the question 'inwhat way does the living being have language?' corresponds exactly to the question 'in what way

does bare life dwell in the polis ?' The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its ownvoice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, withinit."

37 The properly human and political community of speech, is, however, only constituted in practice

by excluding certain individuals from the sphere of law and justice, whose subjugation is essential tothe political freedom of the citizen. The theoretical caesura that Aristotle inscribesbetween bios and zoe is then reflected in political praxis , in a distinction between polisand oikos thatis produced juridically.

There are, however, two crucial places in Agamben's work, in which politics and ontology are nolonger simply analogous, but enter into a zone of indistinction. The first is his repeated suggestionsthat ontology itself is immediately political. In The Open: Man and Animal , Agamben asserts that thefundamental biopolitical fracture is that between the human and the merely living being, and thatontology is an "operation" that realises this relation: as such "ontology, or first philosophy, is not an

innocuous academic discipline, but in every sense the fundamental operation in whichanthropogenesis, the becoming human of the living being, is realized. "

38 In his essay "Kommerell, On

Gesture," Agamben also writes that "politics is the sphere of the full, absolute gesturality of humanbeings, and it has no name other than its Greek pseudonym, which is barely uttered here:philosophy."

39

The second is a zone of indistinction that appears in some of Agamben's figures of contemporarybiopolitics. The figures that dominate Agamben's analysis, such as the bandit and homo sacer , areproducts of the juridical suspension of the law. In his account of contemporary biopolitics, however, Agamben introduces figures such as the overcomatose Karen Quinlan, who is kept "just alive"through medical interventions, separating her biological life "from the form of life that bore the nameKaren Quinlan,"

40 and the Musselman , the inhabitant of the concentration camp who was "giving up

and had been given up by his comrades, (who) no longer had room in his consciousness for the

contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, abundle of physical functions in its last convulsions."41

A figure such as homo sacer is aneu logou ,deprived of the way of life in which speech makes sense, "bare life" only from the perspective of thelegal order. By contrast, what is at stake in figures such as the Musselmanis not only a juridicalabandonment, but an individual reduced by power to the ontological fact of their biological existence.

Ernesto Laclau has criticized Agamben for a confused application of the term zoe , arguing thatfigures such as the bandit "clearly exceeds" bare life.

42 For Laclau, the bandit retains a capacity for

antagonistic social practices that is absent from a figure of "pure zoe " such as the musselman, whohas been deprived of all agency by power. Laclau is correct to point to this distinction, and to assert











































that Agamben's use of the term "bare life" is vague. That Agamben himself is cognizant of thedistinction between the two levels is, however, illustrated by his assertion that the biopolitics of theNazi state inscribed a series of caesura in the political body, so that "the non-Aryan passes into theJew. The Jew into the deportee, the deportee into the prisoner, until the biopolitical caesuras reachtheir final limit in the camp. This limit is the Musselmann. .. the final substance to be isolated in thebiological continuum."

43 While the divisions of the juridical order (Jew/deportee/prisoner) have their

juridical limit in the camp, which is a space of anomie or exception, the final limit or biopolit icalcaesura is the Musselman , the figure of subjective destitution.

Light can be cast on these zones of indistinction by returning to Language and Death and thepotentiality for language. In the final excursus of that work, Agamben turns from the terrain of metaphysics to that of practical philosophy, arguing that the human disjunction from nature throughlanguage gives rise to "violence."

44 Human violence is qualitatively different from the violence of

nature for, as Benjamin puts it in the Critique of Violence , "a cause, however effective, becomesviolent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it bears on moral issues. "

45 Where the storm or

tsunami may destroy lives and property, it is in their nature to do so, for there is no question of thetsunami deciding otherwise. For Agamben, however, being in language is the nature of the human,which thereby disjoins us from nature. The human, then, has no nature: we are essentiallyundetermined, without identity or vocation, defined only by the capacity to speak: a potential being.This indeterminate human potential is, then, the origin of human violence, constituting us not only as

speaking beings, but as free to decide, to be or to do otherwise.

The fundamental stake of Agamben's linguistic thought is how this potentiality for language isunderstood. One of the central claims of Language and Death is that philosophy is characterized bythe "sacrificial mythogeme " of an unspeakable foundation. The lecture series opens with an analysisof an obscure early poem of Hegel's on the Eleusinian Mystery.

46 The rite was devoted to the sacred,

that which transcended human knowledge and experience, and while all could participate in theMystery, it was prohibited by law to speak about it .

47 According to Hegel's poem, this legal prohibition

corresponds to the "profound and ineffable sentiment" that the rite gives rise to, too sacred to bespoken in the mere "desiccated signs" of human language: to communicate it, one would insteadhave to speak the "language of angels."

48 What is involved in the sacrificial rite, then, is an

experience that transcends words and is, as such, unspeakable and ineffable. Sacrifice is, accordingto Agamben, an attempt to regulate the essential ungroundedness of humanity:

However one interprets the sacrificial function, the essential thing is that in every case, the action of thehuman community is grounded only in another action; or as etymology shows, every facere issacrumfacere. At the centre of sacrifice is simply a determinate action that, as such, is separated and marked byexclusion; in this way it becomes sacer and is invested with a series of prohibitions and ritualprescriptions… In this way, it furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of abeginning: that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of thecommunity is founded, and it is assumed by society as the immemorial, yet memorable, past...Theungroundedness of all human praxis is hidden herein the fact that an action (a sacrum facere ) isabandoned to itself and thus becomes the foundation for all legal behaviour; the action is that which,remaining unspeakable (arreton ) and intransmissible in every action and in all human language, destinesman to community and tradition49

For Agamben, the original dimension of politics is our being thrown in language, the ontologicalfracture between speech and the living being, the potentiality for language and the ethico-politicalcapacity of the human. Law, be it ethical or political, attempts to regulate human potentiality by

normatively determining the limits of legitimate violence. The binding force of these prescriptions arethen grounded in a "sacred origin," an immemorial past or a transcendent realm that justifies the law'sauthority to order the form of life of a community. Agamben argues, however, that this legal authorityis a fiction, for law does not derive its authority from a pre-existing transcendent sphere to whichhumans gain access through the ritual of sacrifice. Rather, the sacred is a human artefact, producedthrough a juridico-religious ritual in which an act of violence is separated from the community, and it isthe repetition of this sacrificial act that continually reproduces the division between the sacred and theprofane, the speakable and the ineffable, providing the law with its foundation and authority.































According to Agamben, philosophy is an attempt to liberate man of the unspeakable and thetranscendent through speech and reason: "Philosophy is precisely the foundation of man as humanbeing (that is, as a living being that has logos ) and the attempt to absolve man of hisungroundedness and of the unspeakability of the sacrificial mystery."

50 Philosophy fails in this

endeavour, however, insofar as it conceives the experience of the limit of language as ineffable, for,in the Voice and the gramma , metaphysics thinks the potentiality for language as negativity, thenegation of the living being and an originary immediacy, that is required in order for meaning andbeing to take place. Against this, Agamben suggests that not only does the human lack a foundationinsofar as we are disjoined from any nature by linguistic potentiality, but that we are even poorer thanthe theme of the Voice would suggest: "in the final analysis this Voice is always a mythologeme or a theologoumenon ; nowhere, in the living being or in language, can we reach a point in whichsomething like an articulation takes place. Outside theology and the incarnation of the Verb, there isno moment in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living being is ableto render itself linguistic, transforming itself into speech."

51 The thesis of Agamben's unwritten work

on the Voice was, then, to be that the gap between phone and logos is radically empty, that there isno passage between the living being and speech, no gramma that articulates the two dimensions thatare fractured by the fact of language.

52 There is no ground for the human as speaking being, neither

the sacred mystery that is ineffable, nor metaphysics' negative ground of a removed animal voice.While this lack of ground is a most abyssal experience, it is also, Agamben asserts, what we arealways already doing in speaking: "What if the dwelling to which we return beyond being is neither a

supercelestial place nor a Voice, but simply these trite words that we have?"53

From Language and Death through The Coming Community , Agamben argues that thisexperience of the limit of language as a kind of radical poverty gives rise to the need to rethinkcommunity that fully assumes this fact. Community is often grounded in the presuppositionof alanguage as both the source of political unity, and the field of political contestation.

54 For Aristotle,

for example, politics is the community of discussion of the good and the bad, and this means thecommunity of logos , the community of a particular language. Similarly, the modern nation-state ispredicated on the congruence of juridical community and linguistic community, insofar as itsuperimposes the concepts of nation, people, territory, language, and state, and modern liberaldemocracy is grounded in language, insofar as its political ideal is the exchange of ideas within thepublic political sphere.

55 For Agamben, however, the only content of the experience of the limit of

language is "that there is language," and this factum linguae is the common element that links

humanity. This universality can, however, only be thought through the radical poverty of itsfoundation: neither a particular tradition that is handed down from one generation to the next, nor aparticular language with its grammar, or an always already lost immediacy, but simply our beingthrown in language without being called there by a Voice.

The frame of the Homo Sacer project, by contrast, and its argument for a new politics, is groundednot simply in an ontological error pertaining to language, but in the nihilism of contemporarybiopolitics, an analysis that develops upon the problem of sacred separation first articulatedin Language and Death. .

56 While the political philosophical tradition has variously grounded law in

divine will, natural right, universal rational principles, or the social contract, Agamben argues that inpractice, it is the separation of bare life and its exposure to violence that furnishes politico-juridicalcommunity with its foundation. Philosophy has grounded logos in an unspeakable Voice, and so toois the rationalism of the rule of law grounded in the negativity of the sovereign ban, an anomie and a

bare life that is unspeakable within the political realm. Further, in much the same way ascontemporary philosophy is plagued by nihilism, contemporary politics has brought to light thenegative foundation of the law. While the legal system has always been founded in the abandonmentof bare life, this has historically been a temporally limited response to a determinate threat. Agambenargues, however, that the twentieth century was witness to the "normalization of the exception," inwhich the separation and production of bare life has become central to the operation of thecontemporary nation-state, and the paradigm of this biopolitical nihilism is the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, in which the exception was first normalized and given a "stable spatialarrangement."

57



































It is in the context of contemporary biopolitics that the second form of indistinction betweenontology and politics appears, the oscillation between the bare fact of being alive and the exclusionfrom politics. Homo Sacer 's argument for what is unique in the concentration camps revolves aroundthe "normalization of the exception," thereby highlighting the similarity between the juridical structureof the camps, and other examples of the exception/bare life. As Arendt makes clear in her study of totalitarianism, however, the camp is the most extreme form of exclusion yet devised, for while slavesand exiles are deprived of rights, they remain a part of the human world, the slave having value as apiece of property, the exile being removed from one polity to another .58 While the exception allowedthe atrocities of the camp to take place without legal repercussion, it was this complete removal of thecamps from the society that allowed for what is unique to the concentration camps, as opposed toother forms of exception: the destruction of the individual's moral personality, and ultimately, theproduction of the Musselman , the erasure of human spontaneity and subjectivity as such.

59

While the continuity in juridico-political structure that Homo Sacer highlights is true enough, whatthis underplays is the decisive mutation in biopolitics involved in the camps and the figure of the musselman.

60 As Agamben makes clear in Remnants , a work devoted to the implications of the

concentration camps for ethics, concentration camps see a profound transformation in therelationship between subjectivity and political power characteristic of modern biopolitics. According toMichel Foucault's Discipline and Punish , modernity witnesses the emergence of a disciplinary modeof power that "makes individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as

both objects and as instruments of its exercise."61 Discipline operates through specific apparatuses,such as the prison, the school, or the barracks, and through specific new techniques, "a combinationof hierarchical observation and normalising judgment."

62 Captured by a disciplinary apparatus,

individuals tend to assume responsibility for their own subjection, inscribing the demands of power upon their own bodies.

63 The product of discipline is, then, a normalized individual, and a docile body

that can be more easily inserted into the apparatuses of production.

According to Agamben, however, contemporary biopower no longer seeks simply to producenormal subjects: in fact, its "supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absoluteseparation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios , the inhuman and thehuman."

64 As we have seen, for Agamben, speech is dependent upon an originary fracture between

the living being and language introduced by the capacity for language, and in Auschwitz, biopower operates at this limit, calling into question the ontological processes through which it is constituted, "a

biopolitical experiment on the operators of Being, an experiment that transforms and disarticulates thesubject to a limit point in which the link between subjectification and desubjectification seems to breakapart."

65

Where previous figures of bare life were a purely juridico-political phenomena, in the new andextreme phase of biopolitics marked by the camp, figures such as the Musselman and theovercomatose bring the ontological limit of the human to light, the "purely living being" over againstwhich the speaking being emerges. The oscillation between the registers of ontology and politicsinvolved in Agamben's examples of bare life then has a twofold ground: not only is politico-juridicalphilosophy and praxis characterized by the negativity of metaphysical thought, contemporarybiopolitics sees an intensification of biopolitics that isolates the ontological presupposition of themerely living being: in the camp, the biopolitics of sovereign power not only produces the juridicaldivision between bare and political life within the community, but inscribes within the living individual

the fracture through which metaphysics and political philosophy had always defined the human. Thisis, however, the decisive refutation of the ontology of "natural life," for the "merely living being"isolated in the camp is not a pre-existing natural ground, but rather, the result of the process of acaesura, the product of the biopolitical machine.

For Agamben, then, in the problem of linguistic potentiality, we find a conjunction between ontologyand politics, the latter thought in an "originary" sense. Violence, the ungrounded potential of thehuman to speak and act, is the product of our linguistic being, and we are, in this sense, immediatelypolitical beings. The sovereign ban is not, then, the foundation of politics per se, but of politicalcommunity as one of law. Works such as Language and Death and The Coming Community then



































argue for a radical revision of the notion of politics and community on the basis of the ontological error through which metaphysics has thought the limit of language as a negative foundation. Such workshave, however, none of the sense of crisis that characterizes the Homo Sacer project. Returning tothe problem, first articulated in Language and Death , of the constitution and regulation of politicalcommunity through law and its foundation in the unspeakable, Homo Sacer diagnoses thecatastrophic limits to which the ontology and politics of separation have been pushed in contemporarypolitics. To counter the indistinction between ontology and politics manifest in the musselman , Agamben argues that it is, then, necessary to return political thought to the register of ontology, andthe potentiality that opens both our linguistic and political capacity to be otherwise, a radicalcontingency that law and metaphysics attempt to "cure" through an unspeakable foundation.

Daniel McLoughlin Daniel McLoughlin is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy in the University of New South Wales, working on therelationship between ontology and politics in the thought of Giorgio Agamben. He has published in Law and Critique on Agamben's work, on both the problem of nihilism, and the relationship between law and language. He has alsopublished on modernity, crisis, and Carl Schmitt's decisionism in the Australian Feminist Law Journal.

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1998), 182.

2. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics , (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press,2000), 65.

3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , 1.




7. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty , (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,1985), 5.


9. Aristotle, in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 27.

10. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience , (London: Verso, 2007), 6.

11. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History , 3-4.

12. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity , (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1991), 85.

13. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity , trans. K. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 34. See also Giorgio Agamben, "The Thing Itself," Potentialities: Collected Essays inPhilosophy , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 42.

14. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity , trans. K. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 43.

15. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History , 9.

16. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity , (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1991), 39.

17. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity , 85.

http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.mcloughlin.html#front


http://muse.jhu.edu.vortex3.uco.edu:2050/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.mcloughlin.html#f1-text







































18. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends , 112.

19. Wilhelm von Humboldt, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History , 56.

20. Giorgio Agamben, "The Work of Man," Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life , (eds) Matthew Calarco andSteven DeCaroli, (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007), 4.

21. Rationality is a faculty, a potentiality, and as Aristotle is attempting to theorize the work of man, which isnecessarily a praxis , he specifies that life in accordance with the logos is this faculty in action, that is, its being-at-work (energia ).

22. For an excellent analysis of Agamben's analysis of Hobbes through the state of exception, see Sergei Prozorov,"The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and The Political," Continental Philosophy Review Vol. 42 (2009): 26


24. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 87.



27. Giorgio Agamben, "The Work of Man," 6.

28. See Daniel McLoughlin, "The Politics of Caesura," Law and Critique Vol. 20 No.2 (2009): 163.

29. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death , 26.

30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 13

31. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition , 27.



34. As Arendt argues, legal jurisdiction with regard to slaves did not apply to the slaves as such, but only to thehead of the household, and was designed to restrict his otherwise unrestricted power in the interests of the city:"that there could be a rule of justice within the entirely 'private' society of the slaves themselves was unthinkable -they were by definition outside the realm of law and subject to the rule of their master. Only the master himself, inso far as he was also a citizen, was subject to the rules of laws, which for the sake of the city eventually curtailedhis powers in the household" Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition , 31 n.27.

35. Arendt, The Human Condition , 34. Aristotle asserts a parallel between the master of the household and a king,each of whom rule over inferiors, where the statesman as the head of the polis rules over equals. Aristotle, ThePolitics , trans. TA Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1992), 54, 91-2



38. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal , (Stanford, Calif,: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79.

39. Giorgio Agamben, "Kommerell, On Gesture," in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1999), 85.


41. Jean Amery, in At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1980) ci ted in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , 41.




















































42. Ernesto Laclau, "Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?" in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life , 19.

43. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , p. 85.


45. Walter Benjamin. "The Critique of Violence," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writings ,

(New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 277.


47. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition , 63 n.61




51. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , 129-30.

52. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History , 9-10.


54. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History , 10.

55. See Giorgio Agamben, "Languages and Peoples," in Means Without Ends , 65.

56. It may seem odd to draw a link between Agamben's discussion of sacrifice in Language and Death , and homosacer , "an individual who, having been excluded from the community, can be killed with impunity but cannot besacrificed" Giorgio Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," Profanations , (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 78.However, as Agamben points out, sacrare "was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law" Agamben, "In Praise of Profanation," 73. The figure of the sacred man appears in Agamben'sdiscussion of sacrifice in Language and Death , and he notes that given his removal from profane law andcommunity, his killing does not constitute a crime. The refinement of this analysis that takes place in Homo Sacer ,

is that Agamben notes that the sacred man is excluded from profane law, yet are not taken into the divine sphereand the legal regulations that apply to it, and as such, they cannot be sacrificed. It is this double exclusion, beingstuck on the threshold between the two legal spheres that exposes homo sacer not only to death, but to deathcaused by arbitrary violence, unlike the rule governed death of sacrificial ritual. Despite this shift, what remainsconsistent is the role of the sacred as that which constitutes law governed community through its being separated,abandoned to itself and therefore unspeakable.

57. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , 175

58. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest Books, 1973), 444.

59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , 453

60. In Means Without Ends , Agamben does refer to the camps as "the most absolute biopolitical space that hasever been realized." Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends , 40. What he is referring to, however, is the fact thatthe inhabitants have been stripped of every political status. This could be interpreted consistently with the Arendtiananalysis of the oblivion involved in the camp: this is by no means clear, however, and as the analysis to focuses onthe juridical structure of exception, it tends to highlight the continuity between the concentration camp and other forms of exception.

61. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 170

62. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1982), 156.















































63. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 202-3.

64. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , 156.

65. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , 148.

Copyright © 2010 Daniel McLoughlin and The Johns Hopkins University Press







Documents

The Sacred and the Unspeakable- Giorgio Agamben's Ontological Politics