Catastrophe and Redemption

Catastrophe and Redemption
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

—————
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Catastrophe and Redemption
The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben
Jessica Whyte
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whyte, Jessica (Jessica Stephanie)

Catastrophe and redemption : the political thought of Giorgio Agamben /
Jessica Whyte.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A striking new reading of Agamben’s political thought and its
implications for political action in the present”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4853-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942—Political and social views. 2. Political science—
Philosophy. I. Title.
JC265.A34W49 2013
320.01—dc23 2012048336
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption 1

Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah 7
Flowers and Chains 10
Chapter Outline 15
1. The Politics of Life 19

Agamben and Foucault: On Biopolitics, Ancient and
Modern 25
Biopolitics and Sovereignty 28
Biopolitical Being 31
The Rights of Bare Life 35
Hoping Merely Out of Stupidity 42
2. Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception 47

The State of Exception 52
Carl Schmitt: The Paradox of Sovereignty 54
Presupposition and the Problem of Application 59
The State of “Nature” 63
Challenging the Normalization of the Exception? 68
3. If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz 73

The Remnant Shall Be Saved 76
The Danger 78
Where Danger Is, Grows the Saving Power Also 87
vi / CONTENTS
4. “I Would Prefer Not To”: Bartleby, Messianism, and the

Potentiality of the Law 97
The Law Is a Dry Canal 102
Aristotle and the Origins of Sovereignty 104
Past Contingent 110
Bartleby as Messiah? 119
5. A New Use: On the Society of the Spectacle and the

Coming Politics 123
Paying Pilgrimage to the Commodity Fetish 129
The Eclipse of Use and the “Dialectical Salvation of the
Commodity” 132
A New Use for the Self: The Global Petty Bourgeoisie
and the Coming Community 144
We Are Saved When We No Longer Want to Be 150
Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable 159
Notes 167
Bibliography 199
Index 211
Acknowledgments
This book has been years in the making, and I have accumulated debts too
numerous to do justice to. I would like to thank all those brilliant readers
who provided critical responses to elements of it: Mark Kelly, Alison Ross,
Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Sarah Tayton, Vicki Sentas, Justin Clemens, Eve
Vincent, Costas Douzinas, Liz Humphries, Nick Heron, Yoni Molad, Eric
Santner, Sean O’Beirne, Craig McGregor, John Cleary, Daniel McLoughlin,
Rory Dufficy. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose helpful
comments enabled me to refine the manuscript and sharpen my argument,
to Andrew Kenyon and Cathleen Collins at SUNY Press, and to Rory
Dufficy for his fine work on the index. Alison Ross deserves special thanks
for reading numerous drafts, starting with the first one and ending with
the final draft, and providing feedback that was always critical, generous,
and incisive. This work has benefited immensely from conversations (and
arguments) with the following friends and colleagues: Ellen Roberts, Andrew
Benjamin, Thanos Zartaloudis, Bryan Cooke, Sarah Roberts, Alex Murray,
Andrea Maksimovic, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Adam Bandt, Damien Lawson,
Adam Nash, Amir Ahmadi, Alex Ling, Ben Golder, Ihab Shalbak, Paul
Patton, Kim Mereine, Lauren Bliss, Richard Bailey, Tad Tietze, Tyson Wils,
Ben Noys, Andy Schaap, Juliet Rogers, Adam Bartlett and Jon Symons.
This book would literally not have been possible without the experiment in
the creation of a general intellect that is the Melbourne Agamben reading
group. I thank all its past and present members. Finally, I am especially
grateful to Ihab, for bringing such joy to my life. This book is for my
brothers, Joe and Nick Whyte, and is dedicated to the memory of Liz and
Don Whyte.
A portion of the first chapter appeared as “Particular Rights and
Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics,” Law and Critique
(2009, 20:2), 147–161. An earlier draft of the third chapter appeared as “ ‘I
Would Prefer Not To’: Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby and the Potentiality of the
Law,” Law and Critique (2009, 20:3), 309–324. An early draft of a portion of
vii
viii / ACKNOWL EDGM ENT S
the final chapter appeared as “A New Use of the Self: Giorgio Agamben on
the Coming Community,” Theory and Event, vol. 13:1 (2010), http://muse.
jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.whyte.html.
Introduction
On Catastrophe and Redemption
This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past and not remember
tomorrow in the story.
—Mahmoud Darwish, This Is Forgetfulness
In March 2009, Giorgio Agamben gave an address inside the Notre-Dame

Cathedral in Paris. In the audience were a number of high-ranking Church
officials, including the Bishop of Paris. Although his talk has been described
as a homily, its content was far from edifying. “An evocation of final things,
of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the
Church,” he told the assembled listeners, “that it has been said, not with-
out irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window.”1
Charging the Church with having abandoned its messianic vocation, he
argued that, with the renunciation of the promise of salvation, the Church
had become simply another worldly power dedicated to the eternal govern-
ment of this world. Despite his addressees, Agamben’s remarks were not
simply an indictment of the Catholic Church. Rather, they touched on the
structural analogy he has elsewhere employed between the Church’s aban-
donment of its messianic vocation and contemporary governments’ aban-
donment of politics. Lacking a redemptive horizon, he argues, all politics
is “imprisoned and immobile”2—reduced to a technocratic, yet nonethe-
less bloody, management of survival.3 “The crises—the states of permanent
exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually
proclaim,” Agamben told his audience, “are in reality a secularized parody
of the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment.”4 Contemporary
politics, as he sees it, is this parody, in which all worldly powers are fun-
damentally illegitimate and we are faced with the “complete juridification
1
2/ CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
and commodification of human relations.”5 In a bitter reproach to the

gathered Church Officials, he noted that in Christian theology there is one
“legal institution,” an institution founded on judgment and punishment,
that continues eternally without interruption or end: hell. “The model of
contemporary politics—which pretends to be an infinite economy of the
world,” he continues, “is thus truly infernal.”6
In this depiction of the permanence of the liberal capitalist present as
hellish, we see the immense gap that separates Agamben from the liberal
consensus that shaped the period in which many of his major works were
written. The unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and rapid collapse of the
Soviet Bloc gave rise to a form of liberal utopianism that was most starkly
expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In that
book, which now has the feel of a relic from a bygone (post)-historical era,
Fukuyama argued that despite the horror of the twentieth century, “good news
has come” in the form of the demise of totalitarianism and the ascendancy
of liberal democracy as the only coherent political idea with global reach.7
Writing in 1992, he argued that although it is possible to imagine numerous
political regimes that are worse than liberal democracy, we now have trouble
imagining a “future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist” or in
envisaging a political regime that could be better than the one currently in
existence.8 If we can no longer conceptualize a future that would be a fun-
damental improvement over our current order, he suggested, the “possibility
that History itself might be at an end” is worthy of serious consideration.9
This liberal utopianism was a paradoxical one—more a sigh of resigna-
tion in the face of the failures of previous, more compelling, utopias than
a promised land.10 Although even Fukuyama was unable to stifle a note
of anxiety about whether such a posthistorical condition could actually
make us happy, the purchase of his thought relied on its ability to capture
a zeitgeist marked by the foreclosure of such anxieties, and the promise of
happiness they recalled, and the affirmation of the eternal and uninter-
rupted continuation of the liberal democratic present. In stark contrast,
for Agamben, it is this transformation of the liberal-capitalist present into
an infinite horizon that is truly infernal.
Before long, it became clear that liberal capitalism had not produced
the irrepressible movement toward a world of peace and democracy that
had been proclaimed in the wake of the fall of the wall. Agamben’s thought
was particularly suited to analyzing the transformations the demise of the
Soviet Bloc wrought on those liberal democratic states that Fukuyama had
portrayed as the victors of the ideological battle against totalitarianism.
By the time Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life appeared, with its
striking claim that today “it is not the city but rather the camp that is
INTRODUCTION /3
the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,”11 liberal democratic

states were transforming from within, suspending basic rights and opening
spaces, like Camp X-Ray, that eerily evoked the repressive regimes that had
supposedly been permanently defeated. By 2002, when then-U.S. President
George W. Bush, echoing Fukuyama, told a military academy gathering
that “the twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human
progress,” the proliferating wars and draconian emergency regimes then in
place in many liberal states made it more difficult to view this as cause for
optimism.12 By 2005, when State of Exception was published in the midst of
the “War on Terror”—which saw the declaration of a state of emergency,
the suspension of a host of basic rights and the utilization of Guantánamo
Bay as an interrogation camp in which so-called enemy combatants were
placed outside the reach of the U.S. court system—Agamben’s analysis of
our time seemed disturbingly prescient.
More than a decade later, it is clear that while the early reception
of his explicitly political works was bound up with the events that seemed
to confirm his central theses, the descriptive value of his thought was
double-edged: while it led to enormous interest in his work across a range
of disciplines, it tended also to obscure the underlying philosophical claims
about the nature of Western politics and metaphysics that provided the
horizon of intelligibility for his more provocative arguments. Furthermore, it
led to a one-sided focus on Homo Sacer and its critical diagnosis of politics,
which displaced attention from what I call the redemptive moment of his
thought. This one-sided focus generated an interpretation of his work as
“overly dramatic and alarmist,”13 and marked by “a rhetoric of histrionic
hyperbole.”14 By focusing exclusively on his depiction of the catastrophic
nature of contemporary politics, critics tended to miss the extent to which
this diagnosis informs his view that our time is making possible a new
politics and a new form of life that would free humanity from sovereign
power. This means that such criticisms did not touch on what I suggest is
the real weakness of his political thought: that is, his tendency to see the
intensification of the catastrophe of the present as the path to redemption.
It is undoubtedly true that Agamben is prone to profoundly bleak
characterizations of contemporary politics. He may be far from celebrating
Fukuyama’s “good news,” but he shares with the latter the view that we
have reached the end of history, and that this may have turned us into what
the latter calls a race of “men without chests”15 unable to affirm any values
or to imagine anything worth fighting for—or, in Agamben’s (admittedly
hyperbolic) terms, turned us into “the most docile and cowardly social body
that has ever existed in human history.”16 In The Open, he explicitly situates
this diagnosis at the end of history, remarking: “man has now reached his
historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there
is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of
the unconditional unfolding of the oikonomia.”17 By oikonomia, Agamben
means a form of economic government modeled on the household, and it
is this domestic focus on the sustenance of life itself that is central to his
indictment of contemporary politics. If “men are unable to affirm that any
particular way of life is superior to another,” Fukuyama warns in The End
of History, “then they will fall back on the affirmation of life itself, that
is, the body, its needs, and fears.”18 For Agamben, this is the catastrophe
of our posthistorical present.
In his notes on the theory of knowledge and the theory of progress in The
Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin, a key influence on Agamben’s thought,
briefly defines several “basic historical concepts,” among them: “Catastro-
phe—to have missed the opportunity.”19 This book contends that, by “catas-
trophe” Agamben understands that things continue as they are. Fukuyama’s
utopia is his hell. Like Benjamin’s, Agamben’s thought is oriented to iden-
tifying opportunities to interrupt the machinery of the present. And yet, it
is within this catastrophic present that he sees the possibility of a new form
of life that would be worthy of the name redemption. To demonstrate this,
throughout this book I examine a number of central aspects of what he
views as the catastrophic situation of the present: his account of biopolitics
and the reduction of life to what he terms bare life; his examination of the
normalization of the state of exception; his reading of one specific historical
catastrophe, which he metonymizes with the name Auschwitz; his account
of the commodification and instrumentalization of human potential in the
society of the spectacle; and his depiction of contemporary government as
the rule of the economy over all of life. In each of these catastrophic situ-
ations, however, I suggest that Agamben sees the condition of possibility
of a form of redemption that appears, as “an ‘otherwise’ where everything
is finished forever.”20
In speaking of redemption, I refer (as I believe Agamben does) to a
profane experience, and not to a religious one. Although his work draws
heavily on Jewish and Christian messianism, his vision of redemption is
oriented to a use of the world that is “profane, free of sacred names,”
and “negligent” toward the divine.21 “Redemption” he makes clear in The
Coming Community, “is not an event in which what was profane becomes
sacred and what was lost is found again. Redemption is, on the contrary,
the irreparable loss of the lost, the definitive profanity of the profane.”22
INTRODUCTION /5
Walter Benjamin once remarked that, with the idea of the classless society,
Karl Marx secularized the messianic kingdom.23 It is my contention that
the redemptive moment of Agamben’s thought takes us closer to Marx’s
secularization of the kingdom than it does to those Church officials who
assembled in the Notre Dame cathedral to hear this professor of profanation
rail against their fatal compromise with the world. Marx’s critique of capi-
talism was a critique of a system in which the workers’ needs to sell their
labor in order to survive drive them to “surrender its creative power, like
Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage.”24 Similarly, Agamben’s critique
of contemporary politics is oriented to a world in which potentiality could
be experienced as such, in the form of a free use of human capacities. This
redemptive moment of Agamben’s thought is given various names in dif-
ferent books, among them “form-of-life,” “use,” “profanation,” “the coming
community,” and “the ungovernable.” Each of them, I suggest, turns on a
state of the world in which human potentiality would not be substantivized
as the foundation of particular exclusive identities (national identity, for
instance), actualized in the body of a sovereign, or fixed in a naturalized
vocation. Like the ongoing catastrophe of the present, this conception of
redemption should not be conceived as a future state, and Agamben’s mes-
sianism should be distinguished from eschatology. The “Day of Judgment,”
as Walter Benjamin put it “is not different from any others.”25 The present
contains potentialities that exceed the seeming necessity of its actualized
forms and Agamben’s thought is oriented to a Destruktion of these forms,
which would enable us to uncover and experience this potential.
The central claim of this book is that there is no irreducible antag-
onism between this redemptive moment of Agamben’s thought and his
damning account of the present as catastrophe. I therefore provide a reading
that departs from the dominant tendency to isolate the redemptive aspect
of his work from his diagnosis of the present. In doing so, I aim to illu-
minate the ambivalence of his diagnosis of our contemporary catastrophe.
The tendency to treat the redemptive moment of his thought in isolation
from his critique of the present has generated a portrayal of it as “a vague
prophesy”26 disconnected from concrete politics, in which “despair with
what passes for political reality and indifference to historical change [are]
brightened only by the dream of ultimate redemption, some new “beauti-
ful life.”27 In contrast to this position, I argue that his political thought is
animated by the belief, as the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin famously
wrote in Patmos, that “where danger threatens/That which saves from it
also grows.”28 It is in the very exhaustion, or bankruptcy, of the categories
through which the West has understood politics since its inception that
he sees both catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. Rather than
seeking to revive the categories of Western politics that he believes are

exhausted (the rule of law, citizenship, sovereignty, human rights, etc.),
Agamben sees their exhaustion as the condition of the possibility of a new
politics. He thus offers an account of the present in which the catastrophes
of biopolitics, the normalization of the state of exception and the rule of
the economy bring us closer to, not farther from, the possibility of what
he terms the happy life.
In his classic study The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Gershom Scholem
draws attention to the belief in the “catastrophic nature of redemption,”
which accompanies acute messianism.29 The nature of the catastrophe that
would precede redemption takes a number of forms, which appear in “glar-
ing images” throughout the texts of the tradition.30 The “birth pangs of the
Messiah,” Scholem writes, are expressed in “world wars and revolutions, in
epidemics, famine and economic catastrophe; but to an equal degree in apos-
tasy and the desecration of God’s name, in forgetting of the Torah and the
upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature.”31
Within Judaism, the belief in the relation of catastrophe and redemption
has a long and significant history—stretching back as far as the destruction
of the second temple in 70 CE—and is “deeply rooted in visionary religious
tradition.”32 This belief that disaster presages redemption is epitomized in
Sanhedrin 98a of the Babylonian Talmud: “When thou seest a generation
overwhelmed by many troubles as by a river, await him.”33 Such a mythic
understanding of history, as Aviezer Ravitsky notes, constituted a flight from
a historical reality that seemed beyond hope. When faced with such a hope-
less situation, Ravitsky suggests that in the view of such messianists reality
itself “should be turned upside down and accorded redemptive significance.
Otherwise, the only alternative to paradox would be despair.”34 This temp-
tation to treat catastrophe on earth as a sign of a promised redemption is
one to which not only Judaism, but also Christianity and Marxism have
succumbed, and one to which Agamben is not immune.
In what follows, I argue that Agamben is too prone to see the inten-
sification of catastrophe as the precondition of redemption. Beyond this
characterization of his thought, this treatment makes it possible to rethink
key problems of contemporary political theory. Seeing the catastrophe of
the present as itself a sign of redemption, I argue, constitutes a flight from
the difficulties of formulating a response to the seeming closure of the
political imagination that characterized the end of history euphoria of the
post–Cold War period. Today, even Fukuyama has acknowledged that his-
tory may have a future.35 As new political struggles break out across Europe
and the Middle East, I suggest that, instead of reassuring ourselves that
the dangers of the present are the birth pangs of a new redeemed form
INTRODUCTION /7
of life, it is necessary to invent new political forms that are capable both
of forestalling the dangers of the present and contributing to a world in
which we are able to make free use of our own capacities. This will require
not the intensification of the dangers of the present (a strategy Benjamin
Noys has aptly dubbed “accelerationism”36) but a rupture with the truly
catastrophic dominance of capital. What is required is not the linear path
of that locomotive that Marx, as a quintessentially modern thinker, saw
as a metaphor for revolution, but, in Benjamin’s beautiful formulation,
“an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to
activate the brake.”37
Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah
In approximately 52 CE, the Apostle Paul received word that disorder was
threatening his congregation in Thessalonika. He responded with a letter of
censure addressed to the Thessalonians, who, it is reported, “had rejected
conventional sexual behavior and abandoned vocations in ecstatic expecta-
tion of the imminent end of the world.”38 In attempting to restore order,
Paul had to explain why the expected second coming had been delayed.
He can hardly have imagined that the figure that he introduced in order
to do so, “the katechon” (or restrainer), would go on to have an important
afterlife in the theory of state power. Christ will not return, Paul told the
Thessalonians, until the “man of lawlessness” (anomos)—a figure usually
understood as the Antichrist—usurps God’s place in the temple. Yet, we
cannot know when this will be because there is a figure who holds back
the lawless one, and thereby delays the second coming: “For the mystery
of lawlessness is already at work [energeitai] but only until the person now
holding it back [ho katechon] gets out of the way. Then the lawless one
[anomos] will be revealed, whom the Lord will destroy with the breath of
his mouth, rendering him inoperative [katargesen] by the manifestation of
his presence [parousia].”39 The katechon is thus an ambiguous figure who
both holds back the already operative, “mystery of lawlessless,” and, by
extending secular history, delays the final redemption.
According to an interpretation that can be traced as far back as to
the Church Father Tertullian, the katechon is the Holy Roman Empire,
which is therefore assigned a positive historical function.40 “We pray for the
permanence of the world [pro stato saeculi],” Tertullian wrote, “for peace in
things, for the delay of the end [pro mora finis].”41 The political significance
of this figure was articulated most forcefully by the conservative German
jurist Carl Schmitt, who is better known for his definition of sovereignty as
the decision on the exception.42 In the Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt argues
that the katechon provides the only basis for a specifically Christian theory
of the state and history, as it enables a compromise between eschatology and
historicity, other-worldly promises of redemption and this-worldly political
power. “Empire,” he wrote, “meant the historical power to restrain the
appearance of the Antichrist.”43 The centrality of this figure for Schmitt’s
theory of the state cannot be overstated. “One must be able to name the
katechon for every epoch of the past 1948 years,” he wrote in 1947. “The
position has never gone unoccupied, otherwise we would no longer exist.”44
As the secular force that holds back the “mystery of lawlessless,” the kat-
echon plays the same role that this “apocalypticist of counterrevolution”45
assigned to the sovereign: that is, it wards off what he saw as the greatest
danger: “the faith in the unlimited potential for change and for happiness
in the natural, this-worldly existence of man.”46
Like Schmitt, Agamben sees the position of the katechon as one that
has never yet gone vacant; “every theory of the State, including Hobbes’s—
which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe—can
be taken,” he writes, “as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessa-
lonians 2.”47 From this perspective, contemporary liberal government, which
finds its rationale in its supposed ability to ward off the dangers of political
radicalism, would be as much a katechonic politics as the authoritarianism
of the Schmittian sovereign. So, too, would the contemporary politics of
humanitarianism, which renounces universal emancipation in favor of the
prevention of suffering, seeking, in Maurice Glucksmann’s words, “not to
open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell.”48And, any left
politics that abandoned the idea of revolution and limited itself to preserv-
ing the victories of the past, whether conceived as accumulated rights, the
welfare state, or still-existent noncommodified areas of life, could similarly
be considered katechonic.49
In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben depicts the katechon as the
power that delays the end of history, and thus subjects us to the permanence
of a form of economic government that he ultimately traces to the Chris-
tian doctrine of providence.50 While early Christianity was eschatological,
and its believers—as we saw in the case of the Thessalonians—awaited
the imminent end of the world, when the promised second coming did
not eventuate, “Christianity,” as Hans Blumenberg remarks, “had to adjust
itself to the rules of the game in the given and persisting world.”51 When
the eschatological future becomes indefinite, Blumenberg suggests, it loses
its original connection with salvation, leading to the substitution of hope
for final events with fear of the destruction of the world and the judgment
believed to accompany it. With what Agamben terms the “exclusion of
INTRODUCTION /9
concrete eschatology,” Christianity accommodated itself to the permanence

of the world.52 It is in the context of this accommodation that Blumenberg
situates the doctrine of Providence, which was assimilated into Christianity
from Stoicism in order to turn the good administration of the world into a
source of satisfaction—something that is possible, as he argues persuasively,
“only if its duration is once more supposed to have a positive value.”53
From this institutionalization of the Church, and the providential
accommodation of Christianity to the permanence of the world, Agamben
derives contemporary forms of government, which are therefore premised
on the abandonment of eschatology and the renunciation of immediate
expectations of redemption. In his address to the Church officials at Notre-
Dame, he depicted the katechon as a figure of the law or state that is dedi-
cated to “the indefinite—and indeed infinite—governance of the world.”54
With the abandonment of the Messianic economy of salvation, he argued,
this other economy, this katechonic infinite government, “extends its blind
and derisive dominion to every aspect of social life.”55 Agamben, thus sees
the contemporary government of life, which Foucault had already stressed
exchanged belief in the parousia for a salvation that now took the form
of material subsistence, as a biopolitical economy that reduces human life
to survival. His political thought thus rejects every katechonic conception
of politics that serves to defer redemption, whether this is understood in
messianic or revolutionary terms, through the fear of catastrophic dangers.
This “Pauline passage,” he writes, “does not harbor any positive valuation
of katechon.”56 Indeed, for Agamben, it is the katechon that ensures the
perpetuation of a catastrophic form of government that oscillates between
the biopolitical protection and the abandonment of life.
It is this eternal perpetuation of the present that Agamben refers to
as the “the days of the Messiah, which are also ‘the “state of exception”
in which we live’ ”—a time between times, in which law, political forms,
substantive identities, and vocations have been stripped of content, and yet
remain in force.57 Our situation, as he sees it, mirrors that of the Thessa-
lonians. The old forms of Western politics have been stripped of meaning,
and yet the law (which Paul saw as aligned with sin) remains in force,
disciplining our behavior and warding off the possibility of a new form of
life. The idea of redemption, and the “completely new politics” to which
his work gestures, would not provide the political with a new foundation
or new ends, but neither would it simply leave the empty forms generated
by the old ones in force.58 The possibility of redemption, as he sees it, is
premised on our ability to “render inoperative” what he sees as the empty
forms of past social and political orders, in order to make possible a life
that is freed from both sovereignty and the apparatuses of government.59
10 / CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION
The katechon, he argues, whether conceived as the Roman Empire

or as any “constituted authority,” is simply a “semblance” that covers over
“the mystery of lawlessness.”60 The katechon is therefore like a legal order
that must mask its own reliance on unlawful violence. It is, in the words
of the liberal magistrate in J. M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians “the
lie that empire tells itself when times are easy.”61 This lie, in Agamben’s
view, is told by all those worldly powers that cover over the fact that the
state of exception is not the exception but the norm, and he therefore
gives positive significance to the revelation of the substantive lawlessness
of power. “The unveiling of this mystery,” he writes, “entails bringing to
light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each
and every power in messianic time.”62 It is therefore possible, he suggests,
to think of katechon and anomos not as two separate figures but “as one
single power before and after the final unveiling.”63 The unveiling of the
katechon reveals the lawlessness of earthly power, which then clashes with
the Messiah, who aims to render this power inoperative. This theologi-
cal language is keyed in to the redemptive possibilities I have suggested
Agamben identifies in catastrophe. To shed light on his understanding of
this profane Messiah figure, and to clarify its relation to his diagnosis of
the present as catastrophe, I now turn from the theological register to the
political one, and give this web of connections an indicative sketch in the
political register of Marxism.
Flowers and Chains
If we reconceptualize Agamben’s argument about the katechon in political

rather than theological terms, we find an argumentative structure that has
played an important role in the history of Marxism. This matters, because,
as I suggest in what follows, “capitalism” is a more analytically useful cat-
egory for grasping the simultaneously destructive and creative ambivalences
of the present than the categories of “modernity,” “metaphysics,” “nihilism”
or “the politics of the West,” to which Agamben makes more frequent ref-
erence. This means that the way in which the Marxist tradition has dealt
with what G. M. Tamás terms the “Faustian-demonic” power of capital
is not without relevance for the attempt to analyze the way Agamben’s
thought depicts the relation between catastrophe and redemption.64 Agam-
ben shares with Marx and Engels a certain celebration of capital’s capacity
to melt all that is solid into air, to expropriate fixed social relations and to
nullify substantive identities. Although his thought largely avoids the view
that capital will crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, as
INTRODUCTION / 11
numerous Marxists in the past had hoped, he does share the tendency to
give epistemological value to capital’s power to drown illusions in the icy
waters of monetary exchange. Tamás has suggested that the road that passes
beyond capital would be an apocalypse in the original sense of the term,
“which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness.”65The
catastrophe of the present, as Agamben depicts it, offers precisely such a
privileged epistemological point from which we can see our situation clearly
and formulate a way out of it.
In his very first book, The Man Without Content, Agamben refers to
“the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental
architectural problem becomes visible for the first time.”66 This insight, I
argue, has remained consistent throughout his oeuvre. The collapse of those
state forms that purported to civilize capital, his work suggests, brings the
present into sharper focus. The fall of the Soviet Union, and the “uncon-
cealed rule of the capitalist-democratic state of a planetary scale,” as he puts
it, “have cleared the field of the two main ideological obstacles hindering
the resumption of a political philosophy worthy of our time: Stalinism on
one side, and progressivism and the constitutional state on the other.”67
Today for the first time thought faces its task “without any illusion and
without any possible alibi.”68 The unconstrained rule of capitalist parlia-
mentarism has destroyed the referents of the categories of existing politics
“(sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy and general will),” forcing
us to admit that we no longer know what we mean when we use them.69
Even Fukuyama, writing in 2012, has identified what he depicts as “very
troubling” trends that may “threaten the stability of contemporary liberal
democracies and dethrone democratic ideology.”70 The katechon has fled
the temple, and what remains is the catastrophic clash between an earthly
power deprived of lawful cover and those who seek to render it inoperative.
The catastrophe of the present, as Agamben sees it, is the burning house
in the glow of whose flames we can discern the outline of new political
forms to be constructed from the embers of what were once the seemingly
solid structures of an entire political edifice.
“Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain” Marx
writes in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “not
so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will
shake off the chain and pluck the living flower.”71 If, as Tamás suggests,
“the last flowers have fallen off the chains,” this may allow us to see our
situation clearly. It does not mean, however, that a form of redemption,
which I argue Agamben conceives as a world in which we are able to
make free use of our own potentiality, is more likely than ever.72 Capital
does melt all that is solid, and many emancipatory movements have been
only too glad to see it wash away feudal power structures and fixed hier-
archies, even if those hierarchies were quickly replaced by less traditional
ones.73 Yet to view the destruction of katechonic political forms as a cause
for celebration is complicated by the realization that these forms, from the
rule of law to the welfare state, were won by the emancipatory struggles
of previous generations.
The unveiling of a purer form of capitalism and a state without
recourse to legal cover is a product of capital’s defeat of rival political and
economic possibilities (and of the forms of agency capable of actualizing
them) that served as brakes on its ceaseless subsumption of all life. Any
“political philosophy worthy of our time,” in Agamben’s words, will indeed
be situated after these defeats, and must attempt to explain a world in which
the political options of the twentieth century are largely without purchase
on the present. There is a danger, however, as Noys has identified, that
theoretical positions “remain tilting at reified models of the state and capital
derived from the previous social-democratic consensus, while reproducing
in their alternative conceptions the dynamics of deterritorialising and dis-
embedding capital.”74 To recognize the lack of purchase of older political
concepts does not mean that the empty forms of ascendant neoliberal capi-
talism offer greater opportunities for a noninstrumental politics. Nor is the
replacement of naturalized, fixed vocations with flexible, precarious ones
necessarily more conducive to the free use of human potentiality.
To begin to think a redemptive politics that would contribute to a
world in which we could make free use of our capacities—in which, in the
words of The Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all”—it is necessary to pose the ques-
tion of agency.75 To speak of agency is not to suggest the voluntarism of an
agent conceived as bearing an omnipotent power to bend the world to his
will. As Perry Anderson has noted, “agent” like “subject” carries a “curious
ambiguity,” signifying both an active initiator and a passive instrument.76
Forms of agency, and indeed our representations of them, are constrained
by the historical logics in which they seek to intervene. Anderson was
famously responding to another British Marxist, E. P. Thompson, whose
defense of agency in the face of the rise of structuralist Marxism reminds
us of the need to historicize our representations of the relationship between
structure and agency. Much of Agamben’s work was written in an “end
of history climate” in which the ascendancy of a right-wing Hegelianism
coincided with a vision of the world as largely impervious to political
interventions. In such a context, there arose a postmodern temptation to
celebrate fragmentation, the breakdown of so-called meta-narratives and
the rule of simulacra, and to anticipate a “possible future” as Moishe Post-
INTRODUCTION / 13
one has put it, “on the basis of present developments in an implicitly linear
fashion without understanding what’s constraining that future from being
realized.”77 Agamben is ultimately too attuned to the catastrophic dangers of
the present and too averse to the banality of what, following Guy Debord,
he sees as the society of the spectacle, to offer any simple celebration of
capitalism’s powers of abstraction. Yet, Agamben too shares in the tendency
Postone identifies to overstate the redemptive possibilities constituted by the
nullifying logic of capital, while paying inadequate attention to the ways
in which this logic simultaneously blocks their actualization.
Against the faith in redemptive reversal that would see the dangers
of the present as auguring a form of salvation, I argue that it is necessary
to experiment with forms of agency, or political action. These experiments
will undoubtedly be constrained by the logic of capital, but must none-
theless see their task not as accelerating or intensifying this logic, but as
slamming on the emergency brake. The starting point of such action would
be the non-necessity of the current state of the world. Its task would be to
realize those potentials that are both created and blocked in the present:
potentials to realize the free use of human capacities; to create forms of
life that are not separated into an abstract and increasingly meaningless
political life and a private life that is ever more caught within govern-
mental apparatuses and subjected to the imperative of merely catering to
the necessities of life; and to construct political forms and solidarities that
do not presuppose substantive identities and a dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion. These potentialities do exist, and they serve as inspiration for a
politics that would not nostalgically attempt to prop up what once existed
or hark back to an elitist premodern polis “uncontaminated” by economic
concerns, or what Hannah Arendt termed the “social question.”78
The immense productivity of capital makes possible a world in which
the freedom from the imposition of labor would not be the privilege of the
few, premised on the exploitation of many (as in the Greek polis, for which
Arendt yearns). Yet, this productivity does not lead to what Marx, citing
Dilke, saw as true wealth, “liberty to seek recreation—liberty to enjoy life—
liberty to improve the mind . . . disposable time.”79 Instead, it leads to the
abandonment of whole sections of the world’s population, whose workless-
ness condemns them to poverty and to a form of inclusive-exclusion that
expels them to the margins of a society in which social worth is tied to
productive employment. Capitalism both creates and blocks the potential
for a free use of the self, and only a form of praxis capable of breaking
with its logic will be sufficient to free this potential from commodification
and diversion into new circuits of productive capital. While capital may
expropriate fixed identities and vocations and reveal the contingency of
previous social positions, our task is to reveal the contingency, the non-
necessity, of capital.
At its best, Agamben’s thought allows us to think a form of politics
that would withdraw from the vacuous shells of established political forms
and experiment with new forms of political praxis in the present. At its
worst, he depicts the dangers of the present as themselves cause for hope
and gives redemptive significance to the expropriative power of capital,
leaving him unable to adequately think a rupture with its logic. At its best,
his political thought follows Benjamin in seeing our time as shot through
with “revolutionary chances” to redeem the hopes of those whose struggles
were defeated in the past.80 At its worst, he portrays the present as a time
in which all praxis is “imprisoned and immobile,”81 and we can do little
but place our hope in the intensification of the dangers of the present. In
the face of the dangers Agamben’s thought allows us to recognize, I argue
that we cannot risk a form of quietism justified by a belief that the saving
power will be found amidst the danger. Paradoxically, such a stance would
be open to the same charge Benjamin leveled at German Social Democracy
in the lead-up to World War II: that it allowed fascism a chance because
it believed itself to be “moving with the current.”82
Certain dangers are worth restraining, and certain gains of past strug-
gles are worth defending. To recognize, as Frederic Jameson does, that today
most left movements are conservative reactions against the creative destruc-
tion of capital, which seek to “preserve the few enclaves still remaining
from a simpler era”83 should not compel us to dismiss these movements, as
Agamben tends to do. We should learn from the failures of eschatological
forms of Marxism, for which, as Benjamin Noys notes, “the katechon may
be any reform that delays final reckoning and so the ushering in of the
new communist society.”84Among the most disastrous results of this posi-
tion—which found its starkest form in “Third Period” Stalinism of the early
1930s, for which Social Democracy was “social fascism”—was the refusal of
the German Communist Party (the KPD) to countenance a united front
with social democrats against Nazism. Ernst Thälmann the KPD’s leader
who coined the hideously optimistic slogan “After Hitler, our turn!” was
shot in Buchenwald in 1944 on Hitler’s orders.85
Yet, a recognition of the need to contest specific dangers and bring
about specific reforms should not result in the embrace of a katechonic
politics, for which defending the remaining victories of past struggles is
detached from a continuing effort to realize their hopes for universal eman-
cipation. Both the belief that such emancipation is too dangerous, and
should be renounced in exchange for a concentration on reforms in the
present, and the converse position, which sees such reform as a barrier to
INTRODUCTION / 15
emancipation, rely on the belief that katechon and Messiah, reform and
revolution are counterposed. To assume that “the Messiah” will come only
after the antichrist has been revealed, presupposes that we must choose
between katechon and Messiah, or, between reform and revolution, assuming
that to the extent that reforms hold back the worst they also hold back the
possibility of emancipatory social transformation. In contrast, T. J. Clark’s
insistence that “it is wrong to assume that a politics of small steps, bleak
wisdom, concrete proposals, disdain for grand promises, and a sense of the
hardness of even the least ‘improvement’ is not revolutionary” leads us in
the opposite direction: towards conceptualizing the fight for reforms in the
present as co-extensive with a revolutionary position.86 Such a position
enables us to view forestalling the dangers of the present and preserving the
victories of past struggles as integral aspects of a revolutionary politics with
larger redemptive goals, whose realization would ultimately be premised on
a break with the logic of capital. If we recognize this, then perhaps we can
formulate a new form of politics, for which it would not be the katechon
and Antichrist, as Agamben suggests, but the katechon and the Messiah,
defensive struggles and redemptive politics, which are revealed as a single
figure. Rather than simply wait in the face of catastrophe, we would then
take seriously the dangers of the present, without allowing ourselves to be
blackmailed into accepting that politics can be nothing other than the
demand for a comfortable protection, secured by the state.
Chapter Outline
Chapter 1 examines Agamben’s claim that Western politics has been, what
Michel Foucault termed biopolitics since its inception. It traces the rela-
tion that Agamben terms abandonment and demonstrates that it is both
a political relation, which constitutes political life through the exclusion
and capture of a supposedly “natural life,” and an ontological one, through
which the human is constituted in opposition to the merely living being. I
argue that Agamben’s reorientation of biopolitics enables him to maintain
a critical stance toward those discourses, including human rights, which are
increasingly used to legitimate the biopolitical state, and to resist nostalgic
attempts to reassert a separation of life and politics modeled on the Greek
polis. It is only on the uncertain terrain of contemporary biopolitics, amid
the dangers he analyzes, I argue, that he sees the possibility of what he
terms a form-of-life—that is, an indissoluble unity of life and politics that
would escape the hold of sovereign power.87 Yet, I suggest that he plays
insufficient attention to the role of past struggles in resisting the separation
of life and politics, and offers little on what would make the difference
between a form-of-life, and a life absolutely abandoned to the biopolitical
production of survival. Conceptualizing such a difference, I suggest, would
require attention to possibilities for political praxis in the present.
Chapter 2 examines Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception,
a term he borrows from the National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt.88 I focus
on Agamben’s suggestion that politics has been “contaminated by law” and
that, therefore, an analysis of the exception is a necessary precondition for
answering the question: “what does it mean to act politically?”89 I contend—
against the recurrent tendency in the critical literature to utilize his critique
of exceptional politics to bolster the rule of law—that his engagement with
the exception is oriented to the possibility of a, new, nonjuridical politics—
that is, a politics whose terms are not those of the law. The normalization
of the state of exception that his work identifies, I argue, is conceived
both as a situation of profound danger, and as the condition of possibility
of this new politics. Such a politics, I suggest, is desperately necessary in a
context in which discourses of rights and legality are mobilized to legitimize
state militarism. Nonetheless, I argue that Agamben’s account of the juridi-
cal contamination of contemporary politics makes him overly dismissive of
forms of political praxis that do exist in the present.90 I conclude that there
is no reason to be particularly hopeful about the contemporary normaliza-
tion of exceptional power, and that it is necessary to formulate a political
praxis that takes seriously the dangers with which we are faced, rather than
viewing them as signs that salvation is at hand.
Chapter 3 interrogates Agamben’s reading of the profound danger that
he sees as consequent to the rule of biopolitics: the reduction of life to pure
survival. I suggest that the Muselmann—that figure of the Nazi Lager who
was deprived of all linguistic and relational existence and reduced, in Jean
Améry’s words, to a “staggering corpse”91—is the paradigmatic figure of this
danger. I trace this danger to his account of anthropogenesis, and suggest he
sees the production of the Muselmann as the final outcome of the produc-
tion of the human through the abandonment of the living being. Yet, in
the midst of this catastrophe, I argue, that Agamben sees the redemptive
possibility that politics could renounce its reliance on a transcendental fig-
ure of the human. I situate this redemptive reading of Auschwitz in relation
to other messianic attempts to see redemption emerging from catastrophe,
most notably in Zionism, and I suggest that seeing catastrophe as the pre-
condition of redemption leads only to a cycle of catastrophe.
Chapter 4 turns from Agambens’s account of catastrophe to his under-
standing of redemption. My interrogation is framed by his claim that the
titular figure of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”—who neither
INTRODUCTION / 17
affirms nor negates the law but simply “prefers not to” carry out his employ-
er’s requests—“offers the strongest objection to the principle of sovereign-
ty.”92 Agamben’s characterization of Bartleby as a new Messiah leads me to
a consideration of the messianic in relation to law, and I argue that he sees
the contemporary exhaustion of the law as the precondition for what he
terms, in reference to the Apostle Paul, law’s fulfillment. I suggest that the
idea of fulfillment enables him to provide an alternative to the dialectic of
constituting and constituted power and therefore to articulate the possibility
of a break with sovereignty. Nonetheless, I question his identification of
Bartleby as the key proponent of such a break, insomuch as this leads to
the valorization of individual weakness and passivity. In contrast, I suggest
that the “weak messianic power” evoked by Walter Benjamin in “On the
Concept of History” is better suited to thinking a form of collective praxis
that would break with the sovereign ban.93
In Chapter 5, I suggest that the “world to come” to which the redemp-
tive moment of Agamben’s thought gestures differs from our world only by
a “slight adjustment.”94 I identify the condition of possibility of redemption
in what he sees as the eclipse of use value by exchange value in spectacular
capitalism. I examine the new forms of praxis Agamben terms profanation
and play, which aim to find new, nonutilitarian, uses for the empty forms
produced by the nullifying power of capital. However, I argue that, because
he ignores the problems of exploitation and the use-value of human labor
power, he is unable to adequately articulate how it would be possible to
put human capacities to a new use. Further, I question his claim that the
spectacle has dissolved all social classes into a single petty-bourgeoisie that
is indifferent to identity, and I suggest that capitalism not only erodes the
foundations of previous identities, but also produces new identities and
identifications, making the project of forming a community without identity
a more difficult one, which must be premised on a break with the logic of
capitalism, rather than in the extension of this logic.
To conclude, I turn to contemporary Greece, which offers a para-
digmatic example of a specifically capitalist catastrophe. In the midst of
this catastrophe, in which youth unemployment has risen to a staggering
50 percent, I identify the conditions of possibility for a life that would
not be defined by work, and could freely experience its own potentiality.
Like Agamben’s coming community, I suggest that the realization of this
possibility requires a rupture with the dominance of capital. To finish, I
therefore turn to the figure he terms the ungovernable and suggest that the
combination of strike action, refusal of taxes, and withdrawal from the
empty forms of parliamentary politics in the contemporary Greece signals
to the possibility of a form of politics that could bring such a rupture about.
Chapter 1
The Politics of Life
A German Aristotle who wished to construct his Politics on the basis

of our society would begin by writing: “Man is a social but wholly
unpolitical animal.”
—Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843
Less than a month after the September 11 attacks on New York and Wash-
ington, the United States began air strikes against Afghanistan. In the
speech announcing the bombings, U.S. President George W. Bush invoked
the humanitarian disaster then underway in that country. “As we strike
military targets,” he said, “we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies
to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghani-
stan.”1 President Bush kept his word: by the following December, some
12,000 bombs had been dropped on the country—including cluster bombs
capable of scattering up to two hundred yellow “bomblets” that can lie
unexploded like land mines until disturbed, over a one-hundred-meter
radius.2 The United States also dropped 37,000 individual “Humanitarian
Daily Ration” packs, also yellow—containing “beans with tomato sauce,
peanut butter, strawberry jam, beans and tomato vinaigrette, biscuit, fruit
pastry and shortbread” salt and pepper, and a napkin—over many of the
same areas.3 Many commentators have highlighted the bitter irony of this
convergence of bombing and humanitarian relief.4 Roberto Esposito notes
the bizarre logic of the bombardments, which are “destined to kill and
protect the same people,” and Slavoj Žižek remarks that, as a U.S. plane
flies overhead, “one can never be sure whether it will be dropping bombs
or food parcels.”5 When faced with this strange synthesis of brutal and
impersonal killing and humanitarian fostering of life, it may be tempting
to dismiss the latter as a sick joke or mere propaganda ploy. Instead, this
convergence of humanitarianism and killing should serve as a provocation
19
to rethink the contemporary relation between politics, and life and death,
and to interrogate the intersection of a power to kill with a humanitarian
commitment to maintaining life.
The political resonance of Agamben’s thought comes in no small part
from his response to such a provocation, which leads him to rethink the
continuing existence of the sovereign power to kill alongside the state’s
newer role of fostering life. While the reception of his thought is, in part,
a result of its resonance with contemporary events—from the invention of
new biotechnologies to the militarization of humanitarianism—his under-
standing of political life today stems directly from his analysis of what he
sees as an “aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics.”6 From
Aristotle onward, he argues, the political realm has been predicated on a
caesura that divides the human into a political and a supposedly natural
life, and isolates what he terms bare life. By bare life Agamben means a life
that is politicized through the fact of its exclusion. Neither simply natural
life nor political life, bare life is the threshold of articulation that enables
the passage from one to the other. Like Walter Benjamin’s depiction of
“mere life” as a life exposed to the mythic violence of the law, Agamben’s
bare life is not a natural life but a life exposed to sovereign power and
the threat of death.7
The Ancient Greeks, he remarks in Means Without Ends, did not have
a single word for “life,” but used two semantically and morphologically dis-
tinct terms: zoē (the simple fact of living), and bios (a qualified, specifically
human, form of life).8 Political power, he argues, always founds itself on
the separation of a natural life from the particular forms of life, from the
ways in which we form our lives as we live them. In the transformation of
Afghan civilians into subjects of military or humanitarian intervention, to
be killed or kept alive, we see one of many manifestations of this separa-
tion of biological life from forms of life. Throughout Agamben’s oeuvre,
we find numerous others, among them the Muselmann—that figure of the
Nazi concentration camps who had so lost the will to live that he “no
longer belongs to the world of men in any way”9—and Karen Quinlan,
whose life was sustained for years purely by artificial technologies, which a
legal decision determined could not be switched off. However contemporary
these lives may be, in Agamben’s view, we will not adequately understand
them unless we address the division between life and politics inaugurated
by Aristotle.
Thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault have
suggested that in modernity biological life itself became directly political
as the state took an active interest in all that was once cast outside the
THE POLITICS OF LIFE / 21
political realm, or the polis.10 For Agamben, this seeming shift conceals a
deeper continuity. The contemporary politicization of life that he identifies
is predicated on a conception of the life lived in the polis as a particular
form of life, from which the maintenance of natural life was decisively
excluded. In the division of man’s private life in the home (oikos) and
his public life in the state—“a division,” Arendt suggests, “upon which all
ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic”11—Agamben
locates the fundamental problem of both ancient and contemporary politics.
A process that begins with the attempt to banish natural life from the polis
culminates in the “lasting eclipse” of politics and “the assumption of the
burden—and the ‘total management’—of biological life, that is, of the very
animality of man.”12
Agamben’s identification of a fracture between life and politics that
is endemic to Western politics leads him to an unsparing critique of the
political tradition, which does not leave its emancipatory resources, such
as democracy and human rights, unscathed. The fracture between life and
politics is still the key political problem, he writes, because the “centuries
that have since gone by have brought only provisional and ineffective
solutions.”13 All the historical struggles, political theories, and manifestos
of the past two and a half millennia, such is his dramatic claim, have been
insufficient to reckon with the originary split between life and politics
inaugurated in the Greek polis. Only rethinking the political tradition in its
entirety would enable us to challenge the reduction of life to the substance
of political calculations. Indeed, his claim is that unless we radically rethink
the terms of political action, any attempt to ameliorate the catastrophic
dangers of the present will only entrench the politicization of life that
is central to sovereign power. “Until a completely new politics—that is
a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life—is at hand,” he
writes in Homo Sacer:
[E]very theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immo-
bile, and the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship only
either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness
to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.14
This severe diagnosis seemingly precludes the possibility of meaningful

political theory or praxis in the present and puts Agamben sharply at
odds with those political thinkers who would place their hope in greater
democratization or the development of a culture of human rights, or with
katechonic political movements that aim to protect past victories from
attack. Those who have recourse to the discourses of rights and democ-
racy, he maintains, are unwittingly complicit with the very powers they
intend to oppose, as any political strategy that does not sever the relation
between life and sovereignty power will only entrench the politicization
of life it seeks to resist.
If we were to accept Agamben’s claim that the politicization of life is
endemic to the Western political tradition, and the emancipatory resources
of this tradition only entrench the very powers they are mobilized against,
there would seem little grounds for hope. And yet, in a 2004 interview, he
responded to the charge that he focuses excessively on aporias, impasses,
and failures at the expense of possibilities for resistance in the following
terms:
I’ve often been reproached for (or at least attributed with) this
pessimism that I am perhaps unaware of. But I don’t see it like
that. There is a phrase from Marx, cited by Debord as well,
that I like a lot: ‘the desperate situation of society in which I
live fills me with hope.’ I share this vision: hope is given to the
hopeless. I don’t see myself as pessimistic.15
Where can we locate the source of Agamben’s hope, if the entire West-
ern political tradition is indelibly marked by a politicization of life that
threatens to reduce all life to mere survival? Answering this requires that
we consider the less-examined, redemptive side of his political work, which
is not easily squared with the charge of pessimism—that is, his contention
that our time is creating the possibility for a new, nonjuridical politics
that would inaugurate a new “form of life” that would escape the hold of
sovereign power.16
Even in the midst of his most dire pronouncements, Agamben gestures
to a new politics, which, he often remarks, is more possible today than
ever before. Where, then, is this possibility located? Antonio Negri has
suggested that there are “two Agambens”: “one who lingers in the existen-
tial, destining and terrifying shadows, where he is perpetually forced into a
confrontation with death,” and another who grasps the “creative upsurges
of being.”17 In Negri’s view, these “two Agambens” coexist paradoxically,
with one momentarily eclipsing the other. I would like to explore another
hypothesis; that is, that it is precisely from the darkest depths of modern
biopolitics, from among the lives that border on death, that Agamben
believes that a new politics of creative potentiality may emerge. Refer-
ring to lives like those of the Muselmann and Karen Quinlan, he writes:
it is “on the basis of the uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult
zones of indistinction, that the ways and the forms of new politics must
be thought.”18 Here, I suggest that the new politics to which his work
gestures will not restore the division between political and natural life
that was central to classical politics, but finds its condition of possibility
precisely in their biopolitical cohesion. This means that even as he traces
the potentially catastrophic consequences of making life itself the key stake
of politics, he nonetheless sees contemporary biopolitics as opening up a
political possibility that we must not let slip away.
This account of the politicization of life as both the key danger of the
present, and the condition of possibility of a new form of life can best be
situated in relation to the line we have already encountered from Friedrich
Hölderlin’s Patmos, which Martin Heidegger paraphrased as follows: “the
closer we come to danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving
power begin to shine”19 For Heidegger, the danger was located in what he
termed the “planetary reign of technology,” which threatened to reduce all
beings to mere “standing reserve” to be used, and used up. For Agamben,
the danger is the politicization of life, which threatens to reduce human-
ity to biological life that can be kept alive or killed with impunity. For
both thinkers, it is with this danger that the possibility of a saving power
emerges. If we wish to find the conditions of possibility of a “completely
new politics” then we must search them out, he suggests, amid the extreme
points of today’s politicization of life. His approach to biopolitics is thus
consistent with the logic he already subscribed to as far back as 1977, when
he wrote that the “mortal malady” “must be traversed completely, without
avoiding or skipping, because along with lethal danger, it also contains the
ultimate possibility of salvation.”20 The horrors of the last century revealed
too clearly what can occur when the indistinction of life and politics leads
the state to treat biology as a political concern. However, it is in this same
politicization of life—if desutured from sovereign decisions on the value or
nonvalue of life—that he sees the possibility of resolving the caesura that
has plagued Western politics since its inception.
What can we make of this location of political possibility in the very
extension of the political danger of the present? The strength of this position
is that it avoids the nostalgic attempts to return to a time when political
categories were supposedly more stable—whether in the form of a yearning
for the Greek polis or an attempt to revive modern political categories that
have been destabilized in postmodernity. Given that citizenship has always
been premised on exclusion and the modern political categories whose wan-
ing we are witnessing not only enabled forms of political participation but
also foreclosed political possibilities that were less easily reconciled with the
state’s monopolization of the legitimate means of violence, this is a wel-
come contribution. By tracing patterns of continuity between contemporary
biopolitics and the way in which Western politics first conceptualized the
relation between natural and political life, Agamben’s thought challenges
us to begin to rethink this relation in contemporary conditions. And yet,
his genealogy of the politicization of life pays little attention to specific
discourses or moments of rupture. Neither does he interrogate the signifi-
cance of the emergence capitalism, a system in which, as Marx stressed,
the “vital force” of the laborer is sold as a commodity.21 Most significantly,
he ignores the role of social struggles in challenging the exclusion from
politics of those whose lives were devoted to labor or reproduction. While
his work identifies uncomfortable complicities between different forms of
power, highlighting an “inner solidarity between democracy and totalitari-
anism” it is less suited to analyzing the distinctions between these political
forms.22 Without this specificity, it becomes difficult to identify moments
in the past where things could have been otherwise, and to trace specific
sites of political intervention or opportunities for resistance in the present.
Instead, in discussing the possibility of a new form of life, Agamben
tends to adopt a prophetic tone, gesturing to a “completely new politics,”
premised on the exhaustion of the past two and a half millennia of Western
politics. This prophetic tone is related to what I see as the real weakness
of the account of danger and salvation he borrows from Heidegger—who
famously remarked, in a late interview: “only a God can save us.”23 That
is, it leads to a tendency to put faith in the intensification of the “mortal
malady” and to dismiss those political movements that attempt to coun-
teract the dangers of the present.24 There is no reason to be particularly
hopeful about the consequences that may arise from the intensification of
state interventions into biology or about the reduction of life to survival,
whether it takes the form of humanitarian benevolence or pacified con-
sumerism. Nor is there any reason to assume that traversing this malady
to the end, wherever that may be, is a better political strategy than one
that seeks to hold back particular political interventions into biological life,
and to transform the terms in which life and politics are unified. Without
attending to forms of political praxis that do exist in the present, it is
difficult to ascertain what would make the difference between danger and
saving power, between the catastrophic politicization of life and a new form
of life. To further examine these questions, it is worth turning to the work
of Foucault, and examining the extent to which Agamben reconceptualizes
his pioneering account of biopolitics.
Agamben and Foucault: On Biopolitics, Ancient and Modern
In a passage from The Politics that takes on a decisive importance in Agam-

ben’s work, Aristotle writes:
The good life is indeed the chief end of the state both corpo-
rately and individually, but men form and continue to maintain
this kind of association for the sake of life itself. Perhaps we
may say that there is an element of value even in mere living,
provided that life is not excessively beset by troubles. Certainly
most men, in their desire to keep alive, are prepared to face a
great deal of suffering, finding in life itself a certain comfort,
and a feeling that it is good to be alive.25
Here, we see the clear distinction Aristotle developed between the prepo-
litical fact of “life itself,” and the good life. While he suggests that men
initially form states for the sake of mere life, this form of association is
driven by biological necessity and, far from being specifically human, is
shared by citizens, barbarians, slaves, women, and animals. Once a certain
number of men are able to free themselves from material concerns and live
freely in the polis, what “started as a means to secure life itself . . . is now
in a position to secure the good life.”26 In contrast to the simple fact of
life that men share with all living beings, the good life is the specific end
of man, as the living being with logos. In Aristotle’s Politics, political life
is not simply different from the life lived in the home by degrees, but is
different in kind.27 The life lived in the polis was a particular form of life,
from which the mere maintenance of biological life was decisively excluded.
This exclusion of biological life was necessary, Aristotle believed, to
create a realm of freedom. While the free pursuit of the good life in the
polis presupposed material self-sufficiency and the reproduction of the lives
of citizens, this reproduction was not considered political. As Arendt points
out, the good life “was ‘good’ to the extent that by having mastered the
necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by over-
coming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was
no longer bound to the biological life process.”28 Consequently, those whose
lives were taken up with working to provide for material necessities were
not considered fit to be citizens. In his Politics, Aristotle remarks that if a
state existed “merely to provide a living,” “it might be made up of slaves
or animals, and that is impossible, because slaves and animals are not free
agents and do not participate in well-being.”29 Slaves and animals (and
women), in Aristotle’s view, were not able to participate in the good life,
but were simply instruments for providing some with the sufficient quality
of life it presupposes.
By counterposing the polis dweller not only to the slave but also to
the animal, Aristotle reveals the ultimate stakes of his divisions: the con-
stitution of that “political animal”—the human being. In De Anima (On
the Soul), he sets out to determine what it means to say that something—
whether a plant, an animal or a human—is alive; “For living beings,” he
writes, “Being is life.”30 To this end, he establishes a series of divisions in
the continuum of life, between what he terms nutritive, sensitive, appeti-
tive, locomotive, and intellectual life.31 Although some of these are shared
by only some living beings, and some only by the human, “all the other
living things as well as plants have the nutritive faculty which is the first
and most general faculty of the soul, in virtue of which all creatures have
life.”32 In Aristotle’s isolation of nutritive life as the basic presupposition of
all forms of life, Agamben sees the “decisive moment” in which, “bare life
as such” was identified in the history of Western philosophy. This isolation,
he suggests, served to mark divisions in the human—between vegetative and
relational life, animal and human—which were then expressed in the politi-
cal realm in the form of those distinctions between zoē and bios, and mere
life (zen) and that good life (eu zen) that play a central role in Aristotle’s
determination of the telos of politics and the work of man.33
“For millennia,” Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality: An Intro-
duction—in what is now a justly famous contrast—“man remained what he
was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political
existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a
living being in question.”34 While this definition seems to accept Aristotle’s
definition of man as it applies to ancient Greece, Foucault goes on to trace
what he sees as a shift in modernity, at which time the Aristotelian split
between natural and political life was abandoned and power began to con-
cern itself directly with the biological life of a population—with birthrates,
longevity, health, and “the naked question of survival.”35 In the seventeenth
century, he argues, a “great bipolar technology” focused on life began to
emerge. In the first of these poles, which he terms discipline, power began
to concern itself directly with the body and its integration into systems
of production and efficiency. This disciplinary power, which he analyzed
in detail in Discipline and Punish, was an individualizing power that sought
to create “docile bodies,” which were simultaneously more productive and
more obedient.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, he argues, this disciplining
of individual bodies was augmented by a “biopolitics of the population,”
which targeted the human not as body but as a living being.36 In The Politics,
Aristotle had dismissed the view that men’s natural lives were a political
concern: while the state was concerned with health “to a point”—insomuch
as the good life presupposed that men lived and were healthy—“beyond
that,” he remarked, “it is the doctor’s business.”37 In contrast, Foucault sees
the eighteenth century as inaugurating a new political concern with all of
those factors that would influence the health, the vitality, and the produc-
tivity of the population; among the raft of new biopolitical concerns were
demography, natality, public hygiene, insurance, aging, and urban planning.
There is no question as to the novelty that he attributed to this political
concern with biological life:
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was

reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an
inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid
the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into
knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.38
This new exercise of power over individuals “insofar as they constitute a

kind of biological entity” was bound up with the development of capital-
ism and the need “to use this population as a machine for producing, for
producing wealth and goods, for producing other individuals.”39 At this
point, power ceases to be essentially juridical, as “life enters the field of
power.”40
The juridical model, as Foucault conceives it, was always centered
on the figure of the sovereign; “Right in the West is the King’s right.”41
In explaining the relation between sovereignty and biopolitics, he writes:
“the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to fos-
ter life or disallow it to the point of death.”42 In The History of Sexuality:
An Introduction, he suggests that biopolitics is not concerned directly with
death, which now appears only as the reverse of the power to make live.
This does not mean an end to killing—on the contrary he argues, “mas-
sacres have become vital.”43 Nonetheless, he maps a development in which
the combined development of discipline and biopolitics “characterized a
power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest
life through and through.”44
Situating Agamben’s thought in relation to Foucault’s allows us to
identify more clearly the specific features of the former’s account of bio-
politics. The consequence of Agamben’s argument that politics has always
been biopolitics is that sovereignty and biopolitics are co-extensive. The
operation of sovereign power, he stresses, is always-already biopolitical, and
“the production of a biopolitical body is the originary activity of sovereign power.”45
In contrast, Foucault is concerned to trace the distinctions between sov-

ereign power and biopolitics, which he treats as two discrete techniques
of power, even while acknowledging that the newer biopolitics does not
simply replace sovereignty, but comes to “penetrate and permeate it.”46 The
second key feature of Agamben’s account of biopolitics is philosophical
as well as methodological: while Foucault uses the term “biopolitics” in
a historical-genealogical key to explain a shift in the operation of power
in the late eighteenth century Agamben provides an ontological account
in which biopolitics is consubstantial with the origin of Western politics
and metaphysics.47 What is at stake in this distinction? And what are its
implications for political action in the present?
Biopolitics and Sovereignty
In Homo Sacer, Agamben sets about examining the “hidden point of inter-
section between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of
power.”48 The difficulty of this task, he remarks, is evidenced by a lacuna
in the work of two great thinkers: Foucault and Arendt. Why, he asks, did
Arendt not connect her analysis of the entry of homo laborans, or laboring
man, and with it biological life, into the realm of politics with her previous
analysis of totalitarianism “in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether
lacking”?49 And why is it that Foucault, “in just as striking a fashion, never
dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration
camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth
century?”50 The claim that Foucault ignored the camp and the so-called
totalitarian states is not accurate. In his 1975–1976 course at the Collége
de France, he proposed an analysis of how the sovereign power to kill could
be exercised by a biopolitical state supposedly committed to fostering life.
In the context of a discussion of National Socialism and Stalinism, he sug-
gested that the link between biopolitics and the sovereign power to kill is
provided by racism, which enables some people to be presented as biological
threats that need to be eliminated.51 Nonetheless, Agamben focuses more
attention on the concentration camp and the so-called totalitarian states
than did Foucault, and, in doing so, he is not simply repeating the latter’s
claims, but extending them and transforming them in ways that he is not
always prepared to acknowledge.
If, for Foucault, biopolitics signifies the point at which man ceases to
be what he was for Aristotle, “a living animal with the additional capac-
ity for a political existence,” Agamben, in contrast, sees the Aristotelian
distinction between the living being and political existence as biopolitics’
inaugural moment.52 This assessment relies on the problematization of what

Foucault terms the additional capacity for political existence.53 The separa-
tion between the living animal and political existence, Agamben argues,
is simultaneously an implication and capture of the former in the latter.
Where he differs from both Aristotle and Foucault is that, for Agamben,
zoē, or natural life, is not a preexisting natural substrate but the residue of
a separation. There is thus nothing natural about natural life. Rather, both
zoē and bios are products of a division. Zoē, according to Agamben’s radical
revision of the Aristotelian schema, was not simply excluded from the polis
but was captured and politicized through this constitutive exclusion and
thus “has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the
city of men.”54 If, for Foucault, biopolitics begins at the point at which
natural life is included in the sphere of political calculations, for Agamben,
zoē is included through its exclusion. This inclusive-exclusion of zoē in the
polis, Agamben argues, is therefore both the originary moment of biopolitics
and “the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power.”55 Biopolitics
originates in Ancient Greece because “Western politics first constitutes
itself through an exclusion, (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of a life
that is conceived as ‘natural.’ ”56
Agamben uses the term ban—borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy, who is
indebted to Martin Heidegger’s concept of “abandonment” (Seinsverlassen-
heit)—to signify the exposure through which life is at once excluded from
the political community and captured in the realm of sovereign power.57
In his essay “Abandoned Being,” Nancy highlights the double meaning of
the term ban—the one who is banned is both abandoned, or banished, and
held in a ban. The law to which one is abandoned is not to be subpoenaed
to present oneself before a court, or to be held within the jurisdiction of a
particular law. Rather, it is a compulsion to appear absolutely under the law
as such. Here, we may well think of “K” in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who
was utterly subjected to a law that was both everywhere and nowhere. Like
the law that dominates K’s universe, the law of abandonment is an empty
and indeterminate law that remains in force but is no longer formulated in
specific prohibitions or interdictions. “Turned over to the absolute of the
law,” Nancy writes, “the banished one is thereby abandoned completely
outside its jurisdiction.”58 Here, we should take note of the ambivalence
of abandonment: the one who is abandoned is both utterly exposed to the
law and cast outside of its jurisdiction. It is this ambivalence that Agamben
reiterates in his account of the sovereign ban. The one who is banned,
he writes, is not outside the law in any simple sense, but “exposed and
threatened” on the very threshold of the law, at the point where it can no
longer be distinguished from life.59
This ability to hold life in a ban by abandoning it is, for Agamben,

the original political relation. He uses the term “inclusive exclusion” to
define this limit relation in which people are included in the political com-
munity purely by virtue of an exclusion that leaves them utterly exposed to
sovereign violence.60 The sovereign ban is the limit form of relation, but
at this limit it remains a relation between the sovereign and that bare life
that it includes only by excluding. Because natural life, in this account,
is not merely excluded from the polis, but captured within it, Agamben
can argue that life is originarily included in the realm of a politics that is
biopolitics from the beginning. Agamben’s analysis of the status of zoē in
the Greek polis thus directly anticipates the topology through which he
understands Homo Sacer’s titular figure, the “sacred man” of Roman law. In
the Homo Sacer he identifies a figure in which law refers to life precisely
by excluding it. The abandonment of homo sacer manifested in an absolute
exposure, by virtue of which he could be killed with impunity by anyone.
In a seeming paradox however, the homo sacer could not be sacrificed, and
was therefore subject to a double exclusion: while the unpunishability of
his killing removed the homo sacer from the sphere of human law, the ban
on sacrifices excludes him from the realm of divine law. In this paradoxical
status, Agamben identifies a limit concept of the Roman juridical order, “an
originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction
between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.”61 The homo sacer may
be the definitive figure of the topological relation he terms “inclusive exclu-
sion,” but this relation is by no means confined to Roman law. Rather, this
category plays an important role in his accounts of both the Greek polis
and contemporary biopolitical developments.
By highlighting continuities between diverse forms of the abandon-
ment of life, Agamben’s reconceptualization of biopolitics undercuts nostal-
gia for the Greek polis and shows that the political problems of today cannot
be solved by reviving the separation between natural and political life that
been eroded in the passage to modernity. This can allow us to see that
life in the Greek polis was premised on the permanent exclusion of those
whose lives were bound up with labor and reproduction, notably women
and slaves. As Arendt notes, though without considering the implications
for her own classical account of politics, slavery was not simply a part of
Greek political life, but “the condition of politeuein, of all those activities
that for the Greeks fulfilled the life of the citizen.”62 Agamben illuminates
the fact that natural life did not simply become a problem for politics in
modernity, but played a constitutive role in Western politics at its incep-
tion, albeit in the form of its exclusion. Conversely, his thought enables
us to identify the way in which the problem of sovereignty continues to
operate in our apparently postmodern time, by depicting modernity, in Eric

L. Santner’s words, as “the widespread mutation of social bonds whereby the
traditional forms and loci of sovereignty—along with the sovereign excep-
tion and its effects disperse and proliferate along new pathways and relays.”63
There are also costs to Agamben’s reconceptualization of biopolitics,
however, chief of which is his tendency to subsume the specific practices
and discourses that Foucault analyzes in such detail into a larger philosophi-
cal account of the history of the West. While the latter recognizes that
the development of biopolitics is bound up with that of capitalism—even
while avoiding causal explanations—Agamben ignores this context entirely.
He thus loses the capacity to analyze the significance of the emergence of
a social relation premised on the exploitation of labor power, in which,
as Marx puts it, the objectivity of labor coincides with the “immediate
bodily existence” of the laborer, who is also subjectively the “living source
of value.”64 He also loses the ability to analyze the struggles this generated,
which often aimed to politicize life on terms other than those of the state
and capital. The modern blurring of the distinction between natural and
political life cannot be adequately understood without examining the role of
workers’ struggles and the women’s movement in challenging the depoliti-
cization of labor and reproduction, and the exclusion from politics of those
whose lives were taken up with them. Without such an understanding, we
cannot grasp those contemporary political movements that continue this
legacy by struggling not to revive the separation between life and politics,
but to make possible what Agamben terms a form-of-life.
Biopolitical Being
To draw out some of the problems that stem from Agamben’s identification
of biopolitics as the original structure of Western metaphysics, it is worth
considering it against the background of the original, Heideggerian, concep-
tion of abandonment that informs his account of the sovereign ban. Aban-
donment (Seinsverlassenheit) plays an important role in Heidegger’s account
of the danger facing our epoch.65 “Abandonment of being,” he writes in
his Contributions to Philosophy, “determines a singular and unique epoch in
the history of the truth of be-ing.”66 Heidegger enumerates no fewer than
sixteen ways in which this abandonment announces itself, among them
the forgetting of mindfulness and truth, the subjugation of art to “cultural
usage,” and all those phenomena that Friedrich Nietzsche gathered under
the mantle of “nihilism,” including “the derangement of the West; the flight
of the Gods; the death of the moral, Christian God.”67 The abandonment
of Being is concealed in what Heidegger terms machination, in which the

world appears as “makeable” and characterized by ordering, calculation and
a lack of questioning.68
All this may seem far removed from the biopolitical concerns this
chapter has considered thus far. In thinking abandonment, Heidegger is
not primarily concerned with the problem of life, yet he does suggest that
“mechanistic and biological ways of thinking are always merely conse-
quences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination.”69
Robert Sinnerbrink has argued that Heidegger’s machination provides an
account of the way life becomes subject to calculation, ordering, and plan-
ning, which anticipates the theme of biopolitics in Foucault and Agam-
ben.70 Indeed, Heidegger’s warning that machination prepares a “transition
to a technicized animal” directly prefigures the themes of animalization
and technological intervention into the sphere of life that are central to
Agamben’s account of biopolitics.71 In my view, it is in his re-utilization
of abandonment that Agamben’s account of biopolitics displays its great-
est debt to Heidegger. Indeed, in Homo Sacer Agamben suggests that the
problem of the sovereign ban and the nihilism of contemporary biopolitics
“is the same one that Heidegger confronts in his Beiträge zur Philosophie
under the heading of Seinsverlassenheit, the abandonment of the entity by
Being.”72
This conviction that ontology is directly political is central to Agam-
ben’s divergence from Foucault over the periodization of biopolitics. In
his account of machination, Heidegger notes that while it unfolds most
powerfully in modernity, it “dominates the history of being in Western
philosophy up to now, from Plato to Nietzsche.”73 Agamben, unlike Fou-
cault, is convinced not only that ontology is directly political, but also that
only the formulation of “a new and coherent ontology of potentiality” will
enable us to escape the biopolitical capture of life in the sovereign ban.74
This raises questions about the relation between ontology and politics and
about that between what Heidegger calls the ontic and the ontological levels
of analysis.75 Sinnerbrink has suggested that Agamben’s work (as well as
that of Heidegger and Foucault) evinces a tension between these levels,
which emerges in his explication of the “relationship between the onto-
logical aspects of biopower as the ground of politics in modernity, and the
ontic dimension of specific social practices and collective political action
within specific biopower regimes.”76 This tension, I suggest, is sharper in
Agamben’s work than in that of either Foucault or Heidegger, though for
different reasons. Unlike Foucault, Agamben tends to focus his attention
on what he sees as metaphysical structures stemming back to the Greek
polis (the zoē/bios split, for instance) even as he attempts to cast light on
contemporary political developments. And unlike Heidegger, Agamben’s

question is not centrally the question of Being but, at least in his later
works, the question: “What does it mean to act politically?”77
It could be objected that this distinction between the question of
Being and that of politics is a false one, which can be overcome if we
examine the more explicitly political Homo Sacer series alongside Agam-
ben’s earlier works on language, aesthetics, and metaphysics. On the surface,
it appears that the question of political action, which is raised explicitly
in State of Exception, signifies a move away from the concerns of his ear-
lier books, which were defined by two other, interrelated questions. In
a 1988–1989 preface to Infancy and History, Agamben had written: “In
all my written and unwritten works, I have stubbornly pursued only one
train of thought: what is the meaning of ‘there is language?’; what is the
meaning of ‘I speak’?”78 However, in a lecture two years earlier, he had
given a different version of his guiding question: “I could state the subject
of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb ‘can’
[potere]. What do I mean when I say ‘I can, I cannot’?”79 How can we best
understand this seeming proliferation of central questions? Does it express
incoherence, a shift in perspective, or a deeper unity? To answer this, we
must grasp the extent to which the questions of political action, speech,
and ability are deeply entwined in Agamben’s work, such that the former
question cannot be answered without posing the latter two. We cannot
understand what it means to act politically, in his view, unless we come
to terms with the constitution of the speaking being and with the problem
of potentiality (to be able/to be able not to). The central questions posed
in the earlier works do not, therefore, disappear, but remain central to the
later political thought.
Aristotle famously declared the human to be both a zoon logon echon
(a living being with language) and a zoon politikon (a political animal).
Reflecting on Aristotle’s argument that the animal voice expresses only
pleasure or pain, while human speech expresses the just and the unjust,
Agamben locates a caesura between the animal phone and human language.
“The living being has logos,” he writes in Homo Sacer, “by taking away and
conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its
own bare life be excluded, as an exception, in it.”80 No longer the animal
phone, which must be excluded to enable human language, but not yet
language, what is captured in the passage to language is a removed voice,
or as Agamben terms it, a “Voice”—by which he refers to the taking place
of language that occurs in a “no man’s land between sound and significa-
tion.”81 The fully human life—life according to logos—is achieved only
through the separation and abandonment of its nonhuman other, just as
life in the polis is achieved only through the separation and abandonment
of a supposedly natural life.
This begins to answer the question of how it is possible for Agamben
to unify the objects of his seemingly divergent lines of inquiry: politics,
language, and potentiality. Both politics and metaphysics, he suggests, are
founded on the exclusion of that life that men share with other living
beings, and it is language that, since the Greek polis, has been central to
demarcating the human from the inhuman. There is, however, an important
difference between Agamben’s various questions: What does it mean to
speak? What does it mean to have a capacity? and, What does it mean to
act politically? While the first two questions lend themselves to a strictly
philosophical interrogation, the question of political action, in contrast,
requires attention to specific political interventions in the present. No
ontology can answer the question of what it means to act politically; such
a question can only be adequately answered in intimate connection with
the very political action that is the object of the interrogation. There is
thus a need to complement Agamben’s attempt to formulate a new ontology
of potentiality with an examination of those historical and contemporary
forms of praxis that seek to create new possibilities for individual and col-
lective life. Agamben’s deconstruction of the Western political tradition
should therefore be taken as an impetus for forms of experimental praxis
that concretely pose the question of the possibility of political action on
the uncertain terrain of the present.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben remarks that he originally conceived that
work as a “response to the bloody mystifications of a new planetary order.”82
The most important questions raised by his reconstruction of biopolitics are
therefore: How well does his thought enable us to understand this “new
planetary order”? And what kind of a response does it enable and foreclose?
To begin with the former question, if we return to the United States’ mili-
tary action in Afghanistan, Agamben’s identification of the entwinement
of the biopolitical power to foster life with the sovereign power to kill
provides us with a conceptual apparatus that is well suited to theorizing the
reconfiguration of the relation between life, politics, and death that leads
to the grotesque scenario of war planes dropping cluster bombs and food
packages. On the other hand, he provides little of the analytical attention
to the specific practices and events that constituted this shift that played
a crucial role in Foucault’s detailed genealogical account of the historical
development of biopolitics. This means that his thought is less well suited
to illuminating the ontic aspects of the Afghanistan bombardment, includ-
ing the genesis of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, the rise of the
neoconservatives, and the shifting terrain of military practices in the wake
of the Cold War. This, however, is not a reason to discard his insights about
the imbrication of sovereignty and biopolitics. Rather, it suggests that the
attempt to mobilize these insights to conceptualize contemporary political
events should be augmented by a detailed attention to the practices and
discourses that accompanied their genesis.
What, then, does Agamben’s account of the relation of life and poli-
tics suggest about the possibility of political action today? Far from solving
the fundamental problem of the constitution of the political through the
exclusion and capture of natural life, the political weapons developed in the
course of modern struggles—democracy and human rights, for instance—
must, if we accept his arguments, be judged not only to have failed to solve
the fundamental political aporia but also to have furthered the politiciza-
tion of life. If we wish to stop the cluster bombs from falling and prevent
the more powerful states form reducing whole populations to bare life, can
we find resources in Agamben’s thought? Or will such wishes only lead us
to a relation of complicity with the very states we would seek to oppose?
By examining his argument that the categories of the Western tradition,
among them human rights, are in crisis, we will be better placed to assess
his contribution to developing a new form of politics.
The Rights of Bare Life
In the past decade, as new wars, ethnic conflicts, and social struggles have
disrupted the liberal euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War, a
number of thinkers have sought to critically reevaluate the human rights
project.83 Among them, Agamben’s critique is the most damning. Rights, he
argues, are biopolitical instruments that enmesh naked life in the order of
the nation-state, thus paving the way for the contemporary politicization of
life. This account of rights is centered on an examination of the ambiguous
man/citizen link that underlies modern rights declarations. Agamben tends
to situate his own inquiry in relation to that of Arendt, yet more than a
century before her, Karl Marx, in his own theorization of rights, had already
posed the question: “Who is the homme as distinct from the citoyen?”84
Agamben’s view—which can be seen as a continuation of the inquiry that
started with Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”—is as follows: “Rights are
attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is
the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such)
of the citizen.”85 While the nation-state is thus founded on the fictional
subsumption of man into the citizen, what we are seeing today, he suggests,
is the culmination of the separation of the rights of man from the rights
of the citizen. The bearer of human rights today is the “Rwandan child,
whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who ‘is now becoming
more difficult to find alive.’ ”86 Human rights are the rights of those with
no rights, of those he refers to as “bare life.”87
In attempting to understand the situation of human rights today,
Agamben turns to Arendt’s influential essay from the Origins of Totalitarian-
ism, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.”
Here, Arendt argues that the mass refugee flows following World War I
called into question the utility of human rights by creating a section of
humanity stripped of all political status; “[T]he conception of human rights
based on the assumed existence of human being as such,” she writes, “broke
down at the very moment that those who professed to believe in it were
for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other
qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human.”88
From her examination of the situation of these refugees, Arendt, as Etienne
Balibar points out, developed a radical critique of the supposed anthropo-
logical foundation of human rights.89 If those who were stripped of civil
rights found themselves also deprived of human rights, this, he explains,
is because the latter are in fact premised on the civil status, and not the
reverse.”90 Thus, what Arendt refers to as “the right to have rights” cannot
be derived from any essential quality of the human, any “inalienable” inher-
ence of rights in the human person, but is premised on the existence of a
community of political actors who grant each other rights. Abstracted from
such a political community, or state, the supposedly inalienable, universal
human rights, she concludes, are simply the rights of those without rights.
As Balibar notes, Arendt’s dismissal of the efficacy of human rights led
her to a paradoxical form of civic institutionalism, which shares elements
of Edmund Burke’s conservative critique of natural rights—as expressed in
his preference for his “rights of an Englishman.”91 This preference for the
rights of the citizen is premised on the rigid division of man’s private life
in the home (oikos) and his public life in the state, thus Arendt’s dismissal
of human rights (and her valorization of the rights that are granted through
participation in the political sphere) is premised on a narrow conception
of the political, from which social questions, including poverty, labor, and
reproduction are excluded. This expulsion was necessary, she argues, if the
political sphere was to be a realm of freedom. It was this distinction between
freedom and necessity that led Arendt, in her book on the French and
American revolutions, to suggest that it was the entry of the poor, with
their “social” demands into the French Revolution that prevented it from
establishing a realm of freedom and that ultimately precipitated the terror.92
In the politicization of questions of poverty, labor, and reproduction—and
in the valorization of natural life at the foundation of rights declarations—

she saw a blurring of political and natural life, the impingement of necessity
on freedom, and ultimately the eclipse of politics.
Despite the elitism of Arendt’s position, it has the advantage of high-
lighting the role of political actors in challenging the separation of life and
politics and refusing their exclusion from the political stage. The entry of
life itself into the political realm, she stresses, was brought about by those
whose poverty subjected them to necessity and to the power of their bod-
ies, and it “was under the rule of this necessity”:
[T]hat the multitude rushed to the assistance of the French

Revolution, inspired it, drove it onward, and eventually sent it
to its doom, for this was the multitude of the poor. When they
appeared on the scene of politics, necessity appeared with them,
and the result was that the power of the old regime became
impotent and the new republic was stillborn; freedom had to be
surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself.93
As Jacques Rancière highlights, Arendt’s critique of rights “rested on the

assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very begin-
ning by the ‘pity’ of the revolutionaries for the poor people.”94
Like Arendt, Agamben sees the decisive fact of modernity as the
breakdown of the classical distinction between life (zen) and the good life
(eu zen), and between bios and zoē. In modernity, he writes, bare life—
which had originally been situated in a relation of abandonment at the
margins of the polis—“gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,
and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.”95 In stark contrast to
this classical model, “modern democracy,” Agamben argues, “presents itself
from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoē.”96 This means
politics ceases to be a specific activity—the pursuit of the good life—and
comes to be conceived as existing for the sake of life itself, for the protec-
tion of natural life.
Unlike Arendt, Agamben pays no attention to the role of the struggles
of the poor in politicizing life itself, and thereby destabilizing the catego-
ries of classical political thought. Arendt makes clear the disastrous con-
sequences she sees in the reversal of classical politics, through which the
poor enter the political process. “It was necessity, the urgent needs of the
people, that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom,”97
she writes. While Agamben rejects Arendt’s nostalgia for a realm of pure
politics untouched by material concerns, he ignores the historical subjects
who irrevocably shaped modern politics by challenging their exclusion from

the political sphere. While he is free of the desire to preserve the realm of
politics from the social questions of poverty and labor, he does not address
the historical possibilities opened up by those who politicized these ques-
tions, or seek to preserve their victories.
Instead, he depicts the transition through which bare life appeared
as the modern political subject as a product of those declarations of rights
that enabled the transition from divine to national sovereignty. In “On
the Jewish Question,” Marx had traced this move by which “politics pro-
claims itself to be a mere means, whose end is life in civil society” to the
1791 “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” which proclaimed: “The goal of
all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible
rights of man.”98 For Marx, the separation between man and citizen, and
the transformation of politics into a means for the preservation of “man,”
or apolitical life, was the political expression of the capitalist separation
between the sphere of circulation, or commodity exchange (“a very Eden of
the innate rights of man”) and the sphere of production, which is premised
on exploitation and substantive inequality.99 This broader perspective led
him to tie his analysis of modern juridical innovations, like the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen, to an examination of those struggles, over
the length of the working day for instance, which subjected the realms of
production and reproduction to political dispute. As Arendt notes, Marx
learned from the French Revolution that poverty can be politicized and the
struggle against it oriented to freedom. Through the categories of exploita-
tion and oppression, she suggests, he translated “economic conditions into
political factors.”100 Here we see a coherence of life and politics that is not
on the terms of the state but that results from a struggle against it, which
is missing from Agamben’s redemptive account of biopolitics.
Agamben’s account of rights can be seen as a continuation of Marx’s
inquiry, but it is one that dispenses with the analysis of capitalism, speaking
only of “modernity,” and thus focusing on the political and juridical levels
without considering the forms of antagonism that practically politicized the
question of life. The nation-state, he argues, is founded on a unity of birth-
territory-order, and human rights declarations—which locate sovereignty in
the natural life of a people—are “the originary figure for the inscription of
natural life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state.”101 This loca-
tion of sovereignty in the nation, he suggests, is only enabled by a fiction
by which birth is automatically nation, and as such becomes a political
category. It is because rights declarations are predicated on the creation of
bare life, that is, because they politicize the fact of birth, that Agamben
sees them as “double-sided”—both bearers of liberties and vehicles for the
increasing inscription of life in the realm of a state that now finds its
rationale in precisely that which the ancients had excluded as unpolitical:
natural life, man’s biological vulnerability.102 In modernity, he argues, the
split between life and politics begins to heal, but only at the cost of tying
life to the sovereignty of the state, and transforming politics into a means
for the protection of biological life—a shift we see today both in the view
that the role of government is to ensure a comfortable level of pacified
consumerism no less than in the militarization of humanitarianism.
How, then, is it possible to resist sovereign power, and, in Agamben’s
terms, to free ourselves from a condition of abandonment? The account
he offers of the relation of sovereignty, politics, and life tends to call into
question those strategies with which Foucault believed it was possible to
generate forms of resistance and independence of the governed. In the
latter’s view, the political concern with life that characterized biopolitics
produced, along with new dangers, the possibility of new forms of resis-
tance. In opposition to this new form of power, he argues, “the forces that
resisted relied for support on the very things it invested, that is, on life,
and man as a living being”:
Whether or not it was a Utopia that was wanted is of little

importance, what we have seen has been a very real process of
struggle: life as a political object was in a sense taken at face
value and turned back against the system that was bent on con-
trolling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue
of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through
affirmations concerning right.103
In Agamben’s view, in contrast, the human as a living being, the body,

and life itself—when conceived as a natural property—are always-already
enmeshed in the sovereign ban, and can provide no basis for resistance;
“The ‘body,’ ” he writes, “is always a biopolitical body and bare life, and
nothing in it  .  .  .  seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose
the demands of sovereign power.”104 Here we see not only his departure from
Foucault, but also his distance from those thinkers who wish to develop an
“affirmative” or “productive” biopolitics, notably Antonio Negri, Michael
Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Roberto Esposito.105
While late in his life, Foucault was prepared to utilize the discourse
of rights in specific circumstances—among them to contest the plight
of asylum-seekers from Vietnam, to contest the suppression of Poland’s
Solidarność movement, and to challenge the political repression that fol-
lowed the Iranian revolution—Agamben conceives human rights discourses
and declarations as biopolitical mechanisms that entrap bare life in the

realm of sovereign power.106 If we reflect on the way in which the language
of human rights and humanitarianism have increasingly served to justify
state militarism, the following suggestion in Homo Sacer appears disturb-
ingly prescient:
It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive

political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the
rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription
of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new
and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from
which they wanted to liberate themselves.107
Nonetheless, this also raises important questions about the possibility for
political praxis in the present. Occurring in the context of a discussion of
the politicization of life inaugurated by the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act—which
placed the body, corpus, at the center of political claims—it suggests that,
from this point onward, every political event served to reinscribe life in
the order of the state, as all subsequent political conflicts were premised
on an “affirmation of bare life.”108
By affirming that man is born free and equal in rights, the 1789 Dec-
laration politicizes the fact of birth, turning natural life itself into the new
foundation of sovereign power. “Declarations of rights,” he insists, “repre-
sent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-
political order of the nation-state.”109 The consequences of this shift, in
Agamben’s view, will be far from benign:
It is not possible to understand the ‘national’ and biopolitical

development and vocation of the modern state in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at
its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject but,
above all, man’s bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in
the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle
of sovereignty.110
Here we find the basis of the most controversial aspect of his critique of
rights: his argument that the development by which life appeared as a
political subject in modernity paves the way for the murderous racism of
the Nazi state. Can we simply accept the idea that there is a continuity
between habeas corpus, the French Revolution, National Socialism, and the
contemporary blurring of militarism and humanitarianism? Were there not

other political possibilities that were fought for, sometimes won, and then
defeated again? Is not the contemporary political configuration, that is to
say, far more contingent than such a picture suggests?
It is worth asking after the other side of the political events Agamben
analyses. The French Revolution, may, on the one hand, have prepared
a new basis for the inscription of life in the state order, but it also led to
the creation not only of new spaces, liberties, and rights, but also of new
possibilities for individual and collective life. As Agamben solidifies his
account of human rights, these new possibilities are lost, as his suggestion
that the political struggles of the past were double-sided gives way to a total
critique of the emancipatory tradition of the West, which appears solely
as a history of the increasing inscription of life in the order of sovereign
power. Given his comprehensive treatment of the way in which rights
declarations inscribe life in the order of the state, it is noteworthy that he
devotes no attention to the other side of the struggles of modernity—to
their successes in resisting state power, or to their ability to create spaces
for greater freedom and open up new emancipatory possibilities. Neither
does he spend any time contemplating the dire prospect of a world in
which the political struggles of modernity, including those that took place
under the mantle of the rights of man, had not taken place. In his work,
human rights declarations appear less as sedimentations of social struggles
than as mechanisms of depoliticization. In my view, they are both: those
political freedoms and rights that we do have today are legacies of the
struggles of the past, even as the discourse of human rights serves today
as a depoliticizing one, that, at its worst, serves to justify state militarism.
It is possible to accept that the seeds of contemporary biopolitics
were already present in the great moments of modern emancipation, while
nonetheless recognizing the contingency of political action, which, if it is to
be more than the management of preexisting constituencies, is necessarily
without guarantees. As such, every truly radical and experimental political
act carries great risks; not only may it fail—in circumstances as disastrous
and bloody as those that befell the French Revolution—but it may find
itself preparing a new and more terrifying basis for state power, as was the
fate of the emancipatory movements of the twentieth century, and of those
whose humanitarian activism unwittingly helped to legitimize a new form
of brutal state militarism. Yet, to refrain from acting because such action
may further empower the state, would lead to a fatalism that would leave
us absolutely exposed to an unconstrained state power.
The political configuration in which we live is as much the result
of the defeats of political movements of the past as it is the inheritor of
those movements. “Those who sought to found a new and egalitarian politi-
cal and symbolic space,” as Sophie Wahnich stresses apropos the French
Revolution, “were defeated by history.”111 Wahnich provides an account
of the Revolution, focused on the period of the Terror, which provides us
with a way to rethink the politicization of life. The Revolution, she sug-
gests, brought two ideas of life, two sentiments of humanity into conflict.
The first of these was committed to saving bodies indifferently “(those of
friends, enemies, accomplices, traitors, slaves)” and was attached to “the
life of each human being as such.112 This sentiment of “natural humanity”
can be seen as equivalent to the reduction of life to bare life that Agamben
sees as the Revolution’s legacy. The second form, however, was attached to
preserving the meaning one chose to give to one’s life, and the common
well-being of all.113 It was the latter, which sought a form of life that could
never be reduced to the needs of the body, that Wahnich sees as the key
achievement of the Revolution. From this perspective, it is the defeat of
this possibility, and not the violence of the Terror, that is the catastrophe.
Far from simply inaugurating a biopolitical logic whose most horrific
consequence was Nazism, the French Revolution was as much a failure as
a success. In his magnificent reflection on the Haitian revolution, C. L. R
James notes that the liberty fought for and won by the former slaves was tied
to a desire for general emancipation in France, both of which were brutally
attacked in the aftermath of the Terror. In France, he writes, the “passionate
desire to free all humanity which had called for Negro freedom in the great
days of the revolution now huddled in the slums of Paris and Marseilles,
exhausted by its great efforts and terrorised by Bonaparte’s bayonets and
Fouché’s police.”114 This is not to dismiss the achievements of the French
Revolution, nor of the Haitian, but to stress that the results of political
confrontations are necessarily contingent. As Toussaint L’Ouverture wrote
in a remark of great prescience: “After my death, who knows if my brothers
will not be driven back into slavery and will yet perish under the whip of
the whites. The work of men is not durable.”115 There are good reasons to
refuse the progressive narrative that would claim the gains of the modern
revolutions to glorify present power structures. Yet, reversing the direction
of a progressivist history is not sufficient to free us from the presuppositions
underpinning it—most importantly, the conception of history as operating
according to a logic that is largely impervious to human intervention.
Hoping Merely Out of Stupidity
If we return to the quote from Marx that Agamben cites to explain his own
lack of pessimism, how we are to understand his grounds for hope now that
we have seen that he rejects both the nostalgic attempt to return to past
certainties, and the strategic utilization of human rights. If we cannot return
to the polis, and if human rights further inscribe life in the realm of the state,
what, in this desperate situation, could justify such hope? In explaining his
hopefulness, he argues that contemporary events are producing not only a
new figure of domination but also a new figure of the subject, which arises
from the collapse of the border of life and politics. This subject would be
without substantive identity, and would therefore be unable to be represented
by a state, claim juridical rights, or form the basis for an exclusive com-
munity.116 It would not be a bare life but what he terms a “form-of-life.”117
“By the term form-of-life,” Agamben writes in Means Without Ends,
“I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which
it is never possible to isolate something like a naked life.”118 In the unity
of politics and life he sees the possibility of this form-of-life—a life “for
which what is at stake in the ways of living is living itself.”119 By this, he
means that for such a life, ways of living would take the forms of possibilities,
rather than simple facts, and “no identity and no work could exhaust this
potentiality.”120 With this formulation, he is seeking to move away from
the idea of a biological essence, which could be concretized in a “race” and
conceived as carrying a particular vocation. Biology, as he understands it, is
tied to inevitability—to the idea that something could not be otherwise. In
contrast, “the root of freedom,” he writes—in a remark that points toward
the fundamental coordinates of the new politics he wishes to articulate—
“lies in the abyss of human potentiality.”121 Unlike the constellation of
essence, biology, vocation, and necessity—which, in his view has marred
Western politics and metaphysics since Aristotle—form-of-life would be a
Being that would only exist in its ways of being, a life of potentiality whose
ways of living were not necessary but “necessarily contingent.”122
The political task then, as Agamben sees it, is not to rearticulate the
separation of bare life from particular forms of life, or of zoē from bios, but
to free this unity of life and politics from every relation to sovereign power.
“Political power as we know it,” he writes, “always founds itself—in the
last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context
of the forms of life.”123 By “political power as we know it,” he is referring
to the entirety of Western politics, which he conceptualizes as a sovereign
relation founded on the isolation of bare life. If this isolation is the presup-
position of sovereign power, then form-of-life, in which it is not possible
to isolate a bare life, would be “an existence over which power no longer
seems to have any hold.”124 For all its brutality, Agamben sees contemporary
biopolitics as healing the caesura that has plagued Western politics since
Aristotle first sought to define the human through the exclusion of bare
life, and thus as making such a form-of-life possible.
It is for this reason that he refuses every attempt to return to those

forms of separation through which the West has understood politics since
its inception. Rather than attempting, in an Arendtian vein, to revive the
separations between bios and zoē, public and private, life and politics, he
believes it is necessary to radicalize the indistinction of these terms; “it is
by starting from this uncertain terrain,” he argues—in perhaps his clearest
formulation of the political futility of any attempt to return to an earlier
form of separation—“from this opaque zone of indistinction that today
we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of
another world.”125 The importance of this cannot be overstated for a cor-
rect understanding of Agamben’s thought. It is only if we start from this
indistinction, and recognize the impossibility and undesirability of a return
to that which preceded it—the separations between oikos and polis, bios,
and zoē, public and private—that we can construct a politics adequate to
the task of freeing us from biopolitics and the “sovereign ban.”126 “I would
not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biologi-
cal body and political body, of zoē and bios, for any reason,” he writes.
“It is here that I must find my space once again—here or nowhere else.
Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me.”127 If
today’s “desperate situation” fills him with hope, this is because, just as
Marx saw the ravages of capitalism as producing the circumstances that
made communism possible, he sees today’s catastrophic indistinction of
life and politics as creating the possibility, for the first time in history, of
a new redemptive politics, and the inauguration of a form-of-life, or, as he
puts it elsewhere, a happy life.128
If Agamben sees reason for hope, this is because in contemporary
instances of the collapse of the border of politics and life, which so dis-
tressed Arendt, he sees the condition of possibility of this new politics,
in which it would no longer be possible to isolate a bare life. And yet,
as we have seen, historically there have been two dramatically opposed
ways to politicize life. One fought to turn those questions that had been
relegated to the oikos or cast outside the political sphere—labor, poverty,
reproduction, slavery—into matters of political dispute. The other led to
the expansion of the oikos to the point at which it gradually surpassed the
polis, bringing with it a form of government that is no longer political but
economic. These two ways of politicizing life share a dramatically opposed
orientation to the question of survival. As Wahnich notes of this division
in the French Revolution, while the slogan of one was “liberty or death,”
the other proclaimed that nothing was worth dying for. “The proposition
that existence stands higher than just existence is false and ignominious if
existence is to mean nothing other than mere life,” Walter Benjamin wrote
in On the Critique of Violence. “Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide

with the mere life in him.”129 If the human is not to coincide with mere
life, if living is to be other than being subjected to humanitarian protection
or to the pacified consumerism that is the contemporary manifestation of
Aristotle’s “beautiful day of life,” then we should ask where the form of
politics that would contest this is life is likely to arise.
Although Marx’s hope in the face of the desperate situation of early
capitalism, was, at least in part, generated by his belief that capitalism
creates its own gravediggers, in Agamben’s work, these gravediggers are
missing; in the place of political actors, struggling collectively against the
system of which they are a product, his thought is populated by figures
whose lives border on death and whose extreme manifestations are the
Muselmann of the Nazi camps and the neomort, who survives merely by
virtue of artificial respiratory technologies. If Marx was able to prevent
the proletariat, in its original formulation, being conceived substantively,
this is only because it was a collective political subject. The working class,
stripped of any naturalized vocation, may have been the social precondition
for the creation of the proletariat, but only the proletariat as a nonsub-
stantive, political subject provided grounds for hoping for the overthrow
of capitalism. By turning away from active political interventions in the
present, Agamben risks valorizing a subject that is no subject, except in
that it is subjected to forces it cannot hope to influence. Indeed, he is too
willing to find grounds for hope in individual forms of desubjectivation,
which signal not to a life of potentiality but to extraordinarily constrained
possibilities for living.
To say this is not to ask Agamben to provide a program toward an
ideal end state—a demand that would be contrary to his entire project,
which aims to think a politics of pure means in which political action could
not be instrumentalized in the name of a state that would be actualized in
the future. My point, rather, is that anyone interested in immanent social
transformation must be interested in political struggles and concrete acts
of resistance if they are not to fall into a teleological and deterministic
understanding of such transformation—as indeed was the fate of Marxism in
its social democratic and Stalinist forms, both of which forgot that Marx’s
optimism about capitalism was an optimism about its capacity to create
the forms of political agency that could abolish it. This point was only too
clear to Benjamin, who wrote in the late 1930s: “The experience of our
generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.”130 Neither can
contemporary biopolitics be expected to lead inexorably to a new, redeemed
form-of-life. Today, political practice that takes the form of rights claims
ultimately presupposes the state and the relation of sovereignty and bare life.
Yet, we should not take the step of dismissing those historical struggles—
including their unrealized aspirations—that took place under the mantle of
rights. Furthermore, there are, even in the midst of our desperate situation,
forms of political practice and experiments in the possible that seek to trace
paths out of this relation. If we are to avoid an optimism sustained through
teleological certainty, which pervaded so much of the Marxist tradition—if
we are not, in Marx’s words, to go on “hoping merely out of stupidity”—it
is toward such experiments that we should direct our attention.131
Chapter 2
Politics at the Limits of the Law

On the State of Exception
The accumulated anguish of individuals who fear for their lives brings
about a new power.
—Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes
In State of Exception, Agamben discusses a series of lawless feasts—the Sat-

urnalia, the charivari, and the Carnival—during which lawfulness would
give way to chaos, hierarchies would be overturned and social norms openly
transgressed.1 He quotes a horrified observer who perfectly captures the
anomic disorder that ensued in such periods: “One showed his ass to the
wind, / Another smashed a roof, / One broke windows and doors, / Another
threw salt in the well, / And another threw filth in faces; / They were truly
horrible and savage.”2 Although the anthropological literature has often
understood these periods of “legal lawlessness” as related to the agrarian
cycle or to notions of ritual purification, Agamben suggests they can be bet-
ter understood in light of similar suspensions of law that existed in various
archaic juridical institutions. Relying on the work of Karl Meuli, he portrays
these anomic feasts as parodic repetitions of the violence that accompanied
the “abandonment of bare life.”3 In a series of “meticulous studies,” Meuli
demonstrates, Agamben writes, that the violent acts recorded in medieval
descriptions of lawless feasts “precisely replicate the different phases of the
cruel ritual in which the Friedlos and the bandit were expelled from the
community, their houses unroofed and destroyed, and their wells poisoned
or made brackish.”4 What appear as “rough and wild acts of harassment”
are in fact highly developed legal forms, which enable the ritual punish-
ment associated with what Meuli terms “the ban.”5 These periods of “legal
47
anarchy,” he suggests, thus dramatize the ambiguity of the legal order, and
its need to internalize lawlessness.6
In Homo Sacer, Agamben had already explained that the Friedlos—
the “man without peace” of ancient Germanic law—was a figure whose
expulsion from the community left him without peace precisely because
it deprived him of legal status, and thus ensured anyone could kill him
without committing homicide. Similarly, the bandit’s expulsion condemned
him to a liminal zone between life and death, as, in Cavalca’s words, “[w]
hoever is banned from his city on pain of death must be considered as
dead.”7 Both the Friedlos and the bandit are exemplary figures of the homo
sacer—figures, that is, of bare life. Thus, the life of the bandit is not without
relation to the city and its laws, but is, rather, a threshold of indistinction
and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, “exclusion and
inclusion.”8 This liminal existence of the bandit can illuminate the anomic
feasts Agamben sees as mimicking the lawless violence that the legal order
intermittently wields. These feasts, he argues, replicate, and serve to cel-
ebrate, the violence that law must capture in order to maintain its grasp
on chaos—they perform the suspension of law that must be incorporated
into the legal order if it is to refer to life. Thus, such feasts point to the
intimate relation between law and anomie, and performatively gesture to
the possibility of a sphere of life over which the law would no longer be
violently enforced.
In State of Exception, Agamben suggests that this border zone between
law and life can best be understood as the reverse of the state of excep-
tion, which has more commonly been understood as a juridical mechanism
that ensures the law can be suspended in times of necessity to preserve the
legal order. In a reversal of this perspective, he conceptualizes the state of
exception not simply as a juridical mechanism, but as the original means
by which law refers to, and captures, life. A “theory of the state of excep-
tion,” he thus argues, “is the preliminary condition for any definition of
the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being
to law.”9 It is only if we are able to decipher the state of exception, and
bring to light what is shrouded by this obscure juridical figure that we will
develop a clear understanding of the differences between the political and
the juridical and between life and law. “And perhaps only then,” he sug-
gests, in language that makes clear that he sees the state of exception as
far more than a limited juridical figure, “will it be possible to answer the
question that never ceases to reverberate in the history of Western politics:
what does it mean to act politically?”10
On the final page of State of Exception, Agamben writes: “Politics has
suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing
POLITICS AT THE LIMITS OF THE LAW / 49
itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when
it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law.”11 It is
because Western politics, since its inception, has been aligned with the
problem of sovereignty, he suggests that it has remained impossible to think
a politics that is not subsumed in advance within a juridical framework.
By subjecting politics to predetermined norms, however, such a framework
limits the scope for political action, and captures politics within the legal
order. The belief that the dominance of the law has made it impossible
to think politics underlies both his profoundly critical approach to liberal
democracy, which he sees as subsuming politics to law and to the state,
and his critiques of both Marxism and anarchism, which, he argues have
failed to correctly formulate the problem of the state, and have thus ended
up “identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand.”12
Viewed through such a lens, the state of exception is not merely a simple
juridical provision that is operative in liberal political orders; rather, it is
the “ ‘ark’ of power,” which forms both the condition of possibility of a
liberal legal order and the “reef on which the revolutions of our century
have been shipwrecked.”13 As long as the exception is in force, Agamben
suggests provocatively, we will be unable to conceptualize a politics that
breaks with the model of the law.
My focus in this chapter, on the political import of Agamben’s theo-
rization of the exception, provides a significant departure from much of
the literature on his work, which remains enclosed in a juridical perspec-
tive, and therefore seeks to assess his theory of the exception according
to the criteria of its utility in bolstering the rule of law in the face of the
contemporary extension of exceptional state power. This juridical assess-
ment of his work takes a number of forms: Judith Butler, for instance,
sympathetically utilizes his account of the exception, and his description
of the contemporary “production of a paralegal universe,” in her theori-
zation of Guantanamo Bay.14 For Butler, Agamben’s importance lies in
his piercing analysis of the extent of the contemporary deviation from
the rule of law—an analysis she wishes to utilize in support of her own
normative position, which includes a “wish” that “the state were bound
to law in a way that doesn’t not treat the law merely as instrumental or
dispensable.”15 Others, while recognizing that the project of bolstering the
rule of law is contrary to his own aims, refuse to think of Agamben as a
political thinker at all, portraying him as, at best, “a thinker without politi-
cal vocation,” as Paulo Virno puts it, or as producing a “(non) political
discourse” whose ultimate message is “political nihilism,” in the words of
Ernesto Laclau.16 At worst, Agamben’s antipathy to the normative project
of bolstering the rule of law is taken as evidence that his work displays, as
Matthew Sharpe argues, an “uncanny proximity with the anti-terroristic

legislation his proper name is often invoked to oppose.”17 In this latter
view, any political project that seeks to contribute to the formulation of a
politics whose terms are not those of the law is ultimately complicit with
the violence of the exceptional state.
Despite the diversity of these positions, viewed from within the con-
stellation I am proposing here, each of them can be seen to obscure the
specifically political import of Agamben’s theorization of the state of excep-
tion. In contrast, I suggest that politics is what is at stake in his theorization
of the exception. Therefore, the important question is not whether his work
provides the resources to bolster the rule of law, but whether it can help
to inform a nonsovereign political practice, and “a political philosophy
worthy of our time.”18 Among the questions this chapter addresses are: if
politics is contaminated by law, what possibilities does Agamben see in the
present for creating new political forms? And what is the relation between
the catastrophic normalization of the state of exception and the redemptive
new politics to which his work gestures?
Agamben’s attempt to conceptualize a nonjuridical politics is impor-
tant in a period in which “legalism has nearly saturated the entire political
culture,” and discourses of rights and legality have achieved a hegemonic
position, often displacing nonjuridical political alternatives.19 The attempt
to articulate such alternatives, I believe, is a crucial one in a context marked
by a convergence of rhetoric, in which the discourses of rights and legal-
ity provide the most common pretexts for the aggressive actions of states,
as well as hegemonizing the field of opposition to such actions. Anatole
France’s remark about the abstraction of liberal categories of rights and legal
equality—“poor and rich are equally forbidden to spend the night under
the bridges”—once marked out the chasm separating a liberal worldview
from a politics that sought not the management of injustice through a
system of formal juridical equality, but the overthrow of a system founded
on substantive inequality.20 To abandon such a critique is also to abandon
the challenge to the substantive inequalities of capital, and is demobilizing
in the face of arguments that repressive security measures are necessary to
ensure the survival of the state that guarantees the rights, and the “way
of life” of its citizens.21
Although we can recognize that liberal categories are currently used to
legitimize state militarism, the desirability of a nonjuridical politics is still
not evident. Any attempt to formulate a nonjuridical politics is necessarily
faced with the question of whether such an attempt risks further empower-
ing arbitrary state power, and, indeed, of whether it augurs a horrifying state
of nature like that so powerfully portrayed by Thomas Hobbes. Affirmative
answers to these questions have motivated those liberal-legal critiques of

torture and exceptional power that are premised on identifying the illegal-
ity of the measures introduced in the wake of 9/11. And yet something is
missed if we enable the very real dangers posed by arbitrary state power and
social chaos to blind us to the possibility of nonjuridical political options.
By structuring politics around fear and the vulnerability of life, and seeking
the security of a stable normative framework, we risk depriving ourselves
of political possibilities that start not from the vulnerability of natural
life but from the potentiality of living. If we are to escape the dangers of
contemporary emergency politics, we need to consider political alterna-
tives whose starting point is not the attempt to secure life by constraining
politics within predetermined limits, but the attempt to reconceptualize the
disruptive potential of a politics without guarantees. Agamben’s attempt to
formulate a new conception of politics provides a welcome antidote to the
closure of the political imagination that found its slogan in the Thatcherite
assertion: there is no alternative.22 While recognizing the need for a politics
that is not subsumed to law, however, I critically analyze his account of
the exception in light of whether it enables or forecloses political praxis
in the present.
Carl Schmitt, who argued that all concepts of the modern state are
secularized theological concepts, saw the state of exception as a secular-
ization of the miracle, in which God suspended the laws of nature and
intervened directly in the lives of His creatures. For Agamben, once the
exception becomes the norm, its paradigm is no longer the miracle but the
catastrophe. His attempt to respond to this, I argue, relies on the same logic
I have already identified in relation to his reading of biopolitics, for which,
in Hölderlin’s words, “where danger is, grows the saving power also.”23 That
is, he portrays the normalization of the state of exception as an ongoing
catastrophe that wrecks the legal order, with its necessary articulation of
strictly demarcated norms and exceptions, and yet sees in this catastrophe
the condition of possibility of a redeemed life without relation to law.
With Agamben, I argue that the ongoing departure of state power from
legal norms offers opportunities for rethinking the centrality of legalism to
emancipatory political strategies, and for resisting the structuring of politi-
cal possibility by the fear of a lawless state. And yet, I argue that there is
no reason to assume that the normalization of the exception will lead to a
more redemptive outcome, rather than to an intensification of catastrophic
dangers. Thus, I suggest that we should not take the step of dismissing the
entirety of existing politics as katechonic, but should instead attempt to
contest the predations of an increasingly exceptional state power and open
up new possibilities for a life without relation to law.
The State of Exception
Agamben’s belief that an analysis of the state of exception is the neces-

sary condition for enabling us to rethink the possibility of political action
may seem counterintuitive, given that the state of exception is commonly
understood as a simple juridical mechanism—subordinated to and con-
strained by the legal order—which enables the suspension of some or all
aspects of this legal order in times of emergency. His consideration of the
state of exception came at the end of a century in which, as William E.
Scheuerman points out, two world wars, the great depression, and the Cold
War generated significant political and intellectual interest in the question
of the measures by which constitutional states could confront crises and
emergencies.24 As states utilized extensive emergency powers to deal with
these crises, much of this scholarship focused on what Scheuerman refers to
as the “perennial question of how emergency power can be made to conform
to the rule of law.”25 Twentieth-century writings on emergency powers have
largely sought to provide answers to a question posed by Abraham Lincoln
in the previous century: “Must a government of necessity be too strong for the
liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?”26
It is worth reflecting on this question more than a decade after 9/11—
a period in which we have seen the extension of emergency powers, the
continuing existence of Guantanamo Bay, and the annual extension of
the state of emergency declared by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.27
“A national emergency exists,” the declaration read, “by reason of the
terrorist attacks at the World Trade Centre, New York and the Pentagon,
and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United
States.”28 The period following this order saw the United States introduce
substantial juridical transformations, including the USA PATRIOT Act—a
contrived acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”—which
subjected noncitizens to massively extended state powers of surveillance
and deportation.29 Other developments included the establishment of a new
military commission process, which violated even established military law,
the designation of prisoners of war as “enemy combatants” without access
to U.S. courts and the “rendition” of detainees to countries with records
of torture. For some theorists writing in the wake of 9/11, there is nothing
overly problematic about temporary emergency measures; as Barber and
Fleming write in their defense of emergency powers, “[v]iolate the Constitu-
tion to save it? No paradox once you realize that as a practical matter at
least (and as a theoretical matter too) fidelity to the constitution always
presupposes material conditions that the constitution can’t guarantee.”30
The suspension of law in such a view is simply a temporary deviation from

the normal legal order, which serves to ensure the continuing existence
of this order in times of crisis, by resurrecting the normal conditions on
which the normal legal order depends.
More than a decade on, however, these temporary measures not only
remain in place, but have been dramatically extended. At the end of 2011,
President Obama signed the “National Defense Authorization Act for the
Fiscal Year 2012,” which bears the ominously familiar subtitle, “Strengthen-
ing the Nation’s Terrorist Detention, Interrogation and Prosecution Poli-
cies.” This act consolidates the “exceptional” regime introduced to enable
the detention without trial of terror suspects, and makes “indefinite deten-
tion and military trials a permanent part of American law.”31 The act, which
enshrines the controversial military tribunal system introduced by the Bush
administration, effectively transforms a supposedly temporary emergency
regime into a permanent aspect of U.S. law. As the 9/11 exception becomes
a normal state of affairs, the exception appears more integral, and more
paradoxical, than its defenders acknowledge.
From the Roman institution of the dictator, to John Locke’s defense,
at the origins of liberalism, of a “prerogative power” “to act according to
discretion for the public good without the prescription of the law and
sometimes even against it” emergency powers appear regularly in the his-
tory of the constitutional state.32 Agamben’s concern is not to ensure such
measures remain constrained by the legal order, to determine the condi-
tions in which their use would be acceptable, or to condemn such uses in
the name of the rule of law. Rather his primary intellectual and political
concern is to problematize all such endeavors by illuminating what he
sees as the necessarily paradoxical nature of the relation between law and
its outside that the suspension of law attempts to ensure. This relation is
paradoxical, in his view, because it means that the law must incorporate
the possibility of its own suspension, embracing its own nonbeing. The
state of exception, he writes is “the legal form of what cannot have legal
form.”33 William Scheuerman has suggested that Agamben is the “most
impressive representative” of a group of “broadly postmodern” scholars for
whom the U.S. response to 9/11 “tears away the liberal veils that shroud
dark but fundamental truths about the authoritarian attributes of every lib-
eral system.”34 As Scheuerman suggests, Agamben is particularly concerned
with what the suspension of law can teach us about the legal order itself;
indeed, the state of exception appears as an apocalypse, which unveils
the katechon, making it is possible to understand the relation between
law and life, and thus to formulate a form of political action beyond this
relation.
Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception begins with a question:

“How can an anomie be inscribed within the juridical order?”35 Anomie, as
he uses it here, refers simply to lawlessness, and the paradox of the state
of exception consists in its ability to maintain a relation between law and
its lawless outside, by creating a zone in which law and fact blur into each
other.36 This focus on the paradox inherent in law’s attempt to grasp its
own nonexistence and internalize its outside is at odds with the depiction
of exceptional measures as aspects of the juridical order—or, at worst, “an
unfortunate but periodic lapse,” necessary to restore this order.37 What these
defenses obscure is the peculiar fact that what must be brought within the
legal order is nothing but the (temporary) annihilation of this very order. “If
the state of exception’s characteristic property is a (total or partial) suspen-
sion of the juridical order,” Agamben asks, “how can such a suspension still
be contained within it? . . . And if a state of exception is instead only a de
facto situation, and as such is unrelated or contrary to law, how is it possible
for the order to contain a lacuna precisely where the decisive situation is
concerned?”38 In his view, the state of exception is not simply one “mecha-
nism amongst many constitutional provisions.”39 It is the mechanism through
which the legal order seeks to ensure a relation to its outside, and so ensure
there is no realm of life without relation to law. In the state of exception,
law borders a nonlegal politics, which, like revolution and civil war, chal-
lenges the legal order. To understand this border-zone, Agamben turns to
the work of Carl Schmitt, for whom the term state of exception referred not
only to the suspension of law, but to the very essence of sovereign power.
Carl Schmitt: The Paradox of Sovereignty
In April 1919, leftist revolutionaries declared a soviet government in

Munich. Later that month, Vladimir Lenin wrote to “whole heartedly greet
the Soviet Republic of Bavaria,” and to request urgent updates on the
following questions: “have councils of workers and servants been formed
in the different sections of the city; have the workers been armed; have
the bourgeoisie been disarmed; has use been made of the stocks of cloth-
ing and other items for immediate and extensive aid to the workers, and
especially to the farm laborers and small peasants?”40 The Soviet Republic
was brutally suppressed after less than a month. Not least among its last-
ing consequences, however, was that it was, as Gopal Balakrishnan notes,
an “irreversibly politicizing experience” for the young legal theorist Carl
Schmitt, who was in Munich and feared for his life during the days of
Soviet power.41 In State of Exception, Agamben writes that Schmitt can be
credited with “the most rigorous attempt to construct a theory of the state
of exception.”42 Given Schmitt’s 1933 rapprochement with Hitler, which
saw him attempt to position himself as the key legal theorist of Nazism, this
praise may seem scandalous. As I hope to show, however, while Agamben
is heavily influenced by Schmitt’s account of the exception, he does not,
as Matthew Sharpe claims, display a “profoundly uncritical debt to the legal
theory” of this archconservative jurist.43 Rather, his work on the excep-
tion aims to challenge the state that Schmitt wished to bolster. That both
thinkers share the view that the functioning of the legal order is ultimately
reliant on the possibility of a state of exception does not suggest any shared
political commitments. As Schmitt notes in Political Theology, conservative
thinkers like himself are not alone in believing that every government is
necessarily absolute—“an anarchist says the same.”44 Agamben should be
placed in a diverse tradition of anti-state thinkers who Schmitt admitted
a certain intellectual admiration for yet nonetheless considered his mortal
enemies. Agamben’s view is that by using Schmitt to develop our under-
standing of the functioning of the exception, and the legal order, we may
be able to interrupt its workings. Schmitt, he suggests, unveils the myth of
a nonviolent state sovereignty, and, by accurately describing what is neces-
sary to maintain state power, better enables us to resist it. Like Schmitt,
Agamben is convinced that “the exceptional case has an especially decisive
meaning which exposes the core of the matter.”45
While Schmitt was convinced that the extreme case could ultimately
be anchored to the juridical order, through a state of exception that would
reinstate the preconditions of a normal legal order, in Agamben’s view this
possibility has decisively broken down, and the state of exception can no
longer ensure a relation between anomic violence and the legal order but
has become a permanent paradigm of government. If it was often missed that
this marked a shift of focus, from the legal order to nonjuridical techniques
of government, The Kingdom and the Glory makes this very clear: “the real
problem, the central mystery of politics,” Agamben writes there, “is not
sovereignty but government; it is not God but the angel; it is not the King
but the ministry.”46 In contrast to Schmitt’s preoccupation with ensuring a
connection between the decision on the exception and the law, Agamben
diagnosed the breakdown of this juridical framework, and the inability of the
sovereign decision to restore the legal order. Following Benjamin, Agamben
counters Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign decision with an account of the
sovereign indecision. Once the state of exception becomes the norm, life is
subjected to forms of economic administration (oikonomia) or government,
which no longer take a strictly juridical form. “Agambenian economy” as
Antonio Negri notes, “remains a state of exception in daily life.”47
Schmitt’s key texts were written in Germany in the final period of the
Weimar regime, whose manifold crises provide the essential background,
and the “passionate urgency,” to his theory of state power.48 Frederick Wat-
kins quite rightly points out that although many states share experiences of
such powers, an understanding of Weimar is essential for an understanding
of the exception, as “[n]o country as yet can compare with Germany in
the richness and variety of its experience with institutions of this particular
sort.”49 During its short existence, in which it was confronted by radical
anti-parliamentary parties on the left and the right, and faced with a severe
economic crisis, the Weimar Republic used Article 48 of the constitution
to suspend the law more than 250 times to maintain its fragile order,
fully justifying Clinton Rossiter’s suggestion that the “life and death of
the German Republic is in no small part a story of the use and abuse of
Article 48.”50 As Jacobson and Schlink write—in their introduction to a
book whose title, Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis, succinctly captures the
political climate in which Schmitt was working—“the law was in crisis in
Weimar. It was in crisis because the state was in crisis for all but a brief
period from the inception of the Weimar Republic in 1919 until its demise
in 1933.”51 It is because the state’s regular reliance on Article 48 led Wei-
mar’s legal theorists to conduct “a profound inquiry into the preconditions
of constitutional government” that Schmitt, as a key participant in this
inquiry, remains of interest to us today.52
Schmitt’s understanding of the preconditions of a legal order can be
summed up in one pithy sentence: “There is no norm that is applicable
to chaos.”53 The factual existence of a normal situation, he argues, “is not
a mere ‘superficial presupposition’ that a jurist can ignore” but a properly
juridical question.54 In State of Exception, Agamben glosses Schmitt in the
following way: “In the decision on the state of exception, the norm is
suspended or even annulled; but what is at issue in this suspension is,
once again, the creation of a situation that makes the application of the
norm possible.”55 In Schmitt’s view, jurisprudence responds to the lack of
internal nexus between law and life by presupposing this reference. Similarly,
today the dominant view, as William Rasch notes, is that “the decision has
already been made” and there will be no more decisions but only norms.56
For Schmitt—who is adamant “no norm, neither a higher nor a lower
one, interprets and applies, protects or guards itself”—by presupposing law’s
reference to life, liberalism obscures the necessity for this reference to be
violently created through the suspension of law, obscuring law’s nonlegal
conditions of possibility.57
This presuppositional structure of law is at the basis of the subsump-
tion of politics to law that Agamben’s theorization of the exception aims
to overcome. By highlighting the fact that the ability of any system of

norms to refer to life cannot be presupposed but must be created through
the nonlegal production of a normal situation, Schmitt offers Agamben an
important tool with which to challenge this subsumption of politics to law
by revealing the law’s condition of possibility. Though without reference
to Schmitt, Michael Ignatieff, then-Director of Harvard University’s Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy, makes a point that the German jurist
would undoubtedly agree with in his defense of “lesser evils” in the context
of the War on Terror: civil liberties and freedoms, Ignatieff argues, are the
liberties of citizens in a state, and not of an abstract individual in a state
of nature, and “therefore, must depend on the survival of government and
must be subordinate to its preservation.”58 Thus, he argues, everything from
the suspension of civil liberties to secret assassinations “might be allowed,
as a last resort, if the life of the state were in danger.”59 In concrete terms,
Schmitt’s prescription for preserving legal and social order in Weimar was
encompassed in his broad reading of the emergency provisions enabled by
Article 48 of the constitution, which he argued—in the context of fero-
cious constitutional debates with figures like Hans Kelsen, Richard Thoma,
and Gerhard Anschütz—enabled the suspension not only of basic rights
but also of the entire legal order in times of emergency. Weimar would
only survive, Schmitt argued, if the constitution were to be interpreted as
granting unconstrained powers in times of crisis. The “ordinary organiza-
tional provisions of the Weimar Constitution,” he wrote, “cannot resist the
extraordinary powers of Article 48.”60 The emergency clause, he argued,
grants absolute power.
While this interpretation was hugely controversial—and was opposed
by those who argued that the constitution constrained the actions of the
President, even in dire emergencies—it can at least be said that it was
consistent with Schmitt’s own earlier position, as articulated in Political
Theology in which he had argued:
The precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor

can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially
when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency and of how
it is to be eliminated. The precondition as well as the content
of jurisdictional competence in such a case must necessarily be
unlimited.61
If we understand that Schmitt saw the state of exception as granting abso-

lutely unconstrained and uncodified powers in times of crisis, it becomes
clearer how it was that he was able to derive the question of sovereignty
entirely from the question of the state of exception; “Sovereign,” he infa-

mously stated, “is he who decides on the exception.”62 Using an “abstract
concept” to define sovereignty—the highest power, the undivided power,
and so on—is meaningless, Schmitt argued; what matters is who decides?63
Who has the power to suspend the entire legal order? The mark of sov-
ereignty, Schmitt insists, is not simply the exercise of power during an
exception, but the groundless decision that the entire legal order should
be suspended. The sovereign, had the absolute power to decide that the
state was in danger, suspend the legal order and take “necessary measures”
to restore normal conditions.64 Thus, the sovereign is a “borderline” figure
who occupies a limit position on the threshold of the juridical order, and
decides when this legal order is to be suspended in its entirety. “For a legal
order to make sense,” Schmitt writes, “a normal situation must exist, and he
is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually
exists.”65 The sovereign determines the norm; the norm neither determines
nor constrains the sovereign.
For Agamben, as for Schmitt, the sovereign marks the point of indis-
tinction between law and violence, juridical and factual order. Existing in
an undecidable position in relation to the juridical order the sovereign
decision enables the internalization, within this order, of anomic violence; it
“represents the inscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority
that animates it and gives it meaning.”66 This decision aims to enable an
articulation between law and life, by creating a zone in which they can no
longer be distinguished. In Agamben’s words:
Sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction between law

and nature, outside and inside, violence and law. And yet the
sovereign is precisely the one who maintains the possibility of
deciding on the two to the very degree that he renders them
indistinguishable from each other.67
This means that the sovereign exists in a paradoxical place with relation to
the juridical order; to the extent that sovereignty consists in the decision
on the exception, the sovereign cannot be simply internal to this order;
and yet, as the sovereign decision is that which inscribes an exteriority
within the juridical, neither is the sovereign simply external either. The
state of exception is thus the mechanism that captures all of life in the
realm of the law, foreclosing the possibility of a nonjuridical politics that
could free life from the sovereign ban. In contrast to those legal thinkers
whose interest in the exception is motivated by a desire to bolster the rule
of law in times of crisis, Agamben’s engagement with it flows from his desire
to conceptualize a life without relation to sovereign power and a politics

not exhausted in the juridical.
It was precisely to destroy such a possibility that the freikorps, acting
under the authority of Article 48, entered Munich on May 2, 1919, and
slaughtered six hundred people in two days, ending the early period of revo-
lutionary upheaval in Germany.68 The state of exception was the mechanism
that enabled such brutal state violence to be conceived as the protection of
the juridical order instead of reducing the state to one side in a civil war.
It sought to constrain the very possibility of a nonjuridical politics, and to
prop up, in Schmitt’s words, “the social structure of an individualistic social
order whose maintenance and safeguarding should be served by the organi-
zational regulations of the state.”69 Such an order, Schmitt made clear, was
one that protected the substantive values of “marriage, religion and private
property,” which he saw threatened by the value-neutrality that gave par-
ties of the radical left an “equal chance” to achieve state power.70 That the
revolutionary left was the key target of the state of exception is acknowl-
edged even by Rossiter in his strident defense of emergency powers: “It must
be frankly and unhappily admitted,” he remarks, “that the suppression of
revolutionary rightism was not blessed with such favorable issue.”71 While
Agamben portrays Schmitt’s account of the state of exception as an episode
in a textual battle, waged on paper against Walter Benjamin, the passionate
urgency of his thought—and indeed, of Benjamin’s—is derived from the real
political struggles of his time. Benjamin’s On the Critique of Violence, which
Agamben depicts as the opening shot in this battle, was published in 1921,
only two years after the crushing of the Spartakus uprising, three years after
the proclamation of the Weimar Republic and four years after the Russian
Revolution. The stakes of Schmitt’s account of the exception were deadly
serious: through the temporary and brutal suspension of the legal order, he
sought to forestall a politics that threatened “marriage, religion and private
property”—a politics that aimed to realize what Agamben, glossing Benja-
min, terms a “state of the world in which the world appears as a good that
absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.”72
Presupposition and the Problem of Application
In State of Exception, Agamben orients his theorization of the exception

in another direction, identifying a “structural analogy between language
and law,” both of which, he suggests, are founded on the suspension of
concrete praxis and the isolation of a body of norms capable of existing
independently of any concrete act of application, or enunciation.73 In the
case of law, Agamben’s central point—which disrupts every attempt to

conceptualize law in opposition to a nonjuridical outside—is that life or
anomie is the excluded presupposition of law. While law presupposes the
juridical reference, this reference must be created through an articulation
that is simultaneously a discontinuity between law and life. There can be no
absolute demarcation between law and a nonjuridical outside as life itself is
always presupposed as a constitutive outside, which must be captured within
law in the form of the state of exception. This life, in Agamben’s view, is
first of all bare life, the life of the homo sacer, included via the mechanism
of its exclusion. In more general terms, although Agamben sees the excep-
tion as an individual case that is excluded from the rule, “what properly
characterizes an exception is that what is excluded in it is not, for this
reason, simply without relation to the rule. The rule applies to the exception
in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it.”74 The exception is thus a limit
relation between law and anomie. It is not the state of nature as outside to
law; it is both a presupposition of law and a product of its suspension. This
signals to the intimate and irrevocable connection Agamben establishes
between law and the state of exception. In the exception we see the reap-
pearance of what was assumed to lie outside—anomie—on the inside, thus
his assertion, “there is nothing outside the law.”75 The state of exception,
he suggests, is the mechanism through which the juridical order captures
life, nullifying the possibility of a nonjuridical politics.
Nonetheless, Agamben can conceptualize such a nonjuridical politics
because, in his view, the incorporation of life into the juridical order is
always the result of an operation, which can potentially be brought to
a halt. The problem of the sovereign decision on the exception, is the
problem of law’s reference to life, of how an abstract body of rules can
apply to a concrete segment of reality. Just as there is no internal nexus
between law and life, there is no logical passage from norm to reality. The
application of a rule is not a logical question but a practical one, as law
can only apply to life through an act of application, which is not itself
contained within the law. The state of exception reveals the separation
of norm and application as, in the exception, the norm is suspended to
enable its application. This suturing of life to law occurs through the cap-
ture of anomie in the juridical order, which nullifies anomie by inscribing
it within law. Not a pure life without relation to law, but not yet law,
the state of exception is the mechanism of articulation that creates the
conditions to which law could apply. From a technical perspective, Agam-
ben writes, the specific contribution of the state of exception is . . . the
separation of the ‘force of law’ from the law.”76 What this separation
produces is not simply an absence of law, which can be opposed to law,
but “ ‘a state of the law’ in which, on the one hand, the norm is in force
but is not applied (it has no ‘force’ [forza] and, on the other, acts that do
not have the value [valore] of law acquire its force.”77 This force of law
without law, which Agamben names “force of law,” is the pure potentiality
of law, separated from any content and severed from law’s application, to
make this application possible. “Force of law,” in which law itself is under
erasure, is not simply an absence of law; it is the pure form of law, the
transcendence of form itself. This pure form of law, in which law remains
in force without being applied, is a law that has become indistinct from
life, but that maintains itself despite its lack of content. “Force of law,”
writes Agamben, “in which potentiality and act are radically separated,
is certainly something like a mystical element, or rather a fictio, in which
law seeks to annexe anomie itself.”78
In drawing attention to law’s reliance on the nonlegal production of
social order, Agamben undertakes a fundamental reversal of liberal political
theory. It is not identity or belonging but exclusion, not the rule of law but
the state of exception that founds sovereign power and constitutes a politi-
cal community. The relation of abandonment and not the social contract
appears here as the originary political relation. Rather than assuming a
simple articulation between a legal norm and a determinate fact, Agamben
demonstrates that law’s application is predicated on its creation of its own
sphere of reference, and its ability to internalize its outside through a deci-
sion that is not contained in the law. It is from this ability to maintain a
relation with its outside that law derives its particular force. “Law is made
of nothing,” he argues with reference to Savigny, “but what it manages
to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio: it
nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. In this
sense, law truly ‘has no existence in itself, but rather has its being in the
very life of men.’ ”79 Here his analysis of the presuppositional structure of
law coincides with his analysis of bare life, and law and ontology become
indistinct: law’s exterior is nothing but human life, and the ban is the
original structure in which law refers to life. The sovereign decision on
the exception is not a simple juridical figure, but the mechanism by which
law creates the terrain to which it could apply, subsuming all of life in the
sphere of the law, and juridicizing all politics.
This account of law and sovereignty, Agamben suggests, finds its
model in language. Just as there is no logical passage from law to applica-
tion, neither is there a logical passage between language and world. Like
law, language secures its reference to the world through the possibility of
its own suspension, through its ability to subsist as an abstract body of
rules independently of any specific act of discourse. It is this split between
langue and parole, in Saussure’s terminology, which, Agamben suggests,

“exclusively and fundamentally characterizes human language.”80 Roman
Jakobson has suggested “langue and parole stand in opposition to each other
as potential values and realized values.”81 If parole is the functioning of
langue, however, there is nonetheless nothing contained in langue itself
that would ensure its actualization. What is at stake for language, just as
for law, is thus the “passage from a generic proposition endowed with a
merely virtual reference, to a concrete reference to a segment of reality.”82
In the case of language, this passage occurs through the linguistic category
of deixis, and through those indicators of the utterance (Benveniste) or
shifters (Jakobson) that enable language to indicate its own taking place.83
What is indicated by the shifters—which include the pronouns, and those
demonstratives (this, here, now, etc.) that always refer to a unique instant
of discourse—is the fundamental presupposition of language: the taking
place of language, that sayability, which, in Agamben’s work, constitutes
the ontological dimension. Shifters are empty signs, which attain meaning
only when they are consubstantial with an act of discourse. At the limit
of language, shifters indicate “pure being in itself, before and beyond any
qualitative determination.”84
This nature of the shifters can best be understood through the personal
pronoun I. “To what does I then refer?” asks Benveniste. “To something
very singular which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of linguistic
discourse in which it is uttered and it designates its speaker. . . . The reality
which it invokes is the reality of discourse.”85 The shifters are immanent to
an act of discourse, from which they cannot be separated; indeed, they can-
not exist in a suspended form. Indicators, writes Benveniste, “cannot exist as
potentialities; they exist only insofar as they are actualized in the instance of
discourse.”86 Through the shifters, which anchor language in a determinate
event of discourse and indicate the taking place of language, langue is trans-
lated into parole, potentiality is actualized. This articulation enabled by the
shifters, however, presupposes sayability, capturing it in language. Sayability
remains ineffable—it is what the machine cannot say—as it cannot be signi-
fied but only indicated. Like law, language, in Agamben’s view, conceals its
absence of foundation by presupposing its reference to the world.
We should by now be in a position to identify the common structural
features of Agamben’s accounts of life, law, and language. In each case,
he: (1) begins with the problem of reference, of how an abstract body of
rules, whether langue or law, can refer to life; (2) traces this problem to
a separation, in which the immanence of praxis has been separated from
itself:—“not only language and law but all social institutions have been
formed through a process of desemanticization and suspension of concrete
practice in its immediate reference to the real”87;—(3) identifies a figure—

the state of exception, homo sacer, Voice—in which an articulation of these
separated terms occurs; (4) demonstrates that this articulation in fact relies
on its own presupposition; (5) reveals that the possibility of reference is
predicated on the creation of a zone of indistinction, in which the separated
terms constitute each other precisely to the extent that they blur into
each other and become indistinguishable. This ban structure, Agamben
suggests, has been illuminated by a number of thinkers, among them Nancy
and Schmitt. In what follows, I suggest that in pursuing this structure,
Agamben’s ultimate goal is not only to illuminate but also to disrupt the
presuppositional mechanism that inscribes life within the realm of the law.
The consequence of conceptualizing life as the excluded presupposition of
the law is that there can be no return to a life (or a politics) prior to its
juridical “contamination.” Rather, the possibility of a life without relation
to law begins only after the exhaustion of the presuppositional structure
(the state of exception) that inscribes life within the law.
The State of “Nature”
Agamben’s account of the state of exception functions as a challenge to

the liberal tradition, to its conception of sovereignty, and to the idea of
a rule of law. To examine the way liberalism has understood the relation
between law and its outside, I now turn to the Hobbesian state of nature,
both because it is Hobbes whom Agamben confronts most directly, and
because the Hobbesian argument that life in the state of nature is “nasty,
brutish and short”88 represents the most powerful and evocative attempt in
the history of liberal thought to derive sovereign authority from the fear of
a lawless state.89 In articulating “The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Inter-
vention,” Fernando R. Tesón argues that such intervention is justified in
cases of tyranny, and in conditions of anarchy, when states are faced with
“the Hobbesian state of nature (war of all against all) caused by the col-
lapse of social order.”90 Ignatieff makes a similar point, arguing, in language
that directly evokes Hobbes, that military intervention becomes necessary
where order has disintegrated and “people have been delivered up to a
war of all against all.”91 Given the importance of the state of the state of
nature mythologeme in the foreclosure of a nonjuridical politics, Agamben’s
attempt to articulate such a politics requires him to confront it directly.
His critique of state of nature theory is, in fact, the radical reversal
of this theory’s rationale. The paradox of sovereignty, he argues, is that
the sovereign must be simultaneously inside and outside the legal order.
This means that the political order does not save us from the misery of
the state of nature, but presupposes it as its own permanent condition of
possibility. “Far from being a pre-juridical condition that is indifferent to
the law of the city,” he argues:
[T]he Hobbesian state of nature is the exception and the threshold

that constitutes and dwells within it. It is not so much a war of
all against all as, more precisely, a condition in which everyone
is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else.92
Peter Fitzpatrick has noted that this is “not an assessment Hobbes would
agree with,” and, given the latter’s concern to mark a rigid break between
the state of nature and the sphere of sovereignty, we can only assume this
would be the case. Agamben’s reading of the state of nature, however, is
designed to disrupt the relation of nature and (sovereign) politics Hobbes
establishes, in order to bring this politics into question.93 He is seeking to
demonstrate that the state of nature, which is depicted as a natural state
that precedes the law—or as that which is achieved when society is con-
sidered tanquaum dissolute, as if it were dissolved—is in fact always held in
a relation of inclusive-exclusion to the juridical order.94
When framed in such a way, the state of nature appears as indistin-
guishable from the state of exception. Indeed Agamben argues that these
“are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what
was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a
Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception).”95 In the
Hobbesian state of nature, Agamben identifies the structure of the sovereign
ban: it is man’s killability, the fact that, in Hobbes’s words, “as to the strength
of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either
by secret machination, or by confederacy with others,” that drives men to
alienate certain of the rights that Hobbes saw as naturally given, and founds
the sovereign power and the law.96 Thus, the motive for this renunciation
of one’s rights is simply the preservation of one’s life, and politics is purely
a means to the protection of natural life. Like the homo sacer, who could
be killed with impunity by anyone, in the Hobbesian metaphor of the
sovereign as a Leviathan, “the absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies
to be killed forms the new political body of the West.”97 This conception
of politics as structured around a fear stemming from the vulnerability of
natural life, as Wendy Brown has convincingly demonstrated, is still domi-
nant today, and its key consequence is to call in the state and the law as
necessary protectors of “injured subjects.”98 The conception of vulnerability
that underlies such a demand for protection, Brown suggests, is not with-
out its costs as the “heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a

measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector’s rules.”99
In structuring politics around the killability of natural life, and founding
sovereign authority in a claim to offer protection from harm, liberalism
elevates the “beautiful day of life” to the chief end of politics and eschews
the possibility that there could be something worth risking one’s life for,
and so reduces this life to the simple fact of survival.
If such a (sovereign) politics is still with us today, this is, in part,
because state of nature theory posits that the formation of a sovereign politi-
cal body does not eradicate the grounds for the fear that first prompted its
formation. However bad the sovereign order may be, the state of nature
is always there, threatening us with “the worst.” Agamben’s rereading of
the state of nature is therefore aimed at affirming the possibility of an
escape from a politics founded on the vulnerability of natural life. In his
view, the fact that every “commonwealth” is always threatened with failure
means only that the foundation is never achieved definitively. Rather it
is always operative within the state in the form of the sovereign decision
on the exception, which appears as the unvanquishable presupposition of
sovereignty. The juridical order, he argues, is incapable of purifying itself
of the violence of the state of nature, as this state is not one of prejuridi-
cal violence that is left behind on the passage to law. Rather, the juridical
order has force only to the extent that it maintains itself in relation to this
anomic violence. The “state from which Hobbes’s sovereign rescues us,” as
Rasch notes, “is the state into which Agamben’s sovereign plunges us.”100
The seeming exteriority of the state of nature and the lawless efforts of
each man to preserve his own life are, in Agamben’s view, the inner core
of the sovereign political realm.
A note from Hobbes can help to illuminate Agamben’s position: in
Leviathan he acknowledges that some will argue that there never was a
state of nature as he describes it, and remarks that he, too, believes “it was
never generally so, over all the world.”101 And yet, he gives two examples
that he believes bolster his theory: the first, which demonstrates the role
of Hobbesian state of nature theory in justifying colonialism by equating
lawlessness with inhumanity, is that “savage people in many places of Amer-
ica . . . live at this day in this brutish manner.”102 In the second, which
relates directly to Agamben’s theory of the exception, Hobbes’s asserts: “it
may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were
no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have
formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a
civill Warre.”103 Taken together, these two points dissolve the myth of a
natural state preceding law, revealing the state of nature as an a bstraction
from two real, nonsovereign, political states: the social organizations of

those living in as-yet uncolonized parts of the globe; and situations of
political conflict, in which the sovereign state loses its monopolization of
violence. While the former reveals the deeply racialized assumptions at the
heart of the justificatory discourse of the liberal state, the latter reveals that
the state of nature is not a truly natural state prior to law, but the figure
the legal order assumes when it is no longer capable of governing social
tensions through law—that is, precisely the anomic space Schmitt seeks to
anchor to the juridical order through the state of exception. If we take
both these examples as evidence of the “actually existing” possibility of a
life beyond sovereignty, we see that the state of nature, like the state of
exception, is a mythical figure that seeks to prevent any possibility of such
a life, and foreclose any nonjuridical politics.
In this radical repositioning of the state of nature, we should be able to
recognize the same structural reversal that characterizes Agamben’s critique
of the Aristotelian distinction of zoē and bios. In both cases, he rejects the
idea of a natural state (zoē/state of nature), which lies outside, or prior to,
the political realm. Rather, Western politics relies on the creation of a
zone of indistinction between nature and politics, life and law, (bare life/
the state of exception) in order to secure an articulation between the two
separated terms. What is portrayed as natural is thus always the product of
a separation—the product of the sovereign ban. In Hobbes’s view, humans
were naturally dangerous, and, when left to their natural state, would create
a life beset by violence and fear. Hobbes, however, believed that he had
solved the problem of human fallibility by limiting this fallibility within
a sovereign political sphere, which would enable peaceful coexistence,
industry and progress.104 This means that Hobbes, like Aristotle, sought
to demarcate man’s natural life (the state of nature) from his political life
(the sovereign order.) His message is clear: “men have no pleasure (but on
the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no
common power able to over-awe them all.”105 Hobbes paints an undeni-
ably terrifying picture of the life of men in such a state: there would be
no industry, no culture, no navigation, no “knowledge of the face of the
Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is
worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death.”106 The state of
nature is a state in which men exist like beasts, and are thus capable of
killing but not of politics. For the theorist of absolutism, as for many of
Agamben’s critics, there can literally be no politics without sovereignty.107
For the latter, in contrast, it is the dominance of a juridical framework,
preoccupied by questions of security and rights, that has led to the very
obliteration of politics.
Like Hobbes, Schmitt was convinced that the state was the sole politi-
cal entity. As George Schwab suggests, Schmitt shared Hobbes’s view that
humans were dangerous and their primary goal is the physical security that
is provided by a strong state. Schmitt’s political theory, he writes, “can be
summarized in the following propositions”:
By virtue of its possession of a monopoly on politics, the state

is the only entity able to distinguish friend from enemy and
thereby demand of its citizens the readiness to die. The claim
on the physical life of its constituents distinguishes the state
from, and elevates it above, all other organizations and asso-
ciations. To maintain order, peace, and stability, the legally
constituted sovereign authority is supported by an armed force
and a bureaucracy operating according to rules established by
legally constituted authorities.108
Schwab is one of the most apologetic of Schmitt’s commentators, and more

concerned than most to portray him as “[c]ommitted to preserving and
strengthening the Weimar state.”109 Yet, this privileging of the state as the
political entity, and the belief that its key task is physical security, would
be acceptable to many liberal thinkers. Agamben’s view is directly counter-
posed to this: the conflation of the political and sovereignty is a key target
of his piercing analysis of the exception, which aims to clear a space for a
politics whose terms are not those of the state.
The exception, for Agamben, is not an innocuous juridical provision
but the mechanism through which the legal order wards off the possibility
of a nonjuridical politics, eclipsing politics itself. The law cannot survive, he
tells us, without the ability to incorporate anomie through the mechanism of
the state of exception. Agamben, like Schmitt, therefore fully believes that
the legal order presupposes the ability to declare an exception. It is only
through its ability to survive its own absence that law is able to refer to life.
With no logical passage between norm and application, law’s reference is
predicated on the possibility of a decision to suspend the legal order in its
entirety. His critique of the state of exception entails a radical rethinking
of the relation of law and violence. Law, in his view, does not come to save
us from the brutal violence of the state of nature. Rather, it is founded on
the killability of its subjects, and presupposes the ever-repeatable possibility
of this violence. He thus rejects what he sees as the nihilism of any posi-
tion that condemns us to tolerating the periodic exercise of unmediated
sovereign violence as a condition of living in the security of a “political
realm.” More importantly, he argues that the ability of the sovereign to
fulfill this role has in fact broken down, as the exception has become a
permanent paradigm of government. The attempt to develop a “completely
new politics” must therefore begin by freeing politics from every relation to
sovereign power, and from its subsumption to law.110 If, for Agamben, all
politics has been contaminated by law, and is thus, strictly speaking, not
politics at all, what opportunities for praxis do exist in the present? And
do we concede too much if we are willing accept such a verdict?
Challenging the Normalization of the Exception?
In 1940, Walter Benjamin remarked, in an implicit critique of Schmitt,

“the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in
which we live is not the exception but the rule.”111 If we develop a theory
of history in keeping with such an insight, he wrote, “we will clearly see that
it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.”112 What Benjamin
meant by a “real state of emergency” has been the subject of enormous
debate between scholars who understand it as an invocation to social revo-
lution, an evocation of the possibility of a messianic rupture, or a depiction
of a classless society.113 In Agamben’s view, Benjamin’s thesis unveils the
katechon, unmasking the attempt of state power to annex anomie through
the state of exception and revealing a zone of “civil war and revolutionary
violence, that is, a human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to
law.”114 Like Benjamin, Agamben is convinced that the state of exception
is the norm. While the former, who wrote in a period of revolutionary
political struggles, depicts this permanence of the exception as an insight
transmitted by “the oppressed,” the latter frames the transformation of the
exception into the rule as a historical transformation. Agamben’s central
claim in State of Exception was that the exception has become the norm,
and is now nothing less than a permanent paradigm of government.
In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben suggests that the temporality
of the normalized state of exception is analogous to that which followed
the Church’s abandonment of eschatology and providential accommodation
with the permanence of the world. The derivation of this exceptional gov-
ernment from providence is significant insomuch as it traces the former to
a doctrine premised on the abandonment of eschatology and the renuncia-
tion of immediate expectations of redemption. “The exclusion of concrete
eschatology,” he suggests, “transforms historical time into a suspended time,
in which every dialectic is abolished the Great Inquisitor watches over so
that the parousia is not produced in history.”115 This permanently suspended
time provides the model for the normalization of the state of exception,
which seeks to ward off that real state of emergency in which Benjamin
saw the possibility of revolutionary redemption.
It is in this sense that Agamben notes—referring to Benjamin’s
account of sovereign indecision in his Trauerspiel—that when the excep-
tion becomes the norm, the paradigm of the state of exception ceases to
be the miracle, as it had been for Schmitt, and becomes the catastrophe.116
This catastrophe appears as an eschatology without content; a beyond that
knows no redemption and is immanent to this world. “It is this ‘white
eschatology’—which does not lead the earth to a redeemed hearafter, but
consigns it to an absolutely empty sky,” Agamben writes, “that configures
the baroque state of exception as catastrophe.”117 This empty eschatology
shatters the transcendence of the Schmittian sovereign, and subjects both
the sphere of creatures and the juridical order to a single catastrophe. And
yet, it is also in this wrecking of the Schmittian schema that Agamben
sees the possibility of redemption. “Of course,” he comments in State of
Exception, after outlining a string of deviations from the normal legal order,
“the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its
spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the
primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded
in it.”118 This controversial position calls into question political responses
to emergency regimes that seek to reassert the distinction between law
and anomic violence. Just as he argued that there was no return from the
camps to classical politics, from “the real state of exception in which we
live, it is not possible to return to the state of law [stato diritto], for at issue
now are the very concepts of ‘state’ and ‘law.’ ”119 Although this appears a
deeply pessimistic account of our time, it is precisely in the normalization
of the state of exception that he sees the possibility of retrieving politics
from its juridical capture.
This raises questions about the forms of political response to contem-
porary state power that are foreclosed by such an account, as well as about
the political possibilities Agamben believes are enabled by what he sees
as the collapse of the state of law. Does the view that the normalization
of the state of exception is the condition of possibility of a “truly political
action” justify the dismissal of attempts to limit exceptional power through
legal means?120 While the contemporary destabilization of the rule of law
offers possibilities for rethinking politics outside of a juridical frame, there
is no reason to be particularly optimistic about the increasingly arbitrary
nature of state power. Political thought must take seriously the dangers with
which the normalization of the exception threatens us. Nonetheless, the
reality of such dangers should not prevent us from attempting to formulate
nonjuridical alternatives in favor of an embrace of a katechonic politics
that offers nothing more than the protection of naked life. Bereft of its
foundation in legal norms, politics is cast into an abyss. Although such a
situation is both frightening and destabilizing, it also holds the possibility
of reconceptualizing a politics without guarantees.
The normalization of the state of exception, according to this account,
would pave the way for a form of human action without relation to law.
When the state of exception becomes the rule, Agamben writes, “it not
only appears increasingly as a technique of government rather than an
exceptional measure, but it also lets its own nature as the constitutive
paradigm of the juridical order come to light.”121 As long as the state of
exception appears as a temporary crisis mechanism, he argues, the extent
to which the juridical order relies on its own suspension is shrouded; when
it is normalized, the true nature of the juridical order comes to light, the
political sphere appears as a “state of nature” in which sovereign power
confronts bare life without mediation, and the Messiah and the Antichrist
clash without mediation. As the normalization of the state of exception
begins to heal the separation reflected in law’s transcendence over life, the
distance between the normalization of the exception and a life freed, the
sovereign ban is thus far smaller, in his view, than that between a function-
ing legal order and a nonjuridical politics.
The “problem that the new politics is facing,” Agamben writes in
Means Without Ends, “is precisely this: is it possible to have a political com-
munity that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of worldly life.”122
As an initial observation, we can see immediately the gulf that separates
such a politics from the Hobbesian structuring of political life around fear of
the state of nature, and the vulnerability of natural life. Agamben’s political
life would not be a vulnerable, fearful life, but what he terms a happy life,
a conception that bears a debt both to Aristotle’s belief that happiness is
the ultimate good of politics, to Spinoza’s ethics and to the Benjaminian
assertion that the order of the profane should be erected on the idea of
happiness but that nonetheless remains largely unformulated, its definition
remaining “one of the essential tasks of the coming thought.”123 Despite
the underdeveloped nature of Agamben’s happy life, and his “completely
new politics,” it is clear that these offer a radical break with the sovereign
politics articulated by Hobbes and Schmitt. The happy life is not the naked
life that is the presupposition of the sovereign state, nor the biological life
of biopolitics, that, as we saw in the previous chapter, he views simply
as a secularization of sacred life. “This ‘happy life’ should be, rather, an
absolutely profane ‘sufficient life’ that has reached the perfection of its own
power and of its own communicability—a life over which sovereignty and
right no longer have any hold.”124
This attempt to formulate a new conception of politics is a welcome

one in a context in which political praxis increasingly borrows its categories
from the law. And yet, Agamben is too willing to see the normalization
of the state of exception as heralding a crisis for sovereign power, and too
eager to see the saving power amid the greatest danger. The increasing
departure of power from norms offers opportunities for rethinking political
praxis, but there is no reason to assume that it provides a more condu-
cive terrain for conceptualizing a politics that asks for more than security.
Further, we cannot assume that the shift toward exceptional power in the
context of the war on terror is not reversible, and neither can we neglect
the possibility that state power will take an increasingly arbitrary and vio-
lent form in the future. Does this mean that Agamben’s attempt to develop
a nonjuridical politics is too dangerous, and that only the revival of the
rule of law can forestall the horrors that may follow the normalization of
the exception? Must we sacrifice a critique of law to an attempt to bolster
it in the face of the normalization of the exception? Do the two poles
marked out by a liberal legal system and a murderous fascist state represent
the sole political possibilities available to thought today? This seems to be
the view of those like Sharpe, who suggests that Agamben’s antinomian
“ ‘new politics’ . . . recalls nothing more in our present age’s sad horizon
of experience than the infamous torture documents issues from the Bush
administration’s legal offices after 9/11.”125 In such a view, law or torture
seem to be the two options available today, and thus, every critique of law,
and especially every attempt to think a politics outside law, undermines
the struggle against arbitrary state power.
Yet, to structure politics around the demand that the state protect
us from violence is to sacrifice the possibility that life could be something
other than survival. Agamben’s thought disrupts the structuring of our polit-
ical imaginations around lesser evils, fear, and the vulnerability of natural
life, which anchors this imagination to the state. By highlighting the rela-
tion that binds the law to the exception, he shows us that the attempt to
think a politics outside the terrain of sovereignty cannot simply consist in
advocating the return of the law, as the law itself ultimately presupposes the
exception in order to secure its relation to life. Nonetheless, there are real
dangers consequent to the normalization of the state of exception, and there
may be times that we wish to fight precisely for the reinstitution of rights
and legal protections. To do so does not mean to endorse the subsumption
of politics to law. Rather, it reflects an understanding of these rights as the
sedimentation of previous social struggles, and their defense as the continu-
ation of such struggles. Despite his concern to pave the way for political
action, Agamben paints a picture of our time as bereft of politics, which
he believes has been contaminated by law. In contrast, if we are not to

rely on the ability of the normalization of the state of exception to bring
into being a new, nonjuridical politics, we must remain attentive to the
possibilities for political contestation in the present. In the next chapter,
I turn to examine a space in which biopolitics and the state of exception
intersect in an attempt to create a human life without any capacity for
politics: Auschwitz.
Chapter 3
If This Is a Man
Life after Auschwitz
No one wants to see the Muselmann.

—Aldo Carpi in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben recounts the story of Aldo Carpi, a

professor of painting who survived the Nazi Lager because the SS became
aware of his artistic talents and commissioned paintings from him. Amid
the horror of the camp, Carpi painted family portraits of his captors from
photographs, Italian landscapes, and Venetian nudes. The ability to repro-
duce the activities and the landscapes of his former life enabled Carpi to
survive the Lager. His current life, however, was of no interest to those who
held the power to end it at any moment. “No one wants camp scenes and
figures,” Carpi wrote in his diary, “no one wants to see the Muselmann.”1
The SS may have had no desire for the aesthetic contemplation of the
Muselmänner, but they were surrounded by these prisoners who had often
become completely disconnected from relational and linguistic life. Primo
Levi describes the Muselmänner as “the weak, the inept, those doomed to
selection” (that is, those doomed to be chosen for the gas chambers), and
depicts them as “drowned” figures occupying a zone that hesitates between
life and death.2 For Agamben, in contrast, the Muselmann is the limit figure
of the human, a zone of complete indistinction between “vegetative exis-
tence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics” where the
border that purports to separate the human from the inhuman breaks down.3
It is hardly surprising that the SS men whose daily lives were devoted
to reducing people to such a condition had no desire to hang their images on
walls. Yet, Agamben suggests that the “impossibility of gazing on the Musel-
mann” is not restricted to those who brought such a being into existence.
73
Citing Elias Cannetti, he writes that while a pile of dead bodies is an

“ancient spectacle” that has often provided satisfaction to those in power,
the Muselmänner is “an absolutely new phenomenon” that is simply unbear-
able to look upon.4 There are many reasons why we may wish not to gaze
on the figures produced by such an “experiment,” and why, in attempting
to understand the Nazi camps, we may instead wish to follow Jean Améry
who suggests that, as “hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude
him from our considerations.”5 Améry’s point is not that we should avert our
eyes from the horror of the camps, of which he was only too well aware, but
that one who has been reduced to the condition of a “staggering corpse” has
been absolutely dehumanized, and so can no longer tell us anything about
his own topic of concern—the power of the human intellect.6
In Agamben’s view, in contrast, the stakes in the attempt to compre-
hend this realm at the border of the human are high: “we will not under-
stand Auschwitz,” he writes, “if we do not first understand who or what the
Muselmann is.”7 The Muselmann is thus one of those exemplary, or “para-
digmatic” figures (“example” in Greek is para-deigma: “that which is shown
alongside”),8 by way of whose isolation Agamben aims to make disparate
historical phenomena intelligible. The question of how we are to understand
Auschwitz is not merely of historiographical interest but has political and
ethical consequences, as it concerns not only the interpretation of the past
but the way in which this past continues to structure the present. The trauma
of World War II, as he understands it, is not simply an event that occurred
in the past, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub suggest. Rather it must be
understood as a “history which is essentially not over,” and which continues
to reverberate and evolve in the present.9 Any attempt to understand our
time must therefore remain attentive to the ways in which it is marked by
Auschwitz, and to the fact that “the past,” to borrow Moishe Postone’s phrase,
“does not simply pass,” but persists, structuring the horizon of possibility in
which we think and act today.10
Such an understanding of Auschwitz raises questions about the his-
torical narrative in which it is positioned. Among them, the following are
of particular importance: What is the specificity (by which I do not mean
the sacralized uniqueness) of Auschwitz? What possibilities did it bring into
the world that may still be with us? How does it condition possibilities for
thought and for action? How does it relate to broader historical patterns?11
There is much at stake in these questions, and in the historical narrative
in which Auschwitz is placed; vastly different political implications derive,
for instance, from understanding the Nazi genocide in terms of a German
Sonderweg (special path) that deviates from the historical trajectory of the
West, or as essentially continuous with this trajectory—as the dark side of
IF THIS IS A MAN / 75
a “dialectic of enlightenment,” for instance.12 Any attempt to rethink the

significance of Auschwitz for today must tread between two poles, neither
treating it as an aberrant event without significance for contemporary poli-
tics, nor subsuming the entirety of our political terrain into an undifferenti-
ated concentration camp universe. The task for thinking is to attempt to
answer what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi has posed as “the most urgent
question”: “How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will
not return . . . ? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of
us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will
be nullified?”13
Answering this question requires that we resist the impulse to flatten
all of our world into an undifferentiated camp universe, and that we retain
the ability to make political distinctions, to identify particular threats, and
to act politically in the present. Foucault provides a pertinent caution here:
when asked about the relation between his own critique of internment
and the Soviet Gulag, he warns against the “universalizing dissolution of
the problem into the ‘denunciation’ of every possible form of internment,”
and stresses the need to pose the problem of the Gulag in its specificity.14
It is necessary, he stresses, to avoid the view that “[e]veryone has their
own Gulag, the Gulag is here at our door, in our cities, our hospitals, our
prisons, it’s here in our heads.”15 Posing the question of Auschwitz in its
specificity means avoiding a thought that simply subsumes a whole range
of phenomena into an undifferentiated concentration camp world.
Moishe Postone has suggested that we must examine “the possible
relation of the Holocaust and its aftermath to overarching historical pat-
terns of the twentieth century.”16 In Agamben’s case, the overarching his-
torical patterns through which he seeks to understand Auschwitz stretch
back far beyond the beginning of the last century to the Greek foundation
of the politics of the West. Given the reach of this narrative, it is all the
more crucial to examine the way he situates the Auschwitz in relation to
his broader understanding of the history of the West. Conceptually, his
designation of the Muselmann as a paradigmatic figure must be understood
in terms of the logic of biopolitics, as exemplifying the collapse of the
border between life and politics. This extreme case of human degradation,
he suggests, reveals to us another paradigm, alongside that of extermina-
tion, through which we are used to comprehending the camps: before being
a death camp, Auschwitz was the space of “an experiment that remains
unthought today,” in which the human was transformed into the inhuman
and the Jew into the Muselmann.17 At the core of the camp, he thus identi-
fies a process that decomposes the very idea of humanity, producing lives
in which the human and the inhuman become indiscernible.
The figure of the Muselmann enables us to grasp the supreme danger

that Agamben sees in the biopolitical conception of politics that has domi-
nated the West since the Greeks. In treating the extreme case as a privi-
leged epistemological point, Agamben makes clear that the truth revealed
by Auschwitz is not an edifying one; “almost none of the ethical principles
our age believed it could recognize as valid have stood the decisive test,
that of Ethica More Auschwitz demonstrata,”18 he writes. Just as he argues
that Auschwitz renders existing ethical categories obsolete, it also informs
his unremittingly critical stance toward the entirety of existing politics.19
It is because he sees the production of the Muselmann as the culmination
of the occidental political tradition, and not an aberration from it, that
he believes the entirety of existing politics is discredited and a completely
new politics is desperately necessary. There is value in this identification
of continuities between aspects of this tradition and the Nazi Lager, which
highlights the way in which the figure of the Muselmann disrupts the sup-
posed universalism of many of the West’s political and ethical categories.
However, in what follows I suggest that Agamben’s attempt to rethink
politics beginning with a figure that has lost all capacity for linguistic and
relational existence risks erasing all possibility for intervening into the
present in ways that could enable a different future.
The Remnant Shall Be Saved
We have already encountered what, in an early work, Agamben referred to

as “the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the funda-
mental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time.”20 It is this
principle that allows him to see the appearance of the greatest danger as an
unveiling that reveals the truth of Western politics. If the production of the
Muselmann, in his view, reveals the true face of biopolitics, thereby allowing
the danger to appear as the danger, does it also herald a form of salvation?
We could certainly expect that faced with the Nazi Lager, any possibility
of sustaining a narrative of redemption would be abandoned. In the wake
of World War II, however, attempts to find redemptive significance in the
Shoah came in many forms, testifying both to the desire to make meaning
of catastrophe, and to the bitter contestations over who would successfully
monopolize this meaning in the service of worldly political goals. We have
already seen that the belief that catastrophe and redemption are intertwined
has a history within Judaism that stems back as far as the destruction of
the temple. Although this understanding of history has been characterized
as a flight from a hopeless historical reality,21 for some it was not a flight
from reality but historical reality itself that served to reinforce the belief
in a nexus of catastrophe and redemption. As Saul Friedlander notes, early
Israeli consciousness was framed in precisely these terms. “A catastrophe
like no other in the history of the Jewish people,” he writes, “led to a quint-
essential historical redemption, the birth of a sovereign Jewish state.”22 That
this “redemption” was, for the Palestinians, a catastrophe (Nakba), should
make us wary of the desire to treat catastrophe as the precursor to redemp-
tion. The diversity of redemptive responses to the Shoah—and we should
include the liberal humanist desire to “save the good name of humanity”
by stressing the “dignity” of the survivors among these23—testifies to the
ways in which this depiction of catastrophe as Janus-faced serves to deflect
criticism from those political positions, from humanitarianism to Zionism,
that depict themselves as redemptive responses that emerge “after evil.”24
Agamben strongly resists the sacrificial reading of “the Holocaust,”
which tends to inform many of these redemptive readings.25 Nonetheless,
there are signs that he, too, sees the growth of a saving power in the horrors
of Auschwitz—specifically, in the production of the Muselmann. It is only
if we grasp the proximity of danger and saving power in his thought that
we can begin to make sense of the introduction of the theme of salvation
toward the end of Remnants of Auschwitz, which begins with the observation
that the remnant of the book’s title is “a theologico-messianic concept”26
Similarly, without this context, the book’s two epigraphs, both of which are
biblical accounts of the relation of the remnant to salvation, seem simply
perplexing. The first is from Isaiah: “And then it shall come to pass in that
day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of
Jacob, shall no more stay upon him that smote them; but shall stay upon
the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth. The remnant shall be saved,
even the remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God” (Isaiah 10:20–22).27
Although here we see the problem of salvation, and the remnant itself,
projected into the future, in the second epigraph, from Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans, the remnant is depicted as something already existing: “Even so,
at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of
grace . . . and so all Israel shall be saved.”28 What form of salvation could
possibly be at stake here?
In what follows, I examine the logic of danger and salvation in Agam-
ben’s thought by reading his account of Auschwitz against the background
of Heidegger’s account of the “supreme danger” inaugurated by the epoch of
technology. I suggest that Agamben provides a biopolitical reconceptualiza-
tion of Heidegger’s history of Being, which shares the latter’s account of the
Janus-faced nature of the danger. In the production of the Muselmann, he
sees the ruin of every ethics and politics grounded on the transcendental
figure of the human and the condition of possibility of rethinking the ethos
of life. Against this identification of the saving power in the midst of the
danger, I suggest that the desire to see catastrophe as leading to redemption
inaugurates a horrific cycle—which leads from Heidegger’s account of the
dangers of modern technology to his celebration of National Socialism,
and from the Shoah to the Nakba. Far from leading to redemption, this
cycle appears as it does to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, as a single
catastrophe that piles wreckage upon wreckage.29
The Danger
The problem of how Agamben conceives the relation between historical

continuity and the singularity of Auschwitz can be clarified if we compare
this thought to Heidegger’s notorious remark that “[a]griculture is now a
motorized food industry, the same thing, in its essence, as the production of
corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing
as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as
the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”30 Given Heidegger’s much-discussed
silences on the question of Auschwitz and the Nazi genocide, and com-
ing from a thinker who was himself implicated in the Nazi regime, the
above-mentioned sentence, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has suggested, is
“scandalously inadequate.”31 Nonetheless, by situating Agamben’s account
of Auschwitz against the background of Heidegger’s perfunctory response
to it, it is possible to interrogate the extent to which his depiction of
the Muselmann rests on an understanding of Western metaphysics that is
indebted to Heidegger’s understanding of the present as a manifestation of
a danger traceable to “the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece.”32
While Agamben’s account of Auschwitz is in part a critical response to
Heidegger’s account of the danger inherent in the essence of technology,
it is nonetheless guided by an understanding of the Western tradition that
shares important features with Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics.
Heidegger traced what he called Ge-stell (or enframing)—in which the
world was reduced to a manipulable resource—to a form of calculative
thinking whose roots can be traced to the Greeks.33 Agamben similarly
conceptualizes the present danger as the manifestation of the biopolitical
logic bequeathed to Western thought by Aristotle, and the Muselmann as
the extreme consequence, as it were, of the split between a natural and a
political life I considered in chapter 1. It is because he treats Auschwitz
as the culmination of Western politics that, in Agamben’s view, an as-yet
unthought new politics is desperately necessary. By examining his debt to
Heidegger, we should be able to deepen our understanding of his concep-

tion of the danger, and of the “saving power.”34
There are two key points in Homo Sacer where Agamben gestures
to the proximity of his thought to Heidegger’s, in terms that are crucial
for helping to clarify the role the Muselmann plays in his account of the
present: in the first, he suggests that the juridical condition of a world in
which the exception has become the norm presents many analogies both
with Kojève’s understanding of the end of history (a key background to
Fukuyama’s more recent book of that name) and with what Heidegger
termed Seinsverlassenheit, that is the problem of our abandonment by Being,
which “constitutes nothing less than the problem of the unity and differ-
ence between Being and being in the age of the culmination of metaphys-
ics.”35 We have already seen that “abandonment” is the central category
through which Agamben understands sovereignty, which he recasts in
a biopolitical key as the inclusive-exclusion of bare life in the state of
exception. This informs his second crucial reference to Heidegger, on the
final page of Homo Sacer, where—having just outlined the breakdown of
the distinction of life and politics exemplified by a series of figures that
includes the Muselmann—he suggests that “attention will have to be given
to the analogies between politics and the epochal situation of metaphys-
ics,” and that today the position of zoē with relation to bios is exactly
comparable to the way essence, in the Heideggarian definition of Dasein,
lies in existence.36
Robert Sinnerbrink has suggested that Agamben “amplifies” Hei-
degger’s agriculture comment, in that he “too emphasizes the metaphysi-
cal sameness uniting the Nazi concentration camp with the asylum seeker
detention centre, the Auschwitz survivor with the overcomatose patient.”37
While Agamben’s understanding of Auschwitz cannot be understood in
isolation from his understanding of the originary status of biopolitics, unlike
Heidegger he does not see it as simply one indifferent manifestation of the
nihilistic essence of the West. Rather, Auschwitz appears in his work as a
singular event that reveals the true nature of Western politics. Paradoxi-
cally, he therefore shares with the contemporary humanitarian politics of
suffering and the interventionist politics of human rights, which he rejects,
the view that all politics must be framed as a response to the horrors of
Nazism. “Interventionism can be summed up quite simply,” its greatest
proponent Bernard Kouchner writes, “Auschwitz never again, Pol Pot never
again, Kosovo and Rwanda atrocities never more.”38 By examining Agam-
ben’s depiction of Auschwitz, it is possible to sharpen our account of his
conceptualization of the Western political tradition, and his orientation to
this humanitarian closure of politics.
Heidegger made his infamous remarks in the context of a 1949 lec-

ture, “Enframing” (Das Gestell), which formed the basis for his published
essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”39 Although the reference
to the gas chambers was excised from the final essay, the central theme of
the latter is the “essence of technology,” which he identifies as a form of
revealing of Being that treats nature as “standing reserve”—that is, as raw
material to be ordered, manipulated and exploited.40 In place of the anal-
ogy between agriculture and the extermination camps, the published essay
places the mechanization of agriculture alongside the way that air “is now
set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium”—
that is alongside the process by which nature is ordered technologically and
placed at our demand.41 Technology, in Heidegger’s view, is, as we shall see,
janus-faced, containing both great danger and the possibility of a “saving
power.”42 Here, I focus on the “supreme danger,” which he identifies in
the dominance of the form of revealing he terms “enframing” (Ge-stell).43
This danger manifests in two ways: first, through the will to technological
mastery of the world, man risks “a precipitous fall” that would lead him to
take himself as standing reserve.44 Second, when the supreme danger comes
to pass, Heidegger suggests that man will be denied a more original reveal-
ing, and thus will lose access to truth as Being shuts itself off in oblivion.45
By reflecting on this context, we can ascertain that Heidegger under-
stood the Nazi gas chambers as a manifestation of the danger inherent in
the essence of technology. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, if Heidegger’s remark
on the gas chambers is scandalously inadequate this is not because of the
relation it establishes between mass extermination and technology. “From
that point of view,” he writes, “it is indeed absolutely correct.”46 Its scandal
and its inadequacy lie, rather, in the depiction of Auschwitz as simply one
of a number of consequences of the essence of technology. What Heidegger
was unable to think, Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, is that in the “Auschwitz
apocalypse, it was nothing less than the West in its essence that revealed
itself—and that continues ever since to reveal itself.”47 A remark of Hei-
degger’s from his essay “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’ ” is pertinent
here: in that text—which was based on his Nietzsche lectures between 1936
and 1940, but which was delivered in 1943 as the “Final Solution” was
taking place—he describes the “last aberration” in combating nihilism as
the tendency to treat what are merely consequences as the causes of nihil-
ism.48 What Heidegger could not understand, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, is
that Auschwitz was not a consequence but an event, or a “caesura,” which,
occurring within history, nonetheless interrupts that history, either by open-
ing up another history, or by closing off the very possibility of history itself.49
Rather than simply a continuation of Heidegger’s position, which seems to
implicitly conceptualize Auschwitz as a consequence of nihilism, Agamben

sees it—in terms that are closer to Lacoue-Labarthe’s—as an event that
signals the end of biopolitics. Here, “end” should be understood neither
as a telos, nor as an indication that we have passed beyond biopolitics. It
should be thought, as Joan Stambaugh writes of “the end of metaphysics”
in Heidegger, as the most extreme possibility of biopolitics, which con-
tinues to define our time, and which may “ ‘last’ longer than its previous
history”50—not an event but an ongoing catastrophe.
By attributing paradigmatic significance to the Muselmann, Agamben
implies that this figure can illuminate something fundamental about the
Occidental conception of the relation between life and politics that has
previously been concealed from us. Relying on Arnold Clapmar’s distinc-
tion between the visible face of power (jus imperii) and the hidden face
(arcanum), he writes that the production of the Muselmann, “not only shows
the efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret cipher, so to speak its
arcanum.”51 This suggests that the Muselmann is not just another instance
of the biopolitical operation of the West. Rather, at the extreme point at
which a life is produced in which the human and the inhuman cannot be
distinguished, the “arcanum imperii comes to light as such,” revealing the
secret of power that is shrouded in normal times.52 Clapmar wrote that, “as
the imperium is like an ark or citadal, so the arcana imperii are like walls or
ramparts which protect this ark from the assaults of the factious.”53 Strictly
speaking, the arcana imperii were apparent grants of power and freedom,
“through which the plebs were lured into believing they had something
they didn’t have” and which thus served to disempower and maintain the
stability of the state.54 Clapmar thus equated them with the sophismata that
Aristotle described as “devices which may be employed in order to give a
constitution a more attractive appearance”—including the right of the poor
not to attend the assembly or carry arms.55
Seen from this perspective, the Muselmann reveals the secret truth of
a biopolitical power that is usually shrouded by “devices” including human
rights and citizenship. Auschwitz would then be not an aberration from
the progressive thrust of Western history, but, as Enzo Traverso suggests, an
event that “unveiled its dark and destructive side,” revealing “its hidden
face, its dialectical doppelgänger.”56 Agamben’s belief that the operation of
power relies on a secret that is hidden in normal times helps to clarify his
view that philosophy “can be defined as the world seen from an extreme
situation that has become the rule”57 This suggests that there is both epis-
temological and political value in focusing our attention on the face of
power that is only revealed in extreme situations—in unveiling its arcanum.
Auschwitz, where the Muselmann was produced, thereby becomes the lens
through which we should view all post-Auschwitz politics and thought, and
through which the extreme danger we face is illuminated.
By treating Auschwitz as a singular event that reveals the arcanum of
the West, Agamben avoids the metaphysical flattening out of Auschwitz
implicit in Heidegger’s agriculture comment. This position, however, is not
without its own difficulties; indeed, it raises numerous questions about the
underlying understanding of Western politics that makes it possible to view
Auschwitz not as a horrific departure from the Western tradition, but as its
apotheosis: On what basis is the significance of Auschwitz elevated over
every other historical catastrophe? What, is at stake in seeing the true
nature of the West revealed in the most awful state violence—rather than
in revolutionary activity, artistic creation, or moments of relative stabil-
ity? Can we really accept the view that citizenship, rights, and the other
achievements of modern emancipatory politics were nothing but sophismata,
designed to deceive those who fought for them into accepting the constitu-
tional order? What is lost in Agamben’s account is the contingency of the
Nazi genocide, and the numerous other possibilities, lodged in the “history
of the West,” which had to be defeated for it to eventuate. As Schmitt
was well aware, Weimar was marked by dramatic political confrontations,
whose outcomes were far from assured in advance. Rather than Auschwitz
revealing the hidden logic of the West, it was the outcome of the defeat
of all those who fought for a dramatically different world. Although today
it is used as the symbol of “evil,” after which politics must limit itself to
the prevention of suffering, it was neither the inevitable outcome nor the
end of politics.
Despite crucial differences, Agamben’s reading of Auschwitz relies on
an understanding of the history of the West that is heavily indebted to Hei-
degger’s account of metaphysics, in which the forgetting of Being culminates
in the nihilism of the technological Ge-stell. Agamben, in contrast, sees
Western politics as culminating in the biopolitical production of a form of
pure survival. These may seem to be very different positions, and they are
different in important ways. Nonetheless, they both rely on the view that
contemporary political problems are manifestations of the way in which
the West has conceptualized first philosophy since its inception. Agamben’s
analysis of Auschwitz must be understood in the context of his biopolitical
reframing of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, according to which the
“metaphysical task par excellence” is the politicization of bare life.58
Once the critique of Western metaphysics is reoriented such that
metaphysics appears as the process of hominization through which the
“humanity of living man is decided,” it becomes clearer why Auschwitz
and the production of the Muselmann plays such a significant role in the
critical moment of Agamben’s thought.59 Lacoue-Labarthe has suggested,

“God in fact died at Auschwitz.”60 For Agamben, it was humanism that
was ruined by the production of the Muselmann. Auschwitz, he suggests, is
“an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the
inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinc-
tion to its ruin.”61 After Auschwitz, he argues, we can no longer understand
the human as a transcendental category, which could serve as the ground
for human rights, or entail particular forms of political obligation. Aus-
chwitz, in his view, showed that humans could be reduced to a condition
beyond dignity, self-respect, and even the capacity for language, and thus
called into question the ontological category of the human and its politi-
cal uses. Consequently, he believes that neither the law, which relies on
a transcendental human subject, nor the categories through which we are
accustomed to thinking political and ethical life have survived the camps.
Agamben’s particular targets here are those ethical conceptions that
are framed in terms of human dignity, communicative rationality or norma-
tivity, and that take their models from the sphere of the law. “Auschwitz,”
he writes, “marks the end and ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity
to a norm.”62 His central claim is that what was discovered in the Nazi Lager
was a realm in which dignity no longer made any sense and normativity
broke down in the face of a situation so extreme as to resist codification
and call into question the very ontological consistency of the human. The
Muselmann, a living being stripped of linguistic and relational capacity, is, as
J. M. Bernstein notes, “nothing other than what it is made by the eclipse
of the human subject as possessing a normatively constituted intentional
comportment to the world.”63 To illustrate such a conception, Agamben
proposes a thought experiment: imagine, he suggests, that the SS allowed
a preacher to enter the camp, and attempt to convince the Muselmänner
of the need to keep their dignity and self-respect. “The preacher’s gesture,”
he writes, “would be odious; his sermon would be an atrocious jest in the
face of those who were beyond not only the possibility of persuasion, but
even all human help.”64 Any ethics that could do justice to Auschwitz, he
avers, must be able to respond to this realm of “extreme degradation” to
which the survivors testify.65 If our ethical concepts are unable to account
for this extreme case, then to continue to treat these concepts as universal
is to risk expelling those in the camps from the sphere of humanity, he
suggests, and thus replicating the Nazi’s gesture.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben suggests that in assuming the task of produc-
ing bare life, modernity declare its fidelity to the metaphysical tradition.66
The Muselmann, however, is not simply another instance of bare life but the
far point of a continuum beyond which, he remarks bitterly, “there is only
the gas chamber.”67 Here, he relies on Foucault’s argument, in Society Must

Be Defended, that racism reintroduces the power to kill into a biopolitical
regime supposedly devoted to maintaining life.68 Every people, Foucault
suggests there, is divided under biopolitics by a caesura that produces a
biological population in the midst of a political People. In Agamben’s view,
such biopolitical caesuras are essentially mobile; under Nazism, they there-
fore served to stratify a continuum in which those of non-Aryan descent
were transformed into deportees, and deportees into prisoners (Häftling),
until the Muselmann is produced, as “the final biopolitical substance to
be isolated in the biological continuum.”69 In the Muselmann, he writes,
evoking Clapmar, “biopower sought to produce its final secret  .  .  .  a kind of
absolute biopolitical substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribu-
tion of demographic, ethnic, national and political identity.”70 Auschwitz is
the point at which biopolitics reaches its end in the production of a form
of survival, absolutely divorced from linguistic and relational life.
Agamben’s argument that this process is evidence of a fidelity to the
essential structure of the metaphysical tradition can best be understood
against the background of his earlier critique of the Aristotelian attempt,
in de Anima, to isolate nutritive life as the ground and presupposition of all
forms of life. If the Muselmann is the end point of the biopolitical division
of life, Agamben locates its “foundational moment” in this Aristotelian
text. The divisions that Aristotle had marked in the human, he suggests,
are factually realized in the production of the Muselmann, which literalizes
the metaphysical mythogeme of a natural life as the mute foundation of
human life.71 In the Muselmann, we are therefore faced with the realization,
in human form, of the mute survival that Aristotle posited as the presup-
position of all forms of life. Rather than a naturally existing substrate,
however, this life, or rather this survival, must be produced through an
operation that strips away all relational and linguistic life.
It is therefore in the camp that Agamben sees the metaphysical con-
ception of the human as a living being with logos realized, in the absolute
separation of those terms and the production of a human life divorced from
the possibility of speech. “Biopower’s supreme ambition,” he writes, “is to
produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and
the speaking being, zoē and bios, the inhuman and the human—survival.”72
Today, he suggests, biopolitics no longer makes live, but makes survive.
Agamben has described Auschwitz as the site of a “biopolitical experi-
ment on the operators of Being.”73 As Daniel McLoughlin suggests, this
“experiment” is at once political and ontological, producing not only a
figure absolutely abandoned to sovereign power, but a living being divorced
from linguistic existence.74 It is this figure, defined by pure survival, that in
Agamben’s view appears for the first time in Auschwitz. The Muselmann, he
suggests, may be absolutely new, but it nonetheless reveals both the ultimate
danger always present in the metaphysical production of the human through
its distinction from animal life, and the arcanum of power.
According to this account, the production of the Muselmann is less a
contingent occurrence resulting from the policies and practices of Nazism,
than the final figure of a biopolitical operation that has defined the human
since Aristotle. As long as the human is defined through reference to a nat-
ural ground, as the living being with logos for instance, Agamben believes
that this institutes a fracture that must constantly be reproduced not only
in the individual but also in the body of humanity. Agamben’s account of
metaphysics therefore consists in problematizing precisely this notion of
human life, or logos, as an “additional capacity,” which he sees as imply-
ing a caesura that—before being expressed in the separation of oikos and
polis—runs through the human.
This metaphysical definition of the human is therefore achieved
through the same ban structure that we have already identified: Like politi-
cal life, the fully human life—life according to logos—is achieved only
through the separation and abandonment of bare life. This structure is
radicalized in the production of the Muselmann, which is nothing less than
the “catastrophe of the subject,” the point at which a form of survival is
created, stripped of the possibility of linguistic life. Here, Agamben relies
on his earlier reading of Benveniste, for whom the subject is linguistically
constituted through the taking up of the personal pronoun “I” in the pas-
sage to discourse. This means that language is marked by the split between
a mute living being that cannot enter language, and a linguistic subject
that is “preindividual,” as Justin Clemens notes,75 and empty—the simple I.
The creation of the Muselmann, in Agamben’s view, is the point at which
these two aspects of the human—the linguistic subject and the mute liv-
ing being—threaten to come apart entirely. His formulation of testimony
is structurally modeled on this understanding of language, insofar as its
two poles are that of a linguistic subject with “nothing of its own to say”
(the survivor, who Primo Levi noted, had not seen “the gorgon”)76 and a
mute living being (the Muselmann). Testimony is the attempt to enable
an encounter between these, and thereby refute the attempt to create a
form of survival absolutely separated from linguistic and relational exis-
tence. While such a form of survival appeared at Auschwitz for the first
time, it is nonetheless the final result of the separation between the living
and the speaking being. The urgent task, he suggests in The Open, is “to
ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man.”77
Consequently, it is only by rethinking the metaphysical understanding of
the human, that we can respond to the creation of the Muselmann and
halt the production of the human through a process of dehumanization.
Here, we should pause and ask what we gain, and what we lose, if we
understand the Muselmann and Auschwitz as the culmination of the logic
that has played a definitive role in Western politics since its inception. The
strengths of this approach begin with its ability to draw our attention to
the political importance of the division between the human and inhuman.
Agamben’s account of biopolitics resists every attempt to view this distinc-
tion as either natural or stable by highlighting the fact that anthropogen-
esis, the becoming human of the human, is a political operation that has
always been bound to processes of dehumanization. It therefore prevents
us from positioning Auschwitz as a pure aberration, with no significant
ramifications for the key political concepts of our time and instead chal-
lenges us to think about the uncomfortable connections between Nazism
and other forms of decision on the humanity and inhumanity of man. At
its best, this could foster a form of thought that attempts to respond to the
challenges of Auschwitz by formulating political categories adequate to the
post-Auschwitz world. This may be one crucial way that we could respond
to Levi’s injunction to think through what we can do to nullify the threat
that Auschwitz may return. By rethinking Heidegger’s critique of Western
metaphysics in a biopolitical key, Agamben avoids Heidegger’s gesture of
simply treating Auschwitz as one in a list of consequences of the essence
of technology. Instead he positions Auschwitz as an event that brought
something new into the world in the horrific form of the Muselmann, and
therefore poses new challenges to a political thought that would hope to
be adequate to such an event.
If Agamben’s point were only that we must rethink the political cat-
egories of Western thought in the wake of Auschwitz, then it would be a
welcome antidote to the idea that the Nazi Lager was simply an aberra-
tion, which left these categories unscathed. Yet, he goes further than this,
and tends to generalize the political incapacity of this figure, leading to a
characterization of the present in which the possibility for intervening into
the production of pure survival in order to disrupt it is confined to the
pathos of testimony. In his ontological account of the politics of the West,
specific political interventions tend to be subsumed into a grand picture of
the various epochs of biopolitics. A central concern of Agamben’s thought,
as we have seen, is to contest the reduction of life to survival, which he
sees in both contemporary state biopolitics and humanitarianism, and to
affirm a form-of-life that could never be reduced to bare life. In accepting
that Auschwitz marks the culmination of Western politics, however, he
concedes too much to the post-Auschwitz moralization of politics, which
depicts us as living in a time “after evil,” in which the possibility of eman-

cipatory social transformation is foreclosed, and politics is limited to the
prevention of suffering.78 When Agamben speaks of a new, post-Auschwitz
politics, this is not the politics he has in mind. And yet we have seen
that he does suggest our time, even in its most dangerous manifestations,
is making possible a new form of politics. What role, then, does Auschwitz
play in his new politics? And what form, other than a katechonic defense
against evil, could such a politics take?
Where Danger Is, Grows the Saving Power Also
From where will the new politics to which Agamben gestures arrive, if
all political praxis in the present is immobilized and impotent? We have
already identified his tendency to draw hope from desperation and identify
the possibility of a saving power in the midst of the greatest danger. Here,
I would like to situate this tendency explicitly in relation to Heidegger’s
account of technology, which provides an important background to Agam-
ben’s treatment of Western metaphysics and politics. In the same period
that he referred to the gas chambers in the context of an account of the
essence of technology, Heidegger turned to Hölderlin’s poetry in order to
reflect on the possibility that the supreme danger entailed by the essence
of technology may also harbor the saving power. In Hölderlin’s words: “But
where danger is, grows the saving power also,”79 Heidegger suggests that we
must hear the following: “The saving power is not secondary to the dan-
ger. The selfsame danger is, when it is as the danger, the saving power.”80
What does it mean for the danger to be as the danger? In The Turning,
Heidegger notes that while enframing is the danger, it does not announce
itself as such, and thus the danger remains “veiled and disguised.”81 This
veiling is what is most dangerous about the danger, he suggests, because it
leads us to view technology as a mere instrument to be used by humans,
and this instrumental and anthropological conception of technology blinds
us to its essence. The failure to recognize the danger posed by enframing
as the danger, thus brings us closer to the supreme danger, through which
Being simply ceases to reveal itself, and humans are shut off from their own
essences, as the ones necessary for the disclosure of Being.82
Only grasping the danger as such, according to Heidegger, will enable
that “turning” (Kehre) through which the danger is surmounted and “the
oblivion of Being turns into the safekeeping belonging to the coming to
presence of Being.”83 Heidegger provides an account of this turning in which
it is only when the danger is unveiled, and exists as the danger that the
saving power can come to pass, or as he puts it, albeit in somewhat contor-
tionate terms: “In the coming to presence of the danger, where it is as the
danger, is the turning about in to the safekeeping, is this safekeeping itself,
is the saving power of Being.”84 Although this turning is without mediation
and cannot be brought about by humans according to any cause and effect
schema, it “presupposes unflinching exposure to the stark reality of enfram-
ing and to the danger.”85 Here we see that rather than developing strategies
or forms of action that may counter the danger—which, in Heidegger’s view,
would amount to a calculative thinking that serves only to entrench this
danger—the human praxis appropriate to fostering the growth of the saving
power consists in seeking to reveal the danger as such, and in waiting. We
don’t know how the turning will come about, he writes, but man’s “essence
is to be the one who waits.”86 The terrain on which we wait, however, is an
uncertain and unstable one. When this turning becomes possible, as Reiner
Schürmann has suggested, the origin begins to show itself, paradoxically, as
an-archic, and the political itself is deprived of foundation.87
This provides an important background to Agamben’s view that the
extreme situation of the camp or the Muselmann enables us to unveil the
truth of this tradition. Yet it is also here that he parts company with
the philosopher whose thought is so central to his account of politics. In
The Kingdom of the Glory, he makes this divergence explicit, referring to
Heidegger’s attempt to resolve the problem of technology as a failure.88
Implicitly accusing his former teacher of remaining trapped within religion,
Agamben writes that because Heidegger thinks the danger of technology
in terms of the ontological difference between Being and beings, it appears
as something that “cannot be decided by men”—as the mystery of Being.89
At this point, he suggests, philosophy passes into religion, hence the use of
the term Kehre, which must be thought in relation to the technical term
for conversion (in German, Bekehrung). “Heidegger,” he writes, “cannot
resolve the problem of technology because he was unable to restore it to
its political locus.”90 While Agamben’s own understanding of the relation
between the saving power and human action is beset by ambiguities, here
he states his case clearly: “the operation that resolves this mystery, which
deactivates and renders inoperative the technological-ontological apparatus,
is political.”91 Neither a guarding nor a waiting, the response to the danger
of technology can only be, for Agamben, a form of political action.
This location of the saving power in the realm of political praxis
opens as many questions as it answers. To the extent that political action
attempts to resurrect past certainties, or to draw sustenance from what
Agamben sees as a now-evacuated ground, he believes it only serves to
entrench the danger of biopolitics. Instead, it is in the blurring of political
distinctions between norm and exception, life and politics, which finds its
most awful expression in Auschwitz, that he sees the possibility of a new
understanding that had previously eluded us. As long as the norm and the
exception, daily life and the extreme case are kept separate, he suggests,
both these poles will remain opaque; “But as soon as they show their com-
plicity, as happens more and more often today, they illuminate each other,
so to speak, from the inside.”92 It is in the camp, where biopolitics ceases
to produce subjects of human rights, and objects of humanitarianism and
begins to produce pure survival that the arcanum of biopolitics is revealed
and the danger appears as the danger. It is thus in the destabilization of
metaphysical foundations, particularly of the human, in the camps that he
sees the possibility of a profane salvation. He is, in this respect, close to
Heidegger, who remarked that: “Before being can occur in its primal truth,
being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and
the earth must be driven to desolation and man to mere labor. Only after
this decline does the abrupt dwelling of the origin take place for a long
span of time.”93 It is in the very danger consequent to the destabilization
of the category of the human that Agamben identifies the possibility of a
politics that would no longer be premised on the creation of a bare life.
When the Muselmann first appears in Homo Sacer, it as a figure in
whom the indiscernability of life and law “threatens the lex animata of the
camp.”94 After citing Robert Antelme’s observation that the inhabitant of
the camp was no longer capable of distinguishing pangs of cold from the
brutality of the SS, Agamben remarks that “the guard suddenly seems power-
less before him, as if struck by the thought the Muselmann’s behavior—which
does not register any difference between an order and the cold—might per-
haps be a silent form of resistance.”95 Sadly, this image of the powerless guard,
immobilized by the silent resistance of the Muselmann, does not appear to
be derived from testimony about the conditions of the camps, and rather
seems designed to confirm a predetermined philosophical predilection for
seeing the saving power amid the greatest danger. Similarly, to see the mere
existence of the Muselmann as a threat to the camp itself seems to rely on
a willful blindness to the reality of the power relation that existed between
the SS and those they would soon send to the gas chambers.
Agamben’s claim, in Remnants of Auschwitz, that the Muselmann is
the “guard on the threshold of a new ethics” is undoubtedly more devel-
oped than this earlier portrayal, resting as it does on both a sustained
inquiry into the implications of such a figure for ethical thought, and on
the elaboration of an ethics of testimony that is grounded in his earlier
work on the structure of linguistic subjectivity.96 Nonetheless, Remnants of
Auschwitz also displays a tendency to give a redemptive significance to the
production of the Muselmann, insomuch as the disruption of existing ethi-

cal thought brought about by such a figure appears to open the possibility
for reconceptualizing ethics, in Spinozan terms, as the “doctrine of the
happy life.”97 In Means Without Ends, Agamben defines the happy life as an
absolutely profane “ ‘sufficient life’ ” which has reached the perfection of its
own power and communicability, and over which, therefore, “sovereignty
and right no longer have any hold.”98 A life over which sovereignty has
no hold, as we have already seen, would be one in which it was not pos-
sible to isolate a bare life. Thus, ethics, in Agamben’s view, is concerned
with refusing the isolation of pure survival in Auschwitz, through a form
of testimony epitomized by Primo Levi, who explicitly framed his books
as attempts to bear witness on behalf of those he termed “the drowned.”99
“With its every word,” Agamben writes, “testimony refutes precisely this
isolation of survival from life.”100 Here we begin to see the contours of a
different ethical project, which finds its starting point in resistance to the
biopolitical fracture that finds its extreme form in the Muselmann.
It is crucial to grasp that Agamben’s redemptive vision does not seek
to reassert the category of the human, but starts from what he sees as its
exhaustion, and the consequent ruin of every attempt to ground ethics and
politics in transcendental human subject. While his thought is undoubt-
edly influenced by Heidegger’s identification of the proximity of danger
and salvation, it is also at this point that he diverges from him. Reiner
Schürmann, whose book on Heidegger stresses the demise of humanism
in the epoch of technology, suggests that, in the turning, “the resistances
may suddenly vanish by which the ‘rational animal,’ the metaphysical ani-
mal, defends itself against polymorphous presencing as against death. The
rational animal, we will hear, has yet to become mortal.”101 Mortality is a
central category for Heidegger, perhaps even, as Agamben suggests, one that
expresses “the ultimate intention” of his ethics.102 In Being and Time, it is
in the possibility of grasping one’s own mortality, of assuming the radically
individualizing possibility of the impossibility of one’s own existence, that
Heidegger locates the possibility of authenticity.103
As Agamben notes, however, this possibility of an authentic being-
toward-death is absent, or so Heidegger implies, in the Nazi camps. Agam-
ben cites the following remark from Heidegger’s lecture “The Danger”:
They die in masses, hundreds of thousands at a time. Do they

die? They decease. They are eliminated. They become pieces
of the warehouse fabrication of corpses. They are imperceptibly
liquidated in extermination camps—But to die (Sterben) means:
to bear death in one’s own Being. To be able to die means: to
be capable of this decisive being. And we are capable of it only

if our Being is capable of the Being of death.104
Why, Agamben asks, is such a possibility closed off to those in the camps?
After all, as he notes, authenticity in Heidegger’s thought is not something
radically other than inauthenticity but is simply a modified way of seizing
on the latter. Therefore, he writes, in terms that are directly relevant to
the present discussion, according to “Hölderlin’s principle often invoked by
Heidegger, ‘where there is danger, there grows the saving power,’ precisely
in the extreme situation of the camp appropriation and freedom ought to
be possible.”105 Instead, Agamben suggests that the reason there can be no
“proper death” in the camps is because there can be no appropriation of
the improper (or inauthentic) in a context in which people “live factually
at every instant toward their death” and in which death, becomes, as Levi
puts it, “a trivial, bureaucratic and everyday affair.”106
Agamben’s point is that the experience of the Lager reveals that Hei-
degger’s early belief in an authentic being-toward-death is ultimately reliant
on a still-metaphysical understanding of the dignity of death as an exclu-
sively human attribute. Agamben traces this idea of a dignified death to
“the most archaic stratum of law, which is at every point indistinguishable
from magic”—that is, a realm that is still caught in the economy of the
sacred.107 The idea that Auschwitz made a proper, dignified, or authentic
death impossible—which he sees in Heidegger, among others—is in his
view continuous with the metaphysical understanding of human dignity
he believes was invalidated by the production of the Muselmann. The Nazi
Lager, he suggests, reveal the ambiguous relation of the West to death,
hence “reason’s inability to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with
any certainty,” which manifests in an oscillation between viewing it as a
space in which death was victorious over life, and as one in which death
itself was debased.108 This ambiguity and oscillation, in his view, stem from
a failure to reflect on the border zone of the human represented by the
Muselmann. The “true cipher of Auschwitz,” he writes, resists the familiar
categories of life and death. The Muselmänner—of whom Levi writes “[o]ne
hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death”109—
“called into question . . . the very humanity of man, since man observes
the fragmentation of his privileged tie to what constitutes him as human,
that is, the sacredness of death and life.”110 Auschwitz, on this account,
revealed in the most horrific manner that there is nothing sacred about
the human but only a purely profane existence. This profane existence,
however, is the terrain on which he believes it becomes possible to rethink
ethics, in the direction of the happy life.
The strength of Agamben’s account of the Muselmann lies in the

challenge it poses to forms of political and ethical thought that give nor-
mative content to a transcendental category of the human, by testifying
to the possibility that a human life could be stripped of all those capaci-
ties that have traditionally signaled its distinction from the simply living
being, including the very possibility of relational existence. The horrific
way in which the category of the human is disrupted, however, should
make us wary of expecting that a redemptive political outcome is more
likely to result from this than one that consolidates the biopolitical rule
over life. While Agamben criticizes those whose responses to Auschwitz
do not “manage to avoid a happy ending,” to the extent that he treats the
production of the Muselmann as an event that reveals the truth of biopoli-
tics, and the coming to light of the danger as the danger, his own account
of the Lager does not escape this criticism.111 Our time undoubtedly poses
new challenges to political thought, and out of these challenges it may be
possible to develop new ways of conceptualizing politics that are no lon-
ger reliant on transcendental categories and naturalized grounds, and that
cease to divide the human from the inhuman. Alternately, it may be that
the destabilization of the categories of Western politics will instead lead
to reactionary attempts to reinstall a lost and idealized past, to new forms
of inhuman barbarism, or simply to political paralysis. The development of
new political forms will require the willingness to experiment, and a con-
tinuing attentiveness to the possibilities for political praxis and the forms
of agency that exist even in the midst of the most desperate of situations.
At no point in Remnants of Auschwitz does Agamben mention forms
of political action that took place inside Auschwitz. This matters because,
to the extent that he treats the camp as the paradigm of the modern,
this exclusion tends to generate a particularly limited picture of the pos-
sibilities for politics in the present. It is therefore worth briefly examin-
ing this resistance, which extended, most famously, to the uprising of the
Sonderkommando (SK) of October 7, 1944, in which a crematoria was set
on fire. In 1962, a search of the ruins around crematorium III at Birkenau
unearthed a manuscript written by SK member Salmen Lewental, which
describes the preparations for an uprising that was to take place among
these prisoners. Lewental details plans for a general rebellion among the
SK, and writes that in June 1944, the day of a planned uprising, “[p]eople
kissed one another with sheer joy” despite knowing that their actions would
lead to “certain death.”112 This uprising, he writes, did not occur, after a
serious problem with transport forced its cancellation. Of those who did
rise up four months later, Lewental writes:
[F]or the first time we lived to see the moment when people
[. . .] refused to do what is demanded of them [. . .] not fear-
ing death [. . .] in spite of the fact that they still had chances
to live longer, in spite of the fact that they could live in good
conditions, as we did not lack food, drink, even cigarettes [. . .].
And yet, in spite of all that they heroically decided to depart
this life. And this fact should be noted down in our history and
stressed especially.113
To raise the question of resistance in the camp, to highlight that some did
tear themselves away from a condition of pure survival, must not be to
fetishize such resistance, or treat it as a source of moral distinction against
which those who did not resist are found lacking. As Levi makes clear,
the obstacles to resistance of any kind were largely overwhelming, and
comprised not only perpetual hunger and exhaustion, but also the difficul-
ties of communication with the outside world, the “permanent Babel of
languages and nationalities,” which the SS deliberately orchestrated inside
the camp, and the spies and inevitable denunciations.114 To this list could
be added the knowledge of what would be done to those who tried and
failed. Lewental writes sparingly of those who were captured and taken to
the bunker, rather than being immediately killed after the 1944 uprising: “It
is clear what they are doing to them there, it is not hard to imagine it.”115
In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi considers the question “that is never
absent,” and the accusation he feels behind it: “Why did you not escape?
Why did you not rebel?”116 He writes brutally and persuasively about the
extraordinary difficulties of doing so, in terms that should certainly make
us refrain from passing judgment on those who did not.
It is presumably to avoid this form of judgment—and the language of
dignity that pervades even Lewantal’s testimony—that Agamben avoids the
question of resistance in the camps. And yet, as Levi writes in The Black
Hole of Auschwitz, it is “of the utmost importance that the seed of Euro-
pean resistance against Fascism nonetheless took root within this inhuman
situation, amidst a discordant and disconnected human heap worn down
by exhaustion and periodic massacres.”117 In failing to treat this political
activity inside the Lager, Agamben misses a crucial opportunity to begin to
reconceptualize politics, and to move away from the metaphysical under-
standing of the human as a zoon politikon that marks the Western political
tradition. The experience of the camps, and more so the existence of the
Muselmann, teaches us too clearly that there is a realm of the human in
which there is no possibility for politics. And yet, it also shows us that
within this desperate situation, some were able, as much through luck as
through personal qualities or convictions, to act politically, and to resist
in numerous ways. This means that rather than being an innate aspect of
human life, politics is necessarily contingent. As in the Lager, so, too, in the
outside world it is possible that there could be humans and no politics,
just as it is possible that politics could exist in situations that seem least
conducive to it. Thus, politics is not the actualization of an essence and
cannot be conceived as the metaphysical task of “the realization of man as
a rational living being.”118 Rather it can only be seen as a possibility that
no determinate anthropological or social facts can determine in advance.
If we are to do justice to Auschwitz, we should attend to the need to
rethink those political categories that revealed themselves as inadequate to
it, while continuing to focus on possibilities for specific political interven-
tions in the present. This is not to endorse an instrumental role for critique
but to suggest that critical accounts of the present must remain attentive
to the exercise of political agency and resist affirming the eradication of
possibilities for transformative political praxis. Rather than asking what
could be drawn from the existence, as well as the nonexistence, of politics
in the camp, Agamben succumbs to the temptation to treat the dangers
at hand as signs that a form of political “salvation” is closer than it would
be in less dangerous times. Such a view is both too pessimistic and too
optimistic: it is too pessimistic about the avenues for political transforma-
tion that are still open to us in the present, and it is too optimistic about
the redemptive consequences of catastrophe.
In 1938, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, gave a
speech in Warsaw in which he warned: “a catastrophe is coming closer.”119
Jabotinsky was speaking on Tisha B’Av, the day that marks the anniver-
sary of the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem and
commemorates the tragedies in Jewish history. Although Jabotinsky’s mes-
sage presaged a destruction that would outweigh any previous tragedy, he
nonetheless sounded a note of hope: “whoever of you will escape from
the catastrophe,” he told those assembled, “he or she will live to see the
exalted moment of a great Jewish wedding: the rebirth and rise of a Jewish
state.”120 Here we see in its starkest form that belief in the intertwining
of catastrophe and redemption that I have suggested informs Agamben’s
account of politics and his reading of the Muselmann. Here, “[m]essianic
legend,” in the words of Jacqueline Rose, “drenches itself in uninhibited
fantasies about the catastrophic aspects of redemption.”121
This messianism, as Rose has stressed, imbued Zionism even in its
most secular form, leading to the tendency to treat the foundation of the
state of Israel as a worldly redemption arising from a historical catastrophe.
This is a perspective shared by Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin

Netanyahu, whose father Benzion served as Jabotinsky’s secretary. Few
“could see the catastrophe coming,” Netanyahu remarks in A Durable Peace,
“and fewer still could share in Jabotinsky’s note of hope.”122 Netanyahu
positions himself firmly alongside those hopeful few, depicting the founda-
tion of Israel as a historical miracle that converted unparalleled adversity
into rebirth. The state of Israel, he writes, is both “the repository of the
millennial Jewish hopes for redemption” and the instrument that ensures
Jewish survival.123 In this vision, catastrophe and redemption are tightly
bound. “In its essence the rise of Israel,” in the characterization of its Prime
Minister, “has been a conscious attempt to wrest redemption from the grip
of unrelenting agony”124
What Netanyahu calls redemption, the Palestinians refer to as “the
catastrophe” (Al Nakba). To maintain the messianic interpretation of the
founding of Israel, this Nakba must be foreclosed and denied. Against those
who seek to contest the continuing occupation of Palestinian land, the
belief that Israel is the redemption that follows catastrophe licenses any-
thing in the name of survival. “Catastrophe,” Rose notes, “can become a
passion.”125 The metaphorical “iron wall” that Jabotinksy argued Israel must
build to become unassailable has since been literalized, in the form of the
“separation wall” that cuts through Palestinian villages, and the blockade
of Gaza—which has turned the strip into an open-air concentration camp
from which people can exit only “in exceptional humanitarian cases.”126
To describe Gaza as a concentration camp is not to simply conflate it with
Auschwitz. And yet, there is a terrible and specific continuity between the
Nazi’s attempt to reduce life to pure survival, which Agamben sees as the
absolute novelty of Auschwitz, and Israel’s decision to allow into Gaza only
those goods that are “vital for the survival of the civilian population.”127
That Israel determines the threshold of this survival by using a math-
ematical equation that calculates the minimum level of calories necessary
to “sustain Gaza’s population of 1.5 million at a level just above the UN
definition of hunger,” should not blind us to the fact that what is at stake
here is the attempt to reduce life to survival.128 From the Shoah to the
Nakba, the belief that catastrophe presages redemption has led only to a
cycle of catastrophes, in which finally, “catastrophization” in Adi Ophir’s
words, “becomes a set of governmental policies.”129
Chapter 4
“I Would Prefer Not To”

Bartleby, Messianism, and the
Potentiality of the Law
I can see that figure now . . . It was Bartleby.

—Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
“I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in
mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by sum-
mer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained
leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till someone touched him,
when he fell.”1 With these words, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Bartleby
the Scrivener recounts his paralysis when faced with the realization that
his inscrutable employee had failed to heed his words of the previous day:
“The time has come; you must quit this place.”2 Upon finding Bartleby still
occupying his office, the narrator—after his return from the dead—descends
the staircase and walks around the block, contemplating a series of equally
unsatisfactory responses: “Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could
not,” he muses; “to turn him away by calling him hard names would not
do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet permit him to
enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me—this too I could not think of.”3
Finally, after imagining he should enter his office, and “pretending not to
see Bartleby at all, walk straight into him as if he were air,” he decides
on a second attempt at reasoned dialogue, which, faced with Bartleby’s
silence, gives way almost immediately to a passionate outburst: “Will you,
or will you not, quit me?” the narrator pleads.4 “I would prefer not to quit
you,” Bartleby replies, sending the narrator into such a resentful rage that
memories of an unfortunate colleague, driven to murder in a similarly pri-
vate office, spring immediately to his mind . . .5
97
What is the power of Bartleby’s phrase—“I would prefer not to”—that

it could create such frustration, while absolutely immobilizing his employer?
In recent years, Bartleby has been depicted as everything from a beau-
tiful soul, who must “continuously tread on the verge of suicide”6 to a
“new Christ.”7 For Agamben, in contrast, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not
to” is nothing less than “the strongest objection against the principle of
sovereignty.”8 While understanding this claim requires an examination of
Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s metaphysics, I read Bartleby’s enigmatic
formula in the context of his work as a scrivener, a legal scribe. What,
I ask, does the statement, “I would prefer not to” do to the law? What
does it mean to “prefer not” when the law is in question? For Bartleby,
it means first a withdrawal from the work of copying that makes up the
daily routine of the legal firm in which he is employed. While at first
Bartleby copied “by sunlight and candlelight,” he soon ceases his work.9
He no longer writes—he prefers not to, and he repeats his single formula
in response to all his employer’s requests. “It is not seldom the case,” this
employer muses, “that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented
and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest
faith. He begins, as it were, to vaguely surmise that, wonderful as it may
well be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.”10 In Agam-
ben’s reading, Bartleby challenges not only our faith in the law’s capacity
to embody and administer justice, but also the form of rational decision
making presupposed by a liberal legal system.
If Bartleby presents a challenge to the law, however, the nature of
this challenge is not easy to categorize. Bartleby does not copy the law
but neither does he oppose it in the name of another law, a natural law,
or a more just law that could be instituted in its place. He is neither an
exemplar of civil disobedience, nor a revolutionary. He does not actively
resist; he simply prefers not to. It is this that draws Agamben to this scribe
who has stopped writing. The “lasting eclipse” of politics he identifies can
be traced to its alignment with the problem of sovereignty, which has seen
it degenerate into either a power to make law (a constituent power), or
a power to negotiate with the law.11 In Bartleby, he sees an approach to
the law that escapes the dialectic of constituting power and constituted
power, and makes it possible to unwork the sovereign relation. While the
diagnostic aspect of his thought and his account of sovereign power have
been subjected to much critical engagement, his more enigmatic suggestion
that the law is in need of fulfillment has, to date, received less attention.
This neglect has contributed to the mistaken perception of him as a pes-
simistic thinker that I have already identified.12 Because many have failed
to register the messianic dimension of his thought, his diagnosis of the
“I WOULD PREFER NOT TO” / 99
political and legal condition of our time has often been interpreted as a
bleak one, which offers no possibility or hope. In what follows, I elucidate
the unconventional, antinomian, and redemptive aspect of his thought
through an examination of his reading of Bartleby. To do this, I reflect on
the “philosophical constellation,” in which he places Melville’s scrivener
(that of Aristotle’s Metaphysics) and interpret his formula in the context of
an examination of a potentiality that is, most importantly, the potentiality
of the law.
This “philosophical constellation” will enable us to grasp the onto-
logical foundations of Agamben’s critique of sovereignty. Deciphering what
he terms the “fulfillment” of law, however, will require an engagement
with another “constellation”—one whose “time of legibility” he believes,
has finally come: that of messianism—specifically, the messianism of Paul’s
Epistle to the Romans and Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.”13
The Messiah, in Agamben’s view, is primarily the figure through which
religion confronts the law. Far from being solely a religious problematic,
however, messianism, he suggests, “represents the point of greatest prox-
imity between religion and philosophy,” both of which are constitutively
involved in a reckoning with law.14 This proximity is certainly present in
his own philosophy, which identifies a profound relation between the status
of the Torah in the messianic age and the legal condition of our own time.
Indeed, in his clearest formulation of the link that binds his analysis of
the messianic to his more widely discussed works on contemporary politics,
Agamben—evoking both the Schmittian state of exception and Benjamin’s
thesis that this exception has become the norm—writes “in the days of the
Messiah, which are also ‘the “state of exception” in which we live,’ the
hidden foundation of the law comes to light, and the law itself enters into
a state of perpetual suspension.”15 If, for Agamben, “the state of exception
in which we live” is also the “days of the Messiah,” then an examination
of the status of the law in the messianic age may help us to decipher the
nature of the law that survives this normalization, and to understand what
it would mean to reckon with it.
This should enable us to shed light on the “completely new poli-
tics” to which his work gestures.16 To date, Agamben’s articulation of the
redemptive possibilities he sees opened up by the normalization of the
state of exception remains confined to a number of suggestive but opaque
passages. In State of Exception, he writes: “One day humanity will play
with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore
them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good.”17 Here he
frames this (childlike) approach to the law in terms of what he calls its
“deactivation”: “What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of
law, but its deactivation and inactivity.”18 This focus on inactivity places
Agamben in a lineage of thinkers, among them Alexandre Kojève, Georges
Bataille, Raymond Queneau, and Maurice Blanchot, who have made the
idea of désoeuvrement—which is alternately translated in Agamben’s texts as
deactivation, idleness, inoperativity, and unworking—central to their thought.
Furthermore, it puts him at odds with a certain productivist strand of Marx-
ism, while nonetheless taking him close to Marx’s own insight that labor,
like Bartleby’s copying, “exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the
bodiliness of the worker” yet is actualized as “value-positing productive
activity by capital.”19 Agamben’s désoeuvrement, as Leland de la Durantaye
suggests, “refers not only to a refusal to do the work of a coercive society,”
but also to an ontological reflection on the modalities of being.20 It is here
that Bartleby’s worklessness intersects with the possibility of reorienting the
relation between potentiality and actuality, in order to enable a politics of
pure means and that redemption that I have suggested consists in a free
use of human capacities.
In what follows, I suggest that situating Agamben’s elusive statements
about the fulfillment of the law in the context of his readings of Judeo-
Christian messianism illuminates both the nature of this deactivation (or
inoperativeness) of the law, and the passage to justice it opens. At stake
in this is the possibility of responding to the normalization of the state
of exception, and formulating a politics and a life that escape the ban of
sovereign power. The “happy life,” which Agamben offers as an alterna-
tive to the vulnerable and fearful life, on whose protection the liberal
state stakes its claim to legitimacy, is only possible after what he terms the
“fulfillment” of the law; neither a return to an idyllic or prelapsarian past,
nor to a less exceptional regime of law, the happy life is a new form of
life premised on the unworking of the relation between law and violence
that is constitutive of sovereignty. What interests him is the possibility of
a figure of the law that survives its own fulfillment and the severing of its
nexus with violence, “a law that no longer has force or application,” and
that opens up the possibility of what Walter Benjamin termed “a state of
the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be
appropriated or made juridical.”21 If the possibility of such a law leads us
to an examination of messianism, this is because it is in messianism, and,
specifically, in “primitive Christianity” that Agamben identifies the first
attempt to formulate the problem of the status of the fulfilled law.
Agamben’s analysis of the proximity of the state of exception to the
paradigm of messianic time is important for another reason also: as we have
seen, it is in the messianic tradition—this time in its Jewish, rather than
its Christian form—that we see one of the earliest articulations of the rela-
tion between catastrophe and redemption that sustains Agamben’s hopeful

account of our times. In a section of the Babylonian Talmud devoted to
the coming of the Messiah, an enigmatic conversation is recounted: in the
midst of a series of prophecies about the Messianic event, those conversing
utter what seems a most peculiar statement: “Let him come, but let me not
see him.”22 Why, given the hopes of redemption bound up with the figure
of the Messiah, would these Talmudic figures wish to avoid him? This is
the question of Rabbi Abaye, who also proposes an answer: “What is your
reason?” he asks the Rabbis. “Shall we say, because of the birth pangs of the
Messiah?”23 The phrase “birth pangs of the Messiah,” as Gershom Scholem
clarifies, refers to the messianic age itself, and returns us to the belief in the
catastrophic nature of redemption that we have already encountered. Given
the horrors that were believed to presage the Messiah, it is understandable
that these teachers feared the messianic age, even to the point of hoping
not to see it. There is, however, another contrary result of the doubling of
the messianic event, in which catastrophe and redemption appear tightly
bound: the notion of the birth pangs of the Messiah fosters hope amidst
desperation, as the appearance of hell on earth can interpreted as a sign
that the long-awaited redemption is imminent.
I have already traced just such a relationship between hope and des-
peration in Agamben’s thought, and shown that, if he rejects a politics that
seeks to ward off danger through the security of a sovereign state and the
rule of law, or through a return to what he sees as the exhausted distinctions
of classical political thought, this is because he sees, in the midst of the
normalization of the exception, the faint outline, the potential existence,
of a “completely new politics.”24 In formulating such a politics, Agamben
is drawn persistently to the problem of the law, and to what, in his view,
characterizes law today—its emptiness, its lack of content. Today, he argues,
we live in a nihilistic age in which a law that has become indistinguish-
able from the exception remains in force despite its emptiness. And yet
rather than trying to restore its meaning or separate the legal order from
the exception, his analysis tends toward a formulation which mirrors the
thesis that the messianic age will not be without potentially cataclysmic
birth pangs. In his view, the collapse of norm and exception unleashes
the catastrophic force of an unrestrained sovereign power. And yet, while
there may be plenty to fear in this blurring of the distinctions through
which liberalism has sought to limit sovereign power, he sees this increasing
indistinction as the condition of possibility of an escape from the sovereign
ban. In what follows, I outline his understanding of the status of the law in
the messianic age in order to elucidate his understanding of the fulfillment,
which he believes will put an end to its travails.
The Law Is a Dry Canal
The problem of the status of a law that remains in force after the arrival
of the Messiah is a central preoccupation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,
yet despite this centrality, the Pauline critique of nomos remains enigmatic.
While Romans stresses that “a man, is justified by faith without the deeds of
the law” (Rom. 3:28), Paul urges obedience to the constituted authorities,
and is adamant that the law not simply be abolished. In a passage that is
particularly significant for Agamben’s own account of the law, Paul writes,
“Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish
the law” (Rom. 3:31). In his seminal work on Romans, Karl Barth provides
one way—“the church way,” Jacob Taubes has suggested25—to understand
Paul’s approach to the law, which can also help to clarify Agamben’s under-
standing of the status of the law in messianic time. The law, he writes,
is “a dry canal which in a past generation and under different conditions
had been filled with the living water of faith and of clear perceptions.”26
It is possible that Barth has in mind here that river, which, we read in
Genesis, once “went out of Eden to water the garden,” and nourished both
the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:10).
The dry canal, however, which in Barth’s reading of Paul, was formed by
the rushing water of revelation, is no longer nourished by it and the tree
of life no longer grows alongside the tree of knowledge. While the men
who have the law inhabit this empty canal, tending its banks, oblivious
to the fact that it has run dry, “the living water fashions its own course,”
leaving them behind in the dusty riverbed.27
The law and religion, Barth writes, are an “impress of revelation,”
which provides those who tend to it with the “form of an experience that
had once been theirs.”28 Yet to fail to notice that this impress of revelation
(and the status it grants) remains in force as pure form, was, in Barth’s
view, the plight of those Jews who refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah.
“What does it avail at the judgment that thou dost dwell on the banks
of the canal if the canal be empty?” he asks. “Can the possibility that the
water has been cut off be ruled out?”29 While at this point Barth poses this
as a question, it becomes clear that in his interpretation Paul does indeed
believe that the water to which the empty canal bed bears witness will
no longer flow through it. In a direct challenge to circumcision, the key
marker of covenant and inclusion in the law, Barth argues that the “form
of holiness is holy only in its form; and no attempt to spiritualize it can
protect such holiness from ever increasing vacuity.”30 The law that remains
in force after the messianic event, in Barth’s reading, is an empty law, a
vacuous law devoid of life and content.
In Agamben’s view, such vacuity and emptiness characterize the law

in the state of exception that has become the norm—a law stripped of
transcendent authority and with no substantial claim to legitimacy. In
attempting to grasp the status of such a law, he turns to a letter addressed
to Benjamin, in which Scholem depicts the law in Kafka’s stories as the
“nothing of revelation.” “Where the wealth of significance is gone,” Scho-
lem writes, “and what appears, reduced, so to speak, to the zero point of
its own content, still does not disappear (and Revelation is something that
appears), there the Nothing appears.”31 This zero-point of content that
Scholem describes is a state of being that is defined by its own absence, a
state of privation in which “presence is lacking in its absence.”32 In Kafka’s
stories, the law exists only in the form of its own nothingness, which
nonetheless does not amount to a simple lack of law, but to a powerfully
present absence. The fact that the law is not formulated in prohibitions
intensifies its power over life, ensuring that no act can be understood to
be in accordance with the law and no space can safely be assumed to be
outside its grasp. The nothing of revelation, Scholem explains to Benjamin,
is “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it
still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.”33
This being in force without significance that Scholem describes, is, in
Agamben’s view, precisely the structure of the empty law that subsists in
the state of exception, the pure potentiality of the law, which is not the
application of a rule but an abandonment: an exposure to the severity of
a law that better resembles a Kafkaesque trial in that it is neither a sub-
poena to appear before a court nor the jurisdiction of a particular law but
simply a compulsion to appear before the law as such at the zero-point of
its content. Today, Agamben argues, we all live in the ban of an abstract
and indeterminate law that retains its force despite its lack of content.
“All societies and all cultures today (it does not matter whether they are
democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive),” he writes, “have
entered into a legitimation crisis in which law . . . is in force as the pure
nothing of revelation.”34 What kind of a “today” is Agamben assuming
here? His analysis presupposes a certain understanding of modernity, and of
relatively recent history (of the two world wars and their aftermath) against
the background of which our time appears as defined by the collapse of
transcendent foundations for law, the undermining of the Enlightenment
faith in progress by the very history that was supposed to lead inexorably to
a more humane world, the collapse of the Stalinist states, the global domi-
nance of spectacular capitalism, and the troubling of substantive concep-
tions of community brought about by extensive (and often undocumented)
levels of migration.
In her perspicuous account of the situation of politics after the demise

of progress, Politics Out of History, Wendy Brown offers a description of our
time that captures something of the experience of this Nothing. Arguing
that modernity has severely eroded the naturalistic epistemological and
ontological foundations of sovereignty and right, Brown suggests that our
condition is defined by the fact that, although “we have ceased to believe
in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood,
statehood and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if
these premises still held.”35 Like the men who live on the banks of Barth’s
empty canal, acting as if it were still a source of rushing water, we live
in the ban of a juridical order that is devoid of meaning, yet remains in
force. Agamben goes further than Brown in his suggestion that escaping
our current predicament requires nothing short of a deconstruction of the
history of Western politics and metaphysics, the retrieval of the possibili-
ties covered over by tradition, and formulation of “a new and coherent
ontology of potentiality.”36
Aristotle and the Origins of Sovereignty
In Homo Sacer, Agamben writes that the paradox of sovereignty, which

refers to life by withdrawing from it, is witnessed most clearly in the prob-
lem of the relation of constituent power to constituted power. Here he has
two targets: one is the position—epitomized in the legal theory of Schmitt’s
archrival Hans Kelsen but present in much liberal legal thought—which
attempts to reduce all political power to norms, thus effectively banishing
constituent power, and, in its extreme form, politics itself. In Agamben’s
view, variations of such an approach are dominant today, as “fewer and
fewer are willing to claim that constituting power is originary and irreduc-
ible.”37 Despite his animosity to liberal attempts to banish constituent power
to a prejuridical realm of fact, however, he is similarly dissatisfied with
the position of the “democratico-revolutionary tradition,”38 which affirms
precisely the uncontainable nature of constituent power—a position most
prominently associated with the work of Antonio Negri, for whom “con-
stituent power resists being constitutionalized.”39 In Negri’s view, constitu-
ent power (potenza) is in conflict with every constituted authority, and
has an autonomous existence that can never be reduced to such authority:
while constituent power is revolutionary, constituted power (potere) finds
its slogan in the words of Napoleon: “The revolution is over.”40
Despite the distance that would appear to separate Negri’s assertion
of the irreducibility of constituent power from the liberal attempt to con-
strain all power within a system of legality, Agamben, relying on Walter

Benjamin’s theorization of the relation of law to violence, argues that these
are two aspects of a single dialectic. In his Critique of Violence, Benjamin
distinguishes between two types of violence (Gewalt) as means, which he
calls law-founding (or positing) violence, and law-preserving violence.41
While law-founding violence refers to the originary violence that estab-
lishes a new law—overcoming all hostile counterviolence to achieve a
stable situation that can then be codified—law-preserving violence relies
on precisely the stability and monopolization of the use of violence that
law-founding violence brings about. Equating constituent and constituted
power with law-founding and law-preserving violence, Agamben writes:
[I]f constituting power is, as the violence that posits law, certainly
more noble than the violence that preserves it, constituting power
still possesses no title that might legitimate something other than
law-preserving violence and even maintains an ambiguous and
ineradicable relation with constituted power.42
Agamben’s thought thus starts from the Benjaminian conviction that as

long as this relation remains, every act of foundation and every law that is
established and then preserved, is, as Werner Hamacher suggests, subject
to a more powerful law of “historical change and internal structural trans-
formation”—perceived on the model of a dialectical oscillation between
law founding and preserving violence—in which the degradation of one
is bound up with the continuation of the other.43 To escape this dialectic,
he suggests, we need to completely reformulate the problem of constituent
power and sever the nexus between means and ends.
Such a task is already a daunting one. And yet, Agamben goes further
than Benjamin to argue that escaping the sovereign relation requires nothing
less than a confrontation with the way in which metaphysics has constructed
the problem of modality. The “unresolved dialectic between constituting
power and constituted power,” he writes, “opens the way for a new articula-
tion of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which requires noth-
ing less than a rethinking of the ontological categories of modality in their
totality.”44 Sovereignty, for Agamben, is both a political and an ontological
category, which is sustained by what, following Gérard Mairet, he terms
the “ideology of potentiality,” which ensures that (sovereign) potentiality
is operative even before it is actualized and presupposes obedience prior to
the institutions that are supposed to command it.45 In examining the struc-
ture of sovereignty, we thus run up against “the ontological root of every
political power.”46 Such a suggestion tends to displace the political events
he analyzes from the specific contexts in which they occurred, locating

their conditions of possibility in the very structure of metaphysics. It thus
reflects that tension between the ontic and the ontological levels of analysis
I have already described in relation to his understanding of abandonment.
To deepen this account, I now turn to Agamben’s attempt rethink modal-
ity, which, like much of his critique of Western politics, proceeds by way
of a critical rereading of Aristotle. Only by understanding his claim that, in
his formulation of potentiality, Aristotle “actually bequeathed the problem
of sovereignty to Western philosophy” can we understand why he sees in
Bartleby the strongest objection to sovereign power.47
Agamben’s account of potentiality proceeds through a reading of Book
Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics—to which Martin Heidegger devoted a lec-
ture course that is of the utmost importance for his interpretation.48 Here,
in opposition to the Megarians, for whom “a thing can act only when it
is acting,” Aristotle suggests that to ensure the independent existence of
potentiality, and prevent it passing immediately into actuality, all poten-
tiality must also be potentiality not to (adynamia).49 “What is potential,”
Aristotle writes, “can both be and not be, for the same is potential both
to be and not to be.”50 The difficulty of this attempt to think the potential
stems from the fact that what Aristotle is attempting to think is the very
existence of a privation. “To be potential,” Agamben writes, “means: to be
one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity.”51 This is clearest in
the case of what Aristotle refers to as an “effective potentiality,” which—
in contrast to the “generic potentiality” of a child, who may grow up to
become any number of things—belongs to the one who remains in full
possession of a capability while it is not in use. Here Heidegger uses the
example of the capability to make pots of the potter who is off work at the
tavern, asking, “does he leave this capability at home when he goes to have
a beer?”52 For our purposes, Avicenna provides a more pertinent example
of what he terms a “complete” or “perfect” potentiality—“the scribe who
is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he does
not write,” a figure embodied in Melville’s scrivener.53
Such perfect potentiality remains capable of the act in withdrawing
from it, and so “maintains itself in relation to the act in the form of its
own suspension.”54 Thus, the view that potentiality must “constitutively
be the potentiality not to” provides the ontological underpinning for both
Agamben’s theorization of law’s application as predicated on its suspension
in the state of exception and for his understanding of language, whose
reference he sees as predicated on its ability to exist in suspended form,
independently of any concrete act of enunciation (as langue, rather than
parole in Saussure’s terms). The novelty of Agamben’s position lies in the
relation he establishes between Aristotle’s account of potentiality and the

theory of sovereignty most provocatively stated in the searing words with
which Schmitt begins his Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides
on the exception.”55 As we have seen, in Schmitt’s view the law presup-
poses the possibility of its own suspension and the anomic reproduction of
the normal conditions that would enable the reintroduction of the (legal)
norm. The sovereign, he argues, has the absolute power to decide that the
state is in danger and to suspend the legal order and take the “necessary
measures” to restore order. Schmitt was thus less interested in the codifi-
cation of positive law than in the conditions of possibility of legal order,
which, according to Agamben’s reading, he was firmly convinced must
be located in its potential not to apply. This means, Agamben suggests,
that for Schmitt, “the state of exception represents the pure and originary
form of the enforcement of the law.”56 It is this ban structure—through
which law’s application is secured by way of its suspension, which subjects
life to law’s power not to apply—that Agamben traces to Aristotle. “For
the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in no longer applying,”
he writes, “corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains
itself in actuality precisely through its ability not to be.”57 The role of
the sovereign is to ensure the possibility of a passage between the anomic
production of a factually normal situation and the law through a decision
that temporarily renders them indistinguishable.
This question of the passage, or the actualization of potentiality, is
central to Agamben’s account of Aristotle. In what he terms “one of the
most acute testimonies to his genius,” he finds the possibility of such a pas-
sage in Aristotle’s suggestion that a “thing is said to be potential if, when
the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing
impotential (that is, there will be nothing able not to be).”58 By rejecting
“traditional interpretations,” which take this to mean that the possible is
that with respect to which nothing is impossible, Agamben reorients the
problem of modality; if, in the passage to actuality, nothing is able not to
be, he argues, this does not suggest the nullification of the potential not to,
but rather its complete realization in the act.59 If the formula of sovereignty
first appears in Aristotle, this, he argues, is because the passage to actuality
is not the destruction of the potential not to be, but its realization, a “gift
of the self to the self,” in which potentiality and actuality are rendered
indistinguishable.
Agamben is at pains to locate this indistinguishability of potentiality
and actuality in Aristotle’s work, yet his insistence that the “potential not
to” is preserved not destroyed in actuality goes further than the following
passage from De Anima, which he cites as evidence:
To suffer is not a simple term, but is in one sense a certain

destruction through the opposite principle and, in another sense,
the preservation [soteria, salvation] of what is in potentiality by
what is in actuality and what is similar to it. For he who possesses
science [in potentiality] becomes someone who contemplates in
actuality, and either this is not an alteration—since here there is
a gift of the self to itself and to actuality [epidosis eis eauto]—or
this is an alteration of a different kind. (De anima, 417b, 2–16)60
Glossing this passage, Agamben writes that Aristotle describes the passage
to actuality “not as an alteration or destruction of potentiality in actual-
ity but as a preservation and ‘giving of the self to itself’ of potentiality.”61
In another essay, he cites this passage again, arguing that in contrast “to
the traditional idea of a potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we
are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in
actuality.”62 Although these glosses tend to erase the ambiguity in Aristo-
tle’s account of the passage from potential to act, they serve to stress what
Agamben sees as the central characteristic of this passage: its formal prox-
imity to the Schmittian schema of the exception, in which the application
of the law does not nullify its constitutive impotentiality, but preserves it
in the form of the incorporation of the sovereign decision to suspend the
law into the juridical order.
It is this structure of suspension that Agamben finds in Aristotle:
if every potentiality is constitutively an impotentiality, he argues, then
this must be true even of impotentiality itself, which must maintain the
potential to not not be (that is, impotentiality must retain the potential
to come into actuality). Thus, he reinterprets actuality as what Daniel
Heller-Roazen terms a “potential to the second degree,” and thereby com-
plicates every attempt to rigidly distinguish potentiality from actuality.63
In Agamben’s view, this complication is already present in Aristotle’s text,
and he insists (against Aristotle’s stated position that “actuality is prior to
both power and potency”)64 that it is never clear to an “insightful reader”
whether Aristotle grants primacy to potentiality or actuality. Central to
Agamben’s account of potentiality—which is indebted to Heidegger’s desire
to avoid the “metaphysical” thinking of possibility “solely in contrast to
‘actuality’ ”65—is an indistinction of potentiality and actuality, which would
have been foreign to Aristotle; “at the limit,” he writes “pure potentiality
and pure actuality are indistinguishable.”66
What is this limit? It should come as no surprise to those familiar
with Agamben’s use of “limit figures”—the camp, the homo sacer, and so
on—that this point of indistinction is nothing other than the sphere of
sovereignty. An “act is sovereign,” he suggests, “when it realizes itself by

simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving
itself to itself.”67 This gift of the self to the self is, in Agamben’s account,
the sovereign self-grounding of Being, which is preceded by nothing but
its own impotentiality, and of which potentiality and actuality are the two
faces. That which is sovereign is therefore that which is able to main-
tain itself in suspension, to survive its own privation; in Aristotle’s words,
“some non-existent things exist potentially; they are non-existent inas-
much as they do not exist in complete reality [i.e., actuality].”68 It is such
a sovereign structure that Agamben identifies in phenomena as diverse
as Scholem’s nothing of revelation, Nancy’s abandonment, and Schmitt’s
sovereign exception, each of which premises power’s grasp on life on its
ability not to apply.
This reformulation of potentiality is central to Agamben’s critique of
both the aforementioned approaches to the problem of constituent power.
While he compares the Megarians, in their reduction of all potentiality to
actuality, to “those politicians today who want to reduce all constituting
power to constituted power,”69 his argument that, at the (sovereign) limit,
potentiality and actuality cannot be distinguished informs his criticism of
those, like Negri, who wish to affirm the radical alterity of constituent
power. Negri bases his argument that constituent power is irreducible to
constituted power on the fact that it is neither derived from the constituted
order nor limited to instituting it. Agamben’s reading of Aristotle disrupts
this by identifying these as characteristics of sovereignty also, which, as the
potential not to apply, is prior to the constituted order and can maintain
itself indefinitely in the absence of such an order. In the sovereign ban,
he argues, constituting and constituted power, means and ends, potentiality
and actuality can no longer be distinguished, as the “violence exercised in
the state of exception clearly neither preserves nor simply posits law, but
rather conserves it in suspending it and posits it in excepting itself from
it.”70 Just as Agamben sees the increasing indistinction between life and
politics and law and fact as threatening us with great dangers while also
creating the possibility of a new politics, this indistinction of potentiality
and actuality is both the generalization of a terrifying sovereign power, and
the precondition for escaping the dialectic of constituting and constituted
power, or law-founding and law-preserving violence. Only this indistinc-
tion, in his view, makes it possible to conceive of the actuality of potential-
ity, and to move from an instrumental account of praxis toward a politics
of means without ends.
This offers us an initial insight into why Bartleby, who neither pre-
serves the law nor founds a new one, is attractive to Agamben: in his
intransigent passivity, Bartleby eschews both the reduction of politics to

a system of rules, which must be copied endlessly, and the revolutionary
attempt to found a new constitution, which would be insufficient to break
out of the cycle of instrumental violence that sustains the legal order.
Bartleby is thus a figure of the voyou desouvré, whose most colloquial trans-
lation would be the “lazy rascal.”71 It is difficult to grasp, however, how
Bartleby’s individualized inaction provides any form of alternative to the
cycle of juridical violence, or, indeed, to sovereign power. Bartleby is, after
all, a lone figure whose “objection to sovereign power” never goes beyond
the quiet insistence on a preference, or lack of preference.72 I return to
consider Bartleby’s solitary resistance below. To understand why, despite
all this, Agamben nonetheless sees him as a new Messiah, it will first be
necessary to turn to his attempt to think this indistinction of potentiality
and actuality outside of the paradigm of sovereignty. Such a reading could
productively be pursued through an interpretation of Agamben’s relation
to Heidegger, which could lead us to conceptualize Bartleby as embodying
the renunciation of that instrumental rationality and will to power that
Heidegger saw as correlates of the subordination of potentiality to actual-
ity. Here, however, I would like to approach the problem from another
direction, which will bring us back closer to the problem of the law. After
all, Bartleby is not only, according to Agamben’s reading, a new Messiah.
He is also a legal scribe. In what follows I position Bartleby alongside two
figures who are crucial to Agamben’s thinking of both messianism and the
law—Walter Benjamin and the Apostle Paul.
Past Contingent
The question of the autonomous existence of potentiality is ultimately

that of contingency and human freedom. If potentiality passed immediately
into the act, then each act would be necessary. Humans could therefore be
defined by a vocation, a fact, by a biology that was our destiny. In contrast
to other living beings, which “are capable only of their specific potential-
ity,” humans, Agamben argues, are also capable of our own impotentiality,
which ensures that we are capable of being other than we are—that we
are beings of pure potentiality, irreducible to biology, identity, or vocation.
This affirmation of contingency, however, has always been a conditional
one. “If Being at all times and places preserved its potential not to be,”
he writes, “the past itself could in some sense be called into question, and
moreover, no possibility would ever pass into actuality or remain in actu-
ality.”73 To mitigate such a possibility, Aristotle relied on two principles,
which Agamben refers to as the principles of “conditioned necessity” and the

“irrevocability of the past (or the unreliability of potentiality in the past).”74
The first of these, “what is is necessary as long as it is, and what is not
is necessary as long as it is not,” means that what has happened cannot
not have happened, as (while potentiality is both the potentiality to do
and the potentiality not to) in the moment at which something occurs,
it cannot be otherwise.75 The second, on the other hand, concerns the
status of the past, which it frames as complete and unchangeable. “This,”
Aristotle writes, “is why no one wants Troy to have been sacked, since no
one decides what happened but only what will be and is possible.”76 The
principle of the irrevocability of the past ensures that the past is fixed and
closed, and that what is done cannot be undone.
In his In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek draws out the stakes
of this principle of conditioned necessity, which he terms the “dialectical
reversal of contingency into necessity”77 by citing Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who
illustrates the principle in these terms:
If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe for example,

it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it
did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s
actualisation—the fact that it takes place—which retroactively
creates it as necessary.78
Both Dupuy and Žižek are concerned to challenge a conception of history

as predestination, in which events are necessary before they take place, yet
they nonetheless see the actualization of an event as retroactively working
on the past to erase the event’s contingency. Žižek provides the example of
the October Revolution of 1917: while the Bolshevik victory was a contin-
gent, historical occurrence, he argues, once they had “won and stabilized
their hold on power, their victory appeared as an outcome and expression
of a deeper historical necessity.”79 Žižek extends this logic even to the
controversial first election of George W. Bush: while the presidency itself
was decided by the Supreme Court, and a few hanging chads in Florida,
after Bush came to power, he argues, this result “retroactively appears as an
expression of a deeper US trend.”80 While this formulation gives the past
a certain openness, it is a paradoxical openness that rewrites the past in
order to limit contingency, erasing it in an appearance of historical necessity.
Agamben’s reconceptualization of the relation between potentiality
aims to challenge the belief in “deeper historical necessities,” which serves
to retroactively nullify contingency. In an essay on language, written three
years before the Bartleby essay, he states the fundamental intention of his
engagement with Aristotle’s theorization of potentiality in the following

terms:
[I]s it possible to grasp contingency otherwise than as “something

that could have been”? Is it possible, in other words, to call into
question the principle of conditioned necessity, to attest to the
very existence of potentiality, the actuality of contingency? Is it
possible, in short, to attempt to say what seems impossible to
say, that is: that something is otherwise than it is?81
Two key things are at stake in this attempt to assure the actuality of potenti-
ality: first, if we are always able to be other than we are, this destabilizes the
attempt to found state power on the representation of a fixed substantive
identity. Second, the repotentialization of the past, by granting possibility
to what is or has been, disrupts the tradition, and its codification in law
that is premised on the erasure and forgetting of manifold unactualized
possibilities, and on the too-hasty burial of the hopes of those who fought
for a different world.
It is here that Agamben positions Bartleby. In the formula “I would
prefer not to,” he sees a liminal zone suspended between affirmation and
negation, being and nonbeing, predicated on the renunciation of any will
or reason to choose either option. Bartleby, in Agamben’s reading, resists
both the “complicated Western onto-theological ceremony” that attempts
to hold onto being as pure positivity, and the alternate, yet complicit,
approach of contemporary nihilism, which seeks to hold onto the Nothing.
Agamben is interested in neither option, but in a form of redemption that
is foremost the redemption of that which was not; not “the saving of the
past,” as Thanos Zartaloudis notes, “but the saving of what never was.”82
Eschewing the decision between yes and no, creation and destruction,
Bartleby, he argues, opens the space for such a redemption by conducting an
experiment in what can either be or not be—an experiment in potentiality
itself, which requires the overturning of the principle of the irrevocability
of the past. If conducting such an experiment makes Bartleby a Messiah,
Agamben argues (in what is the most original, if also the least textually
grounded, aspect of his reading of Melville’s story) this is because it “inau-
gurates an absolutely novel quastio disputata, that of ‘past contingents.’ ”83
Thus, while for Deleuze, Bartleby is “the new Christ,”84 Agamben’s Bartleby
comes “not to redeem what was, but to save what was not,” to redeem
those broken promises, unrealized potentials and forgotten struggles that are
covered over by tradition and law, by renouncing the copying that presup-
poses and repeatedly affirms their forgetting.85 Thus, Bartleby responds to
what in The Time That Remains, Agamben terms the “messianic modal-
ity”—exigency, which “consists in a relation between what is or has been
and its possibility.”86 In exigency, Agamben locates the demand of the
forgotten, but this demand is not simply to be remembered and inserted
into a new tradition, nor to be frozen in commemoration, but “to remain
with us and be possible for us in some manner.”87 The messianic modality,
which Agamben finds in Bartleby, is thus one in which potentiality does
not precede actuality but follows it, restoring it to contingency and enabling
the forgotten to act on the present.
The political implications of this are made clearer when Agamben
positions Bartleby in terms of the redemptive role assigned by Walter
Benjamin to remembrance, which “can make the incomplete (happiness)
complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete.”88 In “On the Concept of
History”—which serves as a critique of a teleological view of history that
builds its monuments on the graves of the forgotten—Benjamin counter-
poses the time of memory to the homogenous and empty time presupposed
by theories of progress.89 Writing in 1940, just before he committed sui-
cide rather than return to face the Nazis after being refused passage across
the border to Spain, Benjamin had good reason to contest the vision of
progress that sustained German social democracy’s refusal to let the rise
of National Socialism interrupt its belief that history was on its side. The
stakes in Benjamin’s attempt to formulate a new conception of history
and a new understanding of memory could not have been higher, as this
passage indicates:
One reason fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress,

its opponents treat it as a historical norm.—The current amaze-
ment that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in
the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is
not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that
the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.90
In opposition to this progressive conception of history, Benjamin posits a

messianic philosophy of history in which remembrance holds the power to
challenge the irrevocability of the past, releasing possibilities that were not
able to be actualized. In the third volume of his great novel In Search of Lost
Time, whose influence on Benjamin’s conception of memory should not be
underestimated, Marcel Proust writes: “And perhaps the resurrection of the
soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.”91 Memory,
for Benjamin, holds a similarly redemptive power. He conceives it not as a
record of established facts, but rather as a form of historical consciousness
whose transformation alters the way in which the past exists in the pres-
ent. If Benjamin sees remembrance as intimately bound to redemption,
this is because redemption, in his view, is not a passage through empty
time to a brighter future, but a relation between the present and its past,
in which the struggles of the past are seized and reactualized in what he
terms “now-time” (Jetzeit).
In his Arcades Project, Benjamin records a passage from a letter in
which Max Horkheimer disputes this conception of historical incomplete-
ness. “Past injustice has occurred and is completed,” Horkheimer writes.
“The slain are really slain . . . If one takes the lack of closure entirely
seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment.”92 He thus proposes a
bleak amendment to the notion of historical incompleteness suggesting
that while suffering is irreparable, the positive character of justice and joy
is negated by their transience. “The corrective to this line of thinking,”
Benjamin responds in his notes, “may be found in the consideration that
history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remem-
brance <Eingedenken>. What science has ‘determined,’ remembrance can
modify.”93 Benjaminian memory is thus not about recalling the past “as it
really was,” but about an active and transformative orientation to it, which
undermines settled historical narratives and the power structures they sup-
port, by redeeming what was not able to be.94 The “past makes a claim on
the present and future,” Eric L. Santner writes, “precisely insofar as that
past is marked by a certain void or lack of being which persists into the
present.”95 While the slain are really slain, the future of their unrealized
hopes, whether they died in vain, and the ways in which their struggles
reverberate in the present and transform the future remain open questions.
Nothing, as Benjamin insisted, can be considered as lost to history.
In his response to Horkheimer, Benjamin writes that the possibility of
memory to make both the complete incomplete and the incomplete com-
plete is a form of theology, a statement he complicates with the precaution
that remembrance forbids us either from “conceiving of history as funda-
mentally atheological” or from writing it “with immediately theological
concepts.”96 This model of history is “theological” insomuch as it concerns
the redemption of the past; as Wendy Brown suggests, the “theological
moment that Benjamin believes inhered in all revolutionary hopes pertains
to traces of the good life left behind, preserved and cultivated as imagistic
memories.”97 And what of Horkheimer’s argument that the belief in the
possibility of redeeming such moments relies on a belief in Judgment Day?
Here, Benjamin’s (and Agamben’s) messianism must be distinguished from
eschatology; as we have seen, if there is a Judgment Day, then this “Day of
Judgment is not different from any others.”98 The attitude of the historian
who wishes to account for the possibility of redemption, in Benjamin’s view,

must be guided by a criterion of the present in which “[e]very instant is the
instant of judgment on certain moments that precede it.”99 The redemption
of the past is not something that occurs at the end of time, but something
that may occur at any instant, as a particular moment is blasted out of the
past and made to live again in the present.
In The Time That Remains, Agamben writes that the memory that
is at stake in messianism is concerned exclusively with the “economy of
salvation.”100And yet, he asks, could this not be true of every memory? It is
within such an economy that he positions Bartleby.101 Yet despite his reli-
ance on Benjamin, from whom he takes the idea that every memory holds
the possibility to seize the past, fulfilling it and making it possible again, the
memory Benjamin evokes in the theses is not an individual memory, but
the memory of the “struggling oppressed class” that seeks to reactualize the
hopes, defeats, and promises of past generations to transform the present.102
Does Bartleby really perform the role Benjamin assigns to remembrance?
Does he succeed in grasping a moment of the past, actualizing it in the
“time of the now,” and transforming the present? Agamben seems far more
interested in the formal characteristic of his formula, which, eschewing any
determinate preference, opens a space of absolute contingency in which
what happens could just as well have not happened. It is perhaps for this
reason that this account of Bartleby as Messiah often appears strained, rely-
ing heavily on Benjamin’s messianism, yet stripping it of the content, or
the specific struggles and moments of the past, of which it was composed.
Indeed, his reading of Bartleby is symptomatic of the same “nothingness”
that he identifies as a central feature of the law in the messianic age. His
positioning of Bartleby as Messiah replicates the form of a Benjaminian
messianism, while stripping it of the struggles of the oppressed, which, in
Benjamin’s view, could be reanimated in the present. I return to my con-
cerns about Agamben’s designation of Bartleby as a figure of redemption
toward the end of this chapter. Before doing so, it is necessary to examine in
greater detail the Benjaminian messianism that underlies this designation.
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin poses the problem of redemption
in terms of a “figural” relation in which a moment of the present comes
together with a moment of the past to form an image.103 “It is not that
what is past casts its light on what is present or what is present its light
on the past,” he writes. “Rather, image is that wherein what has been
comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”104 These
concepts of figure, image, and constellation, which enable a moment of the
past to be grasped and fulfilled in the “time of the now,” are central both to
Agamben’s reading of Paul and to his understanding of the relation of the
Messiah to the law. In The Time That Remains, he discusses the importance
Paul ascribed to figural relations between moments of the past and mes-
sianic time (such as that between Adam and Jesus), in which past events
come to prefigure or foreshadow those of the present.105 What Agamben
sees as most significant about this figural conception of history is not sim-
ply the fulfillment of the past in a future event to which it gestures, but
the “tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and
antitypos in an inseparable constellation.”106 The messianic is neither of
the terms in the typological relation, but the relation between them, which
transforms temporality itself, enabling “another world and another time”
to make themselves present in this world and in this time, and making it
possible for redemption to appear in the midst of catastrophe.107
Jacob Taubes has argued that just such a figural, or typological, rela-
tion clasps together Paul and Moses.108 The “sum total of Christian expe-
rience,” he argues, is captured in this “Moses-Paul typology.”109 If Paul is
the antitypos of Moses, then for Agamben this relation must be understood
in terms of the law that was carried from Mount Sinai by Moses, and,
according to this reading, fulfilled by Paul. Such fulfillment is central to
Agamben’s own reading of the law in force without significance, and pro-
vides him with a way to think beyond the reactionary desire to reinstill
law with a lost meaning, the nihilistic embrace of law’s emptiness, and
the dialectic of constituent and constituted power. But how are we to
understand such fulfillment? And what has it to do with Aristotle’s for-
mulation of potentiality? In an early treatment of potentiality, Agamben
cites Aristotle’s description of pleasure as that which is fulfilled in every
instant.110 From this, he writes, it follows that potentiality is contrary to
pleasure: it is “what is never enacted, what never achieves its end. It is,
in a word, pain.”111 This reading of potentiality has political implications
that return us to Barth’s empty canal and prefigure Agamben’s treatment
of the law that remains in force after the exception has become the norm.
Power, Agamben suggests, is an organization of potentiality, isolated from
its act. “Power bases its authority on this upgathering of pain, it literally
leaves the pleasure of man unfulfilled.”112
Another fragment in Idea of Prose, which treats the opposing tensions
within the idea of study, can bring into relief the relation among potential-
ity, pain, and fulfillment that Agamben is proposing here: in Judaism, as
is well known, study holds a privileged place on the road to redemption;
paradoxically, studium can be traced back to an etymological root signify-
ing a crash, or the shock of impact, illuminating the extent to which the
scholar is, in a certain sense, “stupid,” “stupefied by what has struck her,
unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold.”113 The
tension Agamben identifies in study is between a pole of suffering and a
messianic pole that drives toward fulfillment. The inability to find this
fulfillment, which captures one in the “stupefying” stage, Agamben writes,
accounts for “the sadness of the scholar [as] nothing is bitterer than a long
dwelling in potential.”114 If potentiality is severed from its act, it leads to
suffering, pain, and a form of state organization that resembles the state of
exception, in which the law is not applied, but remains in suspense.
There is no better way to understand what Scholem termed the
“Nothing of revelation” than as an organization of potentiality, which is
detached from its act and remains in force, unable to find fulfillment. In
attempting to think such fulfillment, against the sovereign ban, Agamben
distinguishes between two forms of messianism, or nihilism (an equivalence
about which both Benjamin and Scholem agree). While “imperfect nihil-
ism,” which Agamben sees not only in Scholem but in Schmitt, Nancy,
and Derrida, nullifies the law then leaves the empty law in force without
significance, the second is “a perfect nihilism” that does not even let valid-
ity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka,
“succeeds in finding redemption in overturning the Nothing.”115 Benjamin’s
suggestion for overturning the Nothing takes a directly political form in
the eighth of his theses on history. Once we have realized that the state
of emergency is the norm, he writes, “we will clearly see that it is our task
to bring about a real state of emergency.”116 This real state of emergency,
which deposes the law that remains in force in the state of exception,
disrupting the sovereign gesture that utilizes the exception as a means to
consolidate the legal order, is central to Agamben’s own conception of
the fulfillment of the law. “This paradigm,” he writes, “is the only way in
which one can understand something like an eskhaton—that is, something
that belongs to historical time and its law and, at the same time, puts an
end to it.”117 By refusing to enable the exception to be simply a means
to the reconsolidation of the legal order, the real state of exception, like
Bartleby’s formula, undercuts the possibility of sovereign decision on which
this order rests.
We can bring Agamben’s distinction between these two nihilisms and
his understanding of fulfillment into sharper focus by briefly contrasting his
messianism with that of Jacques Derrida. While deconstruction provides
an important background to Agamben’s thought—so much so that a cru-
cial early essay, “The Thing Itself” is dedicated to Derrida—he ultimately
believes that it is a “thwarted messianism,” which reveals the emptiness
of the law only to leave this empty law in place.118 If this critique seems
to position Derrida in terms that evoke Scholem’s account of the status

of the law in Kafka, this is because Agamben locates both the strength
and the ultimate weakness of deconstruction in the proximity he identifies
between Derrida’s thought and that of the great scholar of Jewish mysticism.
The prestige of deconstruction, he suggests, lies in having recognized that
today the entirety of tradition is “in force without significance.”119 And yet
he sees Derrida’s position, like Scholem’s, as one that, in maintaining the
empty law, is unable to bring it to fulfillment. Deconstruction would on
this account undermine the ground of the law by revealing the “mystical
foundation” of its authority, yet leave this groundless law in place, leaving
us within the grasp of the sovereign ban.120
In contrast to Agamben’s explicit antinomianism, Derrida’s work,
while sharing Agamben’s refusal to equate law with justice, is animated by
another concern: that “[a]bandoned to itself, the incalculable and giving
[donatrice] idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst
for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation.”121
Thus, in Benjamin’s evocation of a divine violence, Derrida saw a move
that took him to close to “the worst.” For the latter, law can never be just,
yet justice nonetheless demands the calculation of law, which must forever
approximate it; indeed, “in their very heterogeneity, these two orders are
undissociable.”122 In contrast to Benjamin’s antinomian account of justice,
for Derrida justice demands a decision in the present, yet it nonetheless
remains always avenir, “to come,” and thus “remains suspended,” as Adam
Thurschwell stresses, “in the ‘to come’ of a future that never arrives.”123
What Derrida terms the “messianic without messianism”—the messianic
signifying a structure of experience, while messianism signifies religious
belief in the coming of a determinate Messiah figure124—is thus an orien-
tation to a “to come,” an openness to the promise of a future and to the
coming of the other.
In contrast, for Agamben law is not a necessary condition of justice,
but that which must be fulfilled in the passage to it. “Justice without law,”
he writes in The Time That Remains, “is not the negation of the law, but
the realization and fulfillment, the pleroma of the law.”125 While Derrida
would no doubt see Agamben’s desire for a messianic fulfillment of the
law as being too close to “the worst,” if we return to Barth’s metaphor,
deconstruction, as Agamben sees it, would reveal to the men who have the
law that the riverbed they occupy has run dry, but provide them with no
alternative but to remain on its parched banks, repeating the empty ritu-
als around which they have structured their lives, fearful that abandoning
these may threaten them with disaster.126
Bartleby as Messiah?
In contrast to Scholem’s depiction of messianism as the “real anti-existen-

tialist idea,” which compels a life of waiting, a “life lived in deferral,”127
Benjamin poses the creation of a real state of emergency as a political task.
In a similar vein, Agamben posits that the Messiah must confront a law
that is in force without significance and that this “is also the task with
which we, who live in the state of exception that has become the rule,
must reckon.”128 To conclude, I would therefore like to offer some critical
comments about Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as the paradigmatic fig-
ure of such a task. After all, while Bartleby drives his employer to quit his
premises and relocate his law firm, his peace is short lived. In a final act of
frustration—prompted by complaints about the man left behind—Bartleby’s
former employer returns with an ultimatum: “Now one of two things must
take place,” he tells his former employee. “Either you must do something,
or something must be done to you.”129 Before Bartleby is able to respond
that presumably he prefers neither option, the decision is made for him.
The police arrive, and remove him to the tombs as a vagrant. Alone, and
silent, condemned to incarceration and death, Bartleby is an unlikely savior.
For Agamben, however, echoing Bartleby’s employer, “the walled
courtyard [where Bartleby meets his end] is not a sad place.”130 Referring
obliquely to Origen’s heretical doctrine, again developed via a reading of
Paul, Agamben depicts the jail as the site of an apokatastatis panton—a
universal salvation.131 But what kind of salvation does Bartleby offer? At the
very end of his most significant treatment of Melville’s scrivener, Agamben
refers to Bartleby, languishing in the “Halls of Justice” as a “new creature.”132
The new creature he has in mind here is no doubt the one that appears
at two particularly significant moments in Paul’s epistles. In the letter to
the Galatians, the new creature is what remains after Paul has nullified the
divisions of the law: “For in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “neither circumcision
availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature” (Gal. 6:15). In
the second letter to the Corinthians, it appears as a figure of the new life in
the Messiah: “If any man is in Christ he is a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17).
Bartleby, we can surmise, is thus a figure of the deactivation of the law of
works, and its messianic fulfillment in faith. Indeed it is to Paul himself that
Agamben traces the theme of désoeuvrement, which he suggests is a “good
translation of Pauline katargein”—the term through which Paul referred to
the messianic deactivation and fulfillment of the law.133
In this Pauline reading, we hear an echo of Scholem’s depiction of
the situation of the first Christians as split between “the apparent reality
which knew nothing of any Messianic transformation of the world and

their Messianic faith which daily expected the return of the Messiah in
his glory.”134 Such a split is clear in Barth’s suggestion that while, in the
messianic age, “the reality of our present existence continues as it is,”
the power of God offers “a lookout, a door, a hope.”135 In Barth’s view,
the power of the gospel offers an internal transformation that leaves the
world intact, while utterly altering it: “The prisoner,” he writes, “becomes a
watchman. Bound to his post as firmly as a prisoner in his cell, he watches
for the dawning of the day.”136 Without such a faith in the power of God,
it is hard to reconcile Agamben’s message of salvation with the narrator’s
picture of “the wasted Bartleby,” “strangely huddled . . . knees drawn up,”
his dim, open eyes the only sign that he is not sleeping, and so, will not
wake.137 Bartleby, who offers the strongest objection to sovereignty Agam-
ben can find in either history or in literature, dies alone in prison as the
world goes on around him—as the tombs continue to hold others in their
grasp and as his employer, no doubt, returns to his new chambers to con-
tinue his “snug business amongst rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and title
deeds.”138 Negri, writing with Michael Hardt, has suggested that Bartleby,
in his solitary withdrawal, is representative of a form of “social suicide.”139
The suicide, however, is not merely a social one; by repeating his formula
even in response to the Grub Man’s “disagreeable” offer of dinner, Bartleby
seems to suggest that only a withdrawal from life itself will free us from
the grip of the sovereign ban.
This leads us to a strange parallel, which could perhaps prompt a more
critical reflection on the endorsement of weakness implicit in Agamben’s
reading of Bartleby. The final section of Agamben’s major essay on Bartleby
is entitled “The Experiment, or On Decreation.”140 Although the term
decreation resembles the various translations of désoeuvrement in Agamben’s
work, this term is also a key technical term in the work of Simone Weil,
whose political thought was the subject of Agamben’s doctoral dissertation.
In an essay that bears the title “Decreation,” Weil describes decreation as
“making something created pass into the uncreated,” and compares it to
God’s self-abnegation in creating the world.141 In that essay, she writes:
Renunciation demands we should pass through anguish equivalent

to that which would be caused in reality by the loss of all loved
beings and all possessions, including our faculties and attainments
in the order of intelligence and character, our opinions, beliefs
concerning what is good, what is stable etc. And we must not
lay these things down of ourselves, but lose them—like Job.142
Not only does Melville’s narrator announce Bartleby’s death by responding

to the Grub Man’s question as to whether he is asleep with an unmarked
citation from Job, “With Kings and counselors,” but Weil, like Bartleby,
would ultimately carry her own self-abnegation to the point at which, ill
with tuberculosis and refusing to eat more than the rations in occupied
France, she starved herself to death.143
Given Agamben’s concern with enabling a life of potentiality, the
absolute eradication of potentiality in death cannot be the final conse-
quence of the messianic task he sees embodied in Bartleby. In the final
threshold of The Time That Remains, he reads Benjamin’s thesis that each
generation is endowed with a “weak messianic power” on which the past
has a claim as a disguised quotation of 2 Corinthians 12:9, “Power realizes
itself in weakness” and argues that Paul is the hunchback theologian who
guides Benjamin’s historical materialism.144 The weak messianic power, on
which Benjamin suggests that the past has a claim, however, does not lead,
like Pauline weakness, to “much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in
distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments,” (II Cor. 6:4) but to the recognition
that alive in class struggle are “confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and
fortitude,” which call into question past victories of the rulers.145 If we are
to confront the state of exception that has become the norm and live a
life of possibility, it is on these resources that we must draw. Perhaps then,
Benjamin’s evocation of the “proletarian general strike,” which is not a
means to an end, but rather, “sets itself the sole task of destroying state
power,” provides a better image of the form of worklessness that may offer
an objection to sovereignty than does Bartleby’s solitary death.146
Benjamin offers us a philosophy of history that rules out any attempt
to see it as conforming to a logic that would ultimately lead to redemp-
tion, even if this logic were to be conceived as a paradoxical one in which
catastrophe heralds redemption. For Benjamin, the possibility of justice
was always contingent, a matter of revolution not evolution. And this
revolution, as we have seen, should not be conceived as the locomotive
of history, but as “an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely,
the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”147 This means that
the forms of withdrawal adequate to challenging sovereign power must be
collective, rather than individual ones. Only a collective withdrawal from
a system in which each of us, whatever his preference, is forced to sell a
commodity, “which exists only as an ability, a capacity [Vermögen] of his
bodily existence”148 will be sufficient to prevent the otherwise inevitable
perpetuation and violent enforcement of the “business amongst rich men’s
bonds, and mortgages and title deeds.”149 Rather than dismissing Agamben’s
reading of Bartleby, it is worth asking whether, despite the seeming futil-

ity of Bartleby’s fate, he nonetheless gestures toward a potential politics
in which desubjectivation would not take an individual form, but would
instead consist in a refusal of communal identities and works, which could
allow a new politics and a new form of community to take place in the
wake of law’s fulfillment. It is to such a possibility that the final chapter
is devoted.
Chapter 5
A New Use
On the Society of the Spectacle
and the Coming Politics
Heaven and Hell, however, hang together.

—Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Among the voluminous speculations on the “world to come” that have

accompanied messianic prophecies, one stands out, not for the extravagance
of its predictions, but for the very banality of its account of redemption.
In the Coming Community, Agamben recounts the following tale, as told
by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: “The Hassidim tell a story about the
world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as
our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps
now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear
in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now,
just a little different.”1 There is no doubt something disappointing about
such an image of redemption, particularly when placed alongside Christian
promises of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), in which “there
shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying” (Rev. 21:4). Nonethe-
less, in offering a vision of the world to come that is intimately connected
to our world, it seems to foreshadow the possibility of changing our world,
even if only a little. And yet, as this tale was passed down by tradition,
and ultimately passed from Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question
of the nature of the change that would be required, and the agency that
could accomplish it, received different, and often contradictory, emphases.
In Bloch’s recounting of the tale—which introduces a slight, yet decisive,
alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin—if the world to
123
come will be just like this world, this does not mean that the little differ-
ence that would constitute it is easy to accomplish. All that is necessary
to establish this new world, Bloch suggests, is the slight displacement of
a stone, a cup, or a brush. “But this small displacement is so difficult to
achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world,
humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come.”2
What would it mean for us today to imagine a redeemed world in
which everything “will be as it is now, just a little different”? In what
would this difference consist, and how would it be possible to achieve it?
And what inflection would it give to the very idea of “redemption”? In
the second of his theses on history, Benjamin offers a vision of redemp-
tion that seems to owe something to the Hassidic tale: in contrast to a
utopia whose inspiration lies outside this world, he suggests that our own
times thoroughly color our image of happiness. “The kind of happiness
that could arouse envy in us,” he writes, “exists only in the air we have
breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have
given themselves to us.”3 Here we hear echoes of the redemptive relation
to the past outlined in the previous chapter, and indeed, Benjamin makes
clear that “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image
of redemption.”4 More importantly, his suggestion that we derive our vision
of happiness from the world in which we find ourselves makes it possible
(whether or not this was his intention) to eschew a model of redemption
premised on divine intervention and to imagine a form of immanent social
transformation, indeed, a form of politics.
In treating Agamben’s work, however, such an approach is compli-
cated by his unrelentingly bleak diagnosis of this world. What does it mean
to take our vision of happiness from a world whose paradigmatic instance
is the concentration camp? What does it mean to suggest that the new
form of life and completely new politics necessary to save us from catas-
trophe resemble nothing so much as the life we live today—a life typified
by the biopolitical collapse of the border that purported to separate it from
politics, by the normalization of the state of exception, and by the rule of
the economy over social life? Despite the bleakness of this depiction, it is
precisely within such a world that Agamben locates the possibility of what
he terms a “happy life.” To demonstrate this, I began at the beginning—that
is, with the ancient Greek origins of a politics that in Agamben’s view was
also, originarily, biopolitics. If we began at the beginning, however, we have
now reached the end: not only the end of politics, as Agamben sees it,
but the permanent suspension of the law and the nihilistic exhaustion of
meaning—a threshold beyond which Agamben sees all political praxis as
entrapped, unable to do more than repeat the empty gestures of exhausted
A NEW USE / 125
political forms. If we are to derive a vision of happiness from this world, we

must therefore find it here, amidst what Agamben—following those works
of Guy Debord in which he sees “the clearest and most severe analysis of
the miseries and slavery of a society that by now has extended its dominion
over the globe”5—terms the “society of the spectacle”: a society dominated
by the commodity form.
In spectacular society, Agamben suggests, all solid foundation, whether
for law or for language, have been hollowed out, and all the nations of the
earth have been driven toward a single destiny, typified by the “transforma-
tion of politics and of all social life into a spectacular phantasmagoria.”6
And yet, at this point he directs us in a startling direction: suggesting
that planetary humanity now comprises a global “petty bourgeoisie,” each
of us living out the “absurdity of individual existence,”7 he simultaneously
offers this petty bourgeoisie—for whom authenticity, vocation, differences
of language, custom, and character “no longer hold any meaning”—as the
precursors of a new life whose “unknowing midwives” are advertising and
pornography.8 In outlining the possibility of this new life, he offers a task
that, in its apparent modesty, echoes Benjamin’s version of the Hassidic
tale: “Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that
allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad
mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only
itself—this,” he writes, “is the political task of our generation.”9 From this
enigmatic suggestion, we can discern that if the petty bourgeoisie is the
cipher for Agamben’s hopes this is because its world—our world—somehow
resembles his own version of the world to come, indeed, resembles it more
so than it has at any other point in history. It is, it seems, amidst the vacu-
ity of this commodified world that he sees the potential of a new form of
life. When this resemblance has been noted by critics it has often been
greeted with perplexity, and with the suggestion that Agamben’s redemptive
vision is simply a restatement of the predicament from which he wishes to
free us. This is clear in Slavoj Žižek’s question: “[a]re we not encountering
in our social reality what Agamben envisages as a utopian vision?”10 and,
in a less critical tone, in Antonio Negri’s view that, in the Coming Com-
munity, “the experience of redemption was presented as dystopia.”11 Here
I suggest that although these thinkers are right to highlight the proximity
of Agamben’s diagnosis of our time to his account of a new form of life,
such critiques remain limited to the extent that they do not examine the
immanent dynamic in the present that he sees as enabling such a life.
Why, then, does Agamben believe that the society of the spectacle
is more conducive to such a form of life than any previous social form? To
answer this, it is necessary to pay special attention to the forms of praxis
he believes would enable us to move the stone or displace the cup that
would alter our world, slightly, yet decisively. In contrast to Bloch’s sugges-
tion that the tiny displacement that would bring about this world is too
difficult for humans to accomplish, Agamben’s account of our time implies
that humanity is faced with a task on which its very survival depends. We
have already seen that he is convinced that only a “completely new poli-
tics” will save us from the horrifying extension of exceptional biopolitical
power. In his work, “genuinely political paradigms are sought in experi-
ences and phenomena that are not usually considered political or that are
considered only marginally so.”12 In this chapter, I examine a number of
these experiences and phenomena, including his account of profanation as
a praxis capable of returning things to free use, his account of the desa-
cralizing potential of play, and his attempt to found a community without
identity on an experience of love. What links these, and what enables us
to shed light on the oft-obscure territory of Agamben’s new politics, can
best be understood in terms of his suggestion that “politics is the sphere
of pure means.”13
At stake in such a politics is both a challenge to political instrumen-
talism and a renunciation of the attempt to found politics on substantive
identities. A politics of means without ends would offer an escape from
both utilitarian subject-object relations and from political instrumental-
ism. While the former, in Agamben’s view, leads to the domination of the
earth and its transformation into what Heidegger referred to as “standing
reserve,” that is, into material to be ordered, exploited, and used up, the
latter is central to the conception of politics that made it possible to view
the establishment of gulags and the violent suppression of emancipatory
movements as necessary means to a (just) end, or to view military bombard-
ment as a justified means to the establishment of “democracy” and “free-
dom,” whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya.14 A politics of pure means,
in contrast, would be one in which the world was not instrumentalized and
in which ends were not called on to justify means. Here we see a political
recasting of the relation between potentiality and actuality examined in
the previous chapter: just as Agamben believes that Western metaphysics
has subordinated potentiality to actuality, Western politics, he suggests, has
subordinated means to ends, thus preventing it from opening a sphere of
possibility, and ensuring that it operates simply as a confirmation of what
Adorno and Horkheimer termed the “everlastingness of the factual.”15 The
attempt to disrupt this everylastingness would have real ramifications for our
understanding of political life and community as, in Agamben’s view, the
subordination of potentiality to actuality results in a substantialist poli-
tics concerned with the representation of factual constituencies and the
A NEW USE / 127
juridical inscription of stable identities, rather than with the possibility

of becoming other than we are. If humans had something we had to be,
whether an identity or a vocation, “there could not be any community but
only coincidences and factual partitions.”16 A politics of means without
ends would thus be a politics of singularities without identity, of beings
with no nature, no task, and no biological destiny: a politics, in short, of
potential beings. Only such a politics, Agamben contends, can overcome
the bloody forms of inclusion and exclusion presupposed by any community
founded on identity.
Given the ever-increasing instrumentalism identified as the outcome
of the capitalist commodity economy by a diverse range of thinkers, from
Weber to Marcuse to Debord, it seems surprising that it is in the contem-
porary extension of the spectacle that Agamben identifies the possibility
of this nonutilitarian politics. To explain this, I situate Agamben within
a lineage of Marxian thinkers—which includes not only Debord but also
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno—who believe that the extension of com-
modification ultimately empties out what Marx termed the “use value” of
commodities, leaving in place empty forms, freed from the need to be use-
ful and thus available for a new, nonutilitarian use. In this way, I suggest,
he assimilates his analysis of the commodity form to his analysis of the
law, which, as we have seen, he views as an empty form, a dusty riverbed,
that has been emptied out by nihilism and is thus susceptible to a form
of active nihilism that would overthrow the form, enabling a free praxis
(or as he elsewhere terms it, “simply human life”).17 Yet, in his redemp-
tive account of spectacular expropriation, he also risks giving credence to
an evolutionary account of salvation history that has pervaded much of
Marxism in the first part of the twentieth century, and which Benjamin
warned had corrupted the German working class by allowing it to believe
it was “moving with the current.”18
It is my contention that this analysis is incapable of adequately grap-
pling with the global dominance of capital—or as Agamben terms, with
a notable lack of terminological precision, “capitalism (or whatever other
name we might want to give to the process dominating world history
today).”19 Capitalism remains undertheorized in his oeuvre, yet he refers
often to commodification, gestures toward the “classless society,” defines the
society of the spectacle as “a capitalism that has reached its extreme figure”
and situates himself within the project of “an integrated Marxian analysis.”20
Nonetheless, capitalism poses problems for his attempt to find a form of
salvation within the extension of the nihilistic logic he identifies. While
the redemptive possibilities he identifies are predicated on the nullification
of law, of identity, and of politics, which remain in place as empty forms,
capitalism is itself a nullifying force, which is indifferent to the content of

those things it commodifies. This does not mean, however, that the com-
modity form is itself empty: rather, what is masked by its fetish quality is
the human labor it embodies, a content it cannot do without, and one that
Agamben’s account does not consider. This displacement of the problem
of labor, I argue, leads him to place too much faith in the redemptive pos-
sibilities created by the extension of the logic of commodification, and to
ignore the exploitation that is central to it.21 Furthermore, I suggest that
while he predicates the redemptive aspect of his thought on this nullifying
aspect of spectacular capital, this is only one side of “the process dominat-
ing world history today,” which produces not only fetishism and vacuity,
but massive poverty, and subsistence living, which ensure the continuing
importance of “use values” to a large portion of the world’s population.22
In the second half of this chapter, I suggest that Agamben’s unwilling-
ness to consider the question of labor, and his one-sided focus on the nul-
lifying force of the spectacle, is central to his claim that all of humanity now
comprises a single petty-bourgeoisie. This claim, which I see as an instance
of what Wendy Brown has framed as a post-Foucaultian “theoretical retreat
from the problem of domination within capitalism,” is unable, I suggest,
to account for the persistence of exploitation and economic inequality in
the global economy, or to illuminate the way in which identity continues
to function as a marker of unequal power.23 In Agamben’s view, particular
nationalities, identities, and languages have been nullified by the extension
of the spectacle, bringing to light their central presupposition—human lin-
guistic potentiality. This leads him to a strategy Benjamin Noys has termed
“accelerationism”: “the immanent radicalisation of capital’s own dynamic
of deterritorialisation.”24 The belief that it is the intensification of capital’s
expropriative power that will lead to the possibility of a new form of life,
however, underestimates the way in which capital not only undermines
naturalistic foundations for identity but also creates new identities that are
bound up with both reactionary and emancipatory political claims. Any
attempt to formulate a politics, or a community, without identity—which,
like Agamben, I see as desirable—must, I suggest, be attentive to the con-
tinuing significance of politicized forms of identity, from Islamist move-
ments to gay and lesbian rights struggles, and must resist the teleological
temptation to see these as archaisms, destined to be washed away by the
nullifying power of capital.25 A politics that wishes to do away with an
ontological ground must be a politics of self-negating subjects, who negate
capital in negating their own structural position within it, I argue, and
cannot assume that capitalism will take care of this negation of substantive
identities and communal bonds.
A NEW USE / 129
Paying Pilgrimage to the Commodity Fetish
In 1851, the first world exhibition was held in London. As if in a gallery,

a vast array of manufactured goods was presented for display, housed in
a crystal palace, 560 meters in length.26 Susan Buck-Morss describes the
structure—whose glass and iron construction mirrored that of the Parisian
arcades to which Benjamin would devote his uncompleted magnum opus—
in the following terms: “Entire trees were covered over by the one-hundred-
twelve foot roof. Industrial products were displayed like artworks, vying with
ornamental gardens, statues, and fountains for the public’s attention.”27 In
1870, three years after the “delirious festival”28 of the 1867 exhibition held
on the Champ de Mars, A. J. Wiertz wrote that what first strikes one on
entering such an exhibition is not what people are producing today but
what they will produce in the future. “The human spirit,” he suggested,
“begins to accustom itself to the power of matter.”29 If we are to be precise,
however, the exhibitions were not simply displays of matter, of whose power
the “human spirit” had long been aware. Renan’s contemptuous remark
about the 1855 exhibition comes closer to the truth: “Europe,” he wrote,
“is off to view the merchandise.”30 Indeed, what was on display, in all its
novelty, was the commodity form, in which visitors to the exhibitions
were faced with matter that seemed to take on a spirit of its own.31 The
exhibitions, in Benjamin’s beautiful phrase, were “pilgrimage sites of the
commodity fetish.”32 Today, in Agamben’s view, we no longer need to visit
a world exhibition to pay our own pilgrimage, and what was once novelty
is now banality. What was celebrated for the first time at the universal
exhibitions, he writes in Stanzas, “has now become familiar to anyone
who has entered a supermarket or been exposed to the manipulation of an
advertisement”: all of life has taken on a phantasmagoric quality, subjected
to the domination of the commodity form.33
Debord coined the term “the spectacle” in the late 1960s to define
“the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of
social life.”34 If Agamben sees this as the most adequate term to designate
our own time, this is because, like Debord, he believes that we are living
through a period in which everything has been expropriated and offered up
for consumption, in which all that was once directly lived is now instead
represented, in which there is nothing authentic or natural, and no spaces,
political or otherwise, that have not been thoroughly commodified.35 Agam-
ben’s critique of the spectacle is unrelenting. Nonetheless, it is conducted
in the name of those possibilities that he believes are not only foreclosed
but also created by the domination of the commodity form. Like sacrifice,
sovereignty, and law, what Agamben sees at stake in commodification is
the problem of separation, that is, of how human creations are separated
from their producers and seem to take on lives of their own.
In an essay entitled “In Praise of Profanation,” Agamben defines sac-
rifice as a mechanism that “removes things, places, animals, or people from
common use and transfers them to a separate sphere.”36 We have already seen
that sovereign power, in his account, is premised on the separation of social
praxis from itself, and on the creation of caesuras between life and politics,
norm and exception, earthly and divine. Following Marx—and Debord, for
whom “separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle”—he sees com-
modification as the realization of the complete separation from themselves of
human powers, which appear as objective properties of a world of things.37
Today, he suggests, “everything that is done, produced, or experienced” is
divided from itself, and placed in a separate sphere—that of consumption.38
If we are to understand the possibilities he sees arising from the spectacle,
it will be necessary, however, to begin not with consumption but with the
commodity, and with Marx’s theorization of commodity fetishism that Agam-
ben believes was “foolishly abandoned” in the Marxist milieu of the 1960s.39
In the first volume of Capital, where Marx provides his most exten-
sive account of the commodity, he begins with what he terms its “plain,
homely, natural form,” that is, its use value, which inheres in the thing
itself, independently of its circulation or exchange.40 In seemingly tauto-
logical terms, he writes, “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value.”41
Insofar as a thing is a use value, he suggests, it is in no way mysterious;
neither that its properties satisfy a human need, nor that it was created by
human labor to satisfy such needs, suffices to transform it into anything
other than “an ordinary, sensuous thing.”42 If a thing were simply a use
value, however, produced solely to satisfy a need of its producer, it would
not be a commodity, which must also be useful to others, who will buy it
on the market, and must therefore have not only a use value but also an
exchange value, which measures the proportions in which it is exchange-
able for other things. Thus, although use value is a qualitative category,
determined by the specific properties inherent in the thing, exchange value
is a quantitative measurement, a category of abstraction that is indifferent
to the specific qualities of objects or the uses to which they can be put,
which dictates (to use one of Marx’s favorite examples) the proportion
in which linen may be exchanged for a coat. The process of exchange is
therefore a nullifying process, abstracted from the properties or qualities of
the commodities that pass from one buyer to the next as though according
to their own internal laws. Indeed, for the people who take their wares to
market, they are not use values at all, but simply vehicles for the exchange
value they hope to realize through their sale.
A NEW USE / 131
If exchange value is indifferent to use value, if the measures in which

things are exchanged are entirely independent of their qualities, as Marx
insists, then what determines the rate of exchange? This question was first
posed by “the great investigator who was the first to analyze the value
form”—that is, by none other than Aristotle.43 In The Nichomachean Ethics,
in the context of a discussion of justice, Aristotle introduces the following
problem: “An association for exchange is formed not from two doctors but
from a doctor and a farmer, and in general from parties that are different
and not equal; but these must be equated. Hence all products that are
exchanged must be in some way comparable.”44 This is a political problem,
for Aristotle, a problem of justice, because justice, in his view, relies on the
same measure of equivalence necessary for the economic exchange rela-
tion.45 “It is proportional requital that holds the state together;” he writes,
“because people expect either to return evil for evil—and if they cannot,
feel that they have lost their liberty—or good for good, and if this is
impossible no exchange can take place; and it is exchange that holds them
together.”46 In formulating the problem of the equation of qualitatively
different things, Aristotle comes to the view that the things exchanged
must have something in common, despite the qualitative variation and
the different uses to which they can be put, and Marx approvingly cites
his view that there “can be no exchange without equality and no equality
without commensurability.”47
It is at this point, however, that in Marx’s view Aristotle “falters,” by
locating the source of this commensurability not in the things themselves,
but in an external relation premised on demand.48 Discussing houses and
beds, Aristotle’s conclusion is that “strictly speaking, things so widely dif-
ferent cannot become commensurable”; thus, it is only in demand, in the
fact that people are willing to exchange their own commodity for that of
another, that the commensurability of the two can be garnered with “a
sufficient degree of accuracy.”49 Like Aristotle, Marx stresses that if com-
modities are exchangeable, this signifies that they have something in com-
mon. Unlike him, however, he does not look to the exchange relation to
find this common factor; rather, what makes a house exchangeable for a
given quality of beds, he suggests, is the fact that both contain something
that is really equal—human labor power.50 Every commodity, he suggests,
is a product of a determinate quantity of “socially necessary labor time,”
that is, of the labor time necessary for its production under normal social
conditions.51 Only as embodiments of equal measures of congealed abstract
human labor, Marx avers, are commodities commensurable and subject to
exchange. What he simply terms “value,” is thus a measure of the socially
necessary labor time necessary for the production of each commodity, the
true basis for that equivalence that finds its form of expression in exchange
value.
In Marx’s view, Aristotle was prevented from developing such an
insight because he lived in a society based on slavery and thus on the
inequality of men and their labor.52 Yet, this does not mean he believed
capitalism had rendered the labor process as transparent as Paxton’s crys-
tal palace. On the contrary, he saw the world of the commodity as an
enchanted world, in which the commodity itself “stands on its head, and
evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than
if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”53 What was grotesque and
wonderful was not a sensuous property inherent in the object but the way in
which the commodity form masks the human labor of which it is a product
and gives the human relation of exchange the appearance of a relation
between things in which the producers do not appear. “The mysterious
character of the commodity form,” he writes, “consists therefore simply in
the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own
labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the
socio-natural properties of these things.”54 The correspondence between
“the misty realm of religion” and commodification, which is particularly
important to Agamben, finds its origin here: in both cases, Marx writes,
“the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed
with a life of their own.”55 For Marx, capitalism, like religion, is thus a
structure of separation, in which humans are faced with their own powers
as though by something purely external—a structure in which, as Benjamin
suggests, the commodity, “although a product of human hands” becomes
an idol that rules over the human.56
The Eclipse of Use and the

“Dialectical Salvation of the Commodity”
In a recent essay, Negri writes that Agamben is “a prisoner of the ‘fetish-

ism of the commodity’; that is, of that catastrophic conception (typical of
the Marxism of the 1920s) that considered the production of commodities
as the production of a reified world (and only of a reified world).”57 If, as
Agamben suggests, Marx’s account of fetishism was abandoned in much of
the Marxist milieu, this is because for many (following Louis Althusser)
it presupposed a humanist understanding of an originary authenticity or
essence, expropriated in the course of production. In Negri’s view, Agam-
ben’s work is marked by a similar nostalgia for a past condition that is
viewed as more natural or authentic—the condition of use value.58 Agam-
ben’s thought, he suggests, is marked by a “a sort of naturalistic or funda-
A NEW USE / 133
mentalist terrorism (the restoration of use value) that we really have no

use for in an age in which the problem is not that of a return to nature
but of constructing another one.”59 If, as we have seen in relation to both
law and life, Agamben rejects the project of returning to an earlier state
of nature—if, in fact, the consequence of his arguments that politics was
always biopolitics and the “state of nature” really a state of exception is that
there is no “nature” to which we could return—then we could expect that
he would agree with Negri that the task facing us today is not a return to
nature but the construction of a new one. In fact, contra Negri, Agamben’s
work is animated not by a return to use value but by the possibility of
what he terms a “new use”—that is a nonutilitarian relation to the world,
predicated on the eclipse of use value in the society of the spectacle.
Agamben’s earliest engagement with the problem of use occurs in
an important section of Stanzas, first published in 1972 under the title
“Il dandy e il feticcio” (The Dandy and the Fetish). Here, we see the first
incarnation of the insight—which will become increasingly important in
his later works—that “the transfiguration of the commodity into enchanted
object is the sign that the exchange value is already beginning to eclipse
the use value.”60 As a witness to this process, Agamben calls Rainer-Maria
Rilke, who described this transformation in a letter of 1925:
Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower,

their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely
more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found
the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from
America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things,
dummy life. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American
apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with
the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and
reflections of our forefathers.61
In contrast, Agamben’s earliest treatment of the commodity, in Stanzas,

is oriented to overcoming the “nostalgia for use value” that he finds not
only in Rilke but also in Marx, in whom he identifies a defense of “the
concreteness of the object of use against the abstraction of the exchange
value,” and a failure to challenge the utilitarian premises that saw use
itself as a natural phenomenon and utilitarianism as a naturally occurring
psychological state.62 Marx, Agamben writes,
[D]oes not know to separate himself from the utilitarian ideology,

which decrees that the enjoyment of use-value is the original and
natural relation of man to objects; consequently, the possibility
of a relation to things that goes beyond both the enjoyment of

use-value and the accumulation of exchange value escapes him.63
Is Marx’s account of use value really as utilitarian and naturalistic as Agam-

ben suggests? While the latter cites Marx’s remark, from Capital, that “no
object can be invested with value unless it is something useful,” he does
not discuss in any detail Marx’s understanding of what it means to refer
to something as useful.64 In Capital, Marx contends that all that is neces-
sary for something to be a use value is that it satisfy a human need; the
“nature of these needs,” he goes on “whether they arise from the stomach
or the imagination, makes no difference.”65 One of his key examples of a
use value is a bible, purchased by a man for “to satisfy his family’s need
for edification.”66 It is difficult to reconcile Marx’s depiction of religion as
a “misty realm” with Agamben’s suggestion that he viewed use value as a
“natural” and “concrete” quality, or to reconcile the “use” one makes of a
bible with a simple utilitarian relation to objects.
Almost hidden in Stanzas, several pages after the bulk of his critique
of Marx, in a small section entitled “Marx and use-value,” Agamben throws
his own critique into question, suggesting that Marx’s position on the ques-
tion of use is unclear, and was modified over time. “In the Manuscripts
of 1844,” he writes, “he still seemed to consider use-value as something
unnatural, on a par with exchange value.”67 As evidence, Agamben turns
to one of Marx’s early reflections on use, which Benjamin, too, loved to
cite: “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object
is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it
is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.—in short, when
it is used by us.”68 What is important about Agamben’s critique of Marx,
however, is not the account it provides of Marx’s supposed utilitarianism,
which relies on a distortion of the account of use provided in Capital.
Rather, it is significant in that it allows us to grasp the extent to which,
since his earliest account of use, Agamben has been concerned to avoid
precisely the return to use value Negri sees in his work, and, has instead
sought to examine the possibility of a new relation to things that consists
neither in a utilitarian conception of use nor in the logic of exchange.
If such a new relation would not be found in a return to use value,
then where would we locate it? In line with his rejection of utilitarianism in
Stanzas, Agamben’s later works locate this possibility within the extension
of commodification, in the very destruction of natural use through which, in
Debord’s words, “exchange value became identified with all possible use.”69
To understand why Agamben sees the possibility of a nonutilitarian relation
to things and a noninstrumental politics in the society of the spectacle, we
A NEW USE / 135
must place his thought in the context of what Debord, playing on Marx’s
account of “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” called the “tendency
of use value to fall.”70 Like Rilke, both Debord and Agamben believe that
commodification increasingly erases the use values of commodities, culmi-
nating in the spectacle, in which “exchange value has completely eclipsed
use value and can now achieve the status of absolute and irresponsible
sovereignty over life in its entirety.”71 When he returns to the problem of
a relation to things beyond use and exchange, thirty years after the Italian
publication of Stanzas, he finds its possibility in the very impossibility of
use that is consequent to the rule of exchange value. As the use values of
commodities are eroded, he suggests, consumer society produces an absolute
impossibility of using things, which face us as spectacular objects, looking
out at us as if from a museum.72
Among the sources of the unhappiness Agamben locates in consumer
society is thus the fact that its inhabitants “consume objects that have
incorporated within themselves their own inability to be used.”73 What does
it mean to claim that things can no longer be used? In Agamben’s formula-
tion, “use” (like meaning, nature, and experience) designates a supposedly
originary way of life that is bound to its place by traditional authority or
the forces of nature; that which is used is subject to a “genetic inscrip-
tion within a given sphere,” its use dictated by its sense and its necessary
relation to an end.74 The generalized impossibility of use he identifies is
a product of the breakdown of any natural relation between object and
function and of a shift from functional to fetishistic consumption. At this
point, Agamben diverges dramatically from Rilke’s nostalgia. If a natural-
ized use serves to fix things within a particular sphere, to tie them to an
end, and thus to enmesh us in instrumental subject-object relations, then
it is in the eclipse of use, in the emptying of substance, that he believes
we may locate a nonutilitarian relation to the world, and with it a form
of politics without ends.
It is worth turning briefly to two other thinkers who have also seen
an important connection between the eclipse of use value in contemporary
capitalism and a new relation to things: Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.
In Benjamin’s work, the possibility of a new, nonutilitarian form of use is
signaled by the collector. Yet, while his essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and
Historian,”75 commissioned by the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Institute
for Social Research) by Max Horkheimer, was published only after the
first paragraph, which was deemed excessively oriented to Marxism, was
removed,76 his most decisive account of the relation of the collector to the
commodity occurs in another essay of the same period, which was initially
rejected by the Institute: “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”77 In
the latter, the collector appears as a figure with the ability to transfig-
ure things, by removing them from their normal, utilitarian contexts. “To
him,” Benjamin writes, “falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their
commodity character by taking possession of them.”78 Benjamin’s collector
neither exchanges the things he collects, nor uses them, and so bestows on
them not a use value but a “connoisseur value.”79 In Konvulut H of The
Arcades Project, which is devoted to the collector, Benjamin expands on
the nonutilitarian potential inherent in collecting, depicting the collector
as a figure who “detaches the object from its functional relations,” allowing
it to enter into new relations with things of the same kind.80 Importantly,
given the discussion of fulfillment in the previous chapter, Benjamin suggests
that this new relation “is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls
into the peculiar category of completeness.”81 The messianic significance
of the nonutilitarian relation to things enabled by collecting is suggested
again in the Paris essay: the collector, Benjamin writes, “dreams his way
not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one . . . in
which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.”82
In a letter concerning this essay, Adorno, who shared Benjamin’s
concerns with both commodification and the escape from instrumentalism,
wrote that this account of the collector provided an important basis for
the “dialectical salvation of the commodity.”83 Like Agamben, both Ben-
jamin and Adorno shared the view that the use values of commodities are
increasingly subordinate to their exchange values. In the letter, however,
Adorno warns against a critique of the commodity that seeks a form of
regression to an earlier time, and suggests that the “mere concept of use
value by no means suffices for a critique of the commodity character, but
only leads back to a stage prior to the division of labor.”84 In contrast, he
finds the possibility of the “dialectical salvation of the commodity” in the
eclipse of use value. For both thinkers, it was therefore within the logic of
exchange itself, within its nullifying reduction of everything to a principle
of equivalence, and in the eclipse of use value, that the possibility for
the salvation of the commodity (by which they meant the possibility that
it could be freed from the drudgery of utility) lay. In an exchange with
Adorno regarding this essay, Benjamin writes that in the nineteenth cen-
tury, technological progress continually puts objects out of use, leading to
a proliferation of such “emptied” things.85 It is in such “emptied things,”
freed from a natural use and from a meaning that would exist indepen-
dently of use (or an essence that would exist independently of existence),
that Agamben sees the presupposition of a new, nonutilitarian, use. “The
creation of a new use,” he writes, “is possible only by deactivating an old
use, rendering it inoperative.”86 This means it is in the spectacle’s nullifying
A NEW USE / 137
power, its ability to render natural uses inoperative and to empty commodi-
ties of sense that he locates its positive possibility.
The spectacle may be the condition of possibility of such a new use,
but our ability to realize this possibility relies on a particular form of praxis
he terms profanation. Calling on the authority of the Roman jurists, who,
he writes, “knew perfectly well what it meant to profane,” Agamben cites
Trebatius who notes that “profane is the term for something that was once
sacred or religious and is returned to the use or property of men.”87 Here we
see the crucial relationship between use and the sacred that we saw previ-
ously in our account of the spectacle as a structure of separation. Sacred
or religious things, Agamben argues, are those that have been removed
from the use of men, and placed in a separate sphere, subject to a “special
unavailability.”88 In line with his earlier account of the homo sacer, who is
excluded from both the realm of men and that of the gods, he argues that
what is essential in sacrifice is always the threshold that must be crossed
from the profane to the sacred. The homo sacer, he suggests in Profanations,
is a figure who has survived the rite through which he was separated from
other men, and—as he continues to live among them despite being removed
“from normal commerce with his kind”—is exposed to violent death.89 By
virtue of the ban on his sacrifice, however, he also subsists as a “remnant
of profanity” in the realm of the sacred, meaning that “in the machine of
sacrifice, sacred and profane represent the two poles of a system in which
a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to
refer to the same object.”90 While this bipolar machine divides use between
men and Gods, it also holds the possibility of a form of praxis that would
enable things to cross the threshold that divides the profane from the sacred
in the opposite direction, to return to what he terms “free use.”
What Agamben terms “profanation” is this praxis, or procedure,
through which things are given a new, nonutilitarian use. “There seems to
be a peculiar relationship,” he writes, “between ‘using’ and ‘profaning’ that
we must clarify.”91 Although he frames the result of profanation as a return
to use, this does not signify a return to an actually existing prior state but
rather a “return” to what has never been, like that evoked in Caproni’s
beautiful poem Ritorno, with which Agamben concludes the “final day” of
Language and Death: “I returned there / where I have never been. / Noth-
ing has changed from how it was not.”92 In contrast to the nostalgic tone
of Rilke’s depiction of “empty things,” Agamben rejects every attempt to
return to an earlier use, and seeks instead to retrieve uses that were not
able to be, uses that were prohibited by the rigid inscription of things in
particular spheres, and by compulsory relations between means and ends.
“Profanation,” he writes (in a remark that serves as a refutation of Negri’s
thesis) “does not simply restore something like a natural use that existed
before being separated into the religious, economic or juridical sphere.”93
Rather, it holds the potential for a new form of use that is neither natural
nor utilitarian, and the positive possibility he finds in the spectacle con-
sists in its ability to denaturalize all that it touches, making possible such
a new use. This is starkest in his argument that it is advertising and por-
nography that “escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners.”94
If pornography appears as a “midwife” of the future society, this is because,
in denaturalizing and desacralizing sexuality, it opens the space for “a new
collective use of sexuality.”95
Lest this be viewed (simply) as a celebration of pornography, we must
note that Agamben also depicts pornography as an apparatus that captures
pure means, creating something that in its very lack of sacredness can no
longer be profaned. Captured by the apparatus, the “solitary and desper-
ate consumption of the pornographic image replaces the promise of a new
use.”96 Pornography, perhaps the apotheosis of the spectacle, simultaneously
frees sexuality from its naturalization or socialization, Agamben suggests,
and separates it into a realm in which it can only be consumed but not
used. In a similar vein, advertising frees the body from ineffability, while
simultaneously subjecting it to “the iron laws of massification and exchange
value,” while the media detaches language from any relation to an end
but simultaneously neutralizes this new relation to the word in endless
vacuity. In the spectacle, pure means are both produced and captured, and
thus a nonutilitarian relation to the world is both enabled and separated
in the sphere of consumption, which serves to block the new uses the
spectacle opens up. Again, this raises the question of agency. To attribute
to pornography the desacralization and denaturalization of sexuality com-
pletely obscures the role of the women’s movement, the sexual liberation
movement and the gay and lesbian movement in challenging the idea
that the role of a woman was to be a Madonna or a whore, and in affirm-
ing possibilities for sexual relations and forms of pleasure in opposition
to the instrumental procreative monopolization of sex. This exclusion of
agency from Agamben’s account of sexuality has broader ramifications for
his account of capitalism, which appears in his work as an automatic process
of commodification, rather than as a terrain of antagonism, in which new
freedoms were won and then commodified.
What forms of praxis, then, does Agamben see as corresponding to
the expropriative power of spectacular capital? If, as Agamben makes clear,
“use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it
only by means of profanation,” then how would we go about profaning the
unprofanable and freeing pure means from their spectacular capture?97 In
A NEW USE / 139
religious terms, profanation may take a form as simple and banal as touching
the sacred object, as in consecration rites in which parts of a victim “(the
entrails, or exta: the liver, heart, gallbladder, lungs)” are reserved for the
Gods, but, on being touched, become edible again.98 Agamben’s favorite
profanatory praxis, however, is play. Tracing the origins of popular children’s
games to religious rituals, he follows Émile Benveniste in characterizing
play as a repetition of a rite divorced from the myth it once staged, or, in
wordplay, the repetition of the myth without the rite.99 In an early essay,
“In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,” Agamben cites a passage in
which Benveniste conceptualizes play as the preservation of a pure form,
stripped of its previous meaning and relation to an end. Defining the sacred
as the conjunction of myth and ritual, Benveniste writes:
[I]n play, only the ritual survives and all that is preserved is the
form of the sacred drama, in which each element is re-enacted
time and again. But what has been forgotten or abolished is the
myth, the meaningfully worded fabulation that endows the acts
with their sense and purpose.100
Suggesting that there is an “inverse relation between play and the sacred,”
Agamben comments—drawing on Collodi’s description of “Playland” in
Pinocchio—that Playland is a country where rituals continue to be cel-
ebrated and sacred words and objects manipulated long after their sense
and purpose have been forgotten.101
The ability of play to decompress rite and myth and thus distract
“humanity from the sphere of the sacred” does not just pertain to religious
rites;102 giving the examples of a cat playing with a ball of string as if it were
a mouse, and of “children who play with whatever old things come into their
hands,” Agamben suggests that play can profane things from the realms of
economics, nature, law or war, returning them to a new use.103 This can help
us to understand the enigmatic suggestion we have already encountered that:
One day humanity will play with law just as children play with
disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical
use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the
law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes
the law, but a new use that is born only after it.104
Profanatory play “deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to com-

mon use the spaces that power had seized” by disrupting the grounding of
power on a sacred model.105
This account of the desacralizing potential inherent in play, and of

the positive possibility of the spectacle, owes much to Debord, and to
the Situationist practice of détournement, which was initially an artistic
practice, typified by Dada, but was generalized by the Situationists into
a revolutionary tactic conceived, “as the creation of a new use-value for
political and social debris.”106 In Agamben’s account of play, it is of the
utmost importance that the objects that are played with are disused objects,
objects whose use values have been eroded, and can thus be put to new
uses as if they were toys. In a strong parallel with the argument that the
eclipse of use value and sense opens things to a new use, Debord stipulates
“two fundamental laws of détournement”: “the loss of importance of each
détourned autonomous element—which may go so far as to completely lose
its original sense—and at the same time the organization of another mean-
ingful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.”107
Détournement is thus a tactic that seeks to respond to a spectacular society
that turns all it touches into debris, not by restoring a previous use but
by playing with this debris, giving it a new use. Raoul Vaneigem, also of
the Situationist International, makes the connection between détournement
and play particularly explicit by defining the former as “an all embracing
re-insertion of things into play.”108 For both thinkers, however, the presup-
position of such a playful relation to objects, cultural forms, and politi-
cal institutions is the view that “[p]olitics, morality and culture are all in
ruins—and have now reached the point of being marketed as such, as their
own parody.”109 Just as Agamben believes we are now faced with an empty
law that can be played with “as children play with disused objects,”110 the
“ruins” these thinkers suggest can be put to new uses are not confined to
objects, but include a student union, and the Chartres Cathedral, which can
be turned into “a funfair, into a labyrinth, into a shooting range—into a
dream landscape.”111 If all of Western politics, as it has been understood
since Aristotle, is entrapped and immobile, rendered senseless by nihilism,
on this account, this may well be a catastrophe, but it is also the condition
of possibility of a new, playful use and a politics without ends.
Even more so than Debord, Vaneigem is quite clear about the positive
possibility spectacular expropriation heralds: remarking that our “experi-
ence, both spiritual and material, is falling to pieces about our ears” as a
consequence of consumer society, he notes that this means “the ‘devaloris-
ing’ phase of détournement has in a sense been taken care of by contem-
porary history itself.”112 As the spectacle itself ‘takes care of’ the negative,
or nullifying, aspect, détournement becomes “an essentially positive act,”
which “broadcasts new ways of using commodities [and] invents superior
uses of goods.”113 We must learn, Vaneigem suggests, from those past failures
A NEW USE / 141
that arose from attempting to reuse things that had not been thoroughly
emptied of sense, such as that of Surrealism, which failed because to tried
to play with Dadaist anti-values “which had not been completely reduced
to zero.”114 The presupposition of play as a positive act therefore lies in
the spectacular reduction of things to what Agamben, following Scholem,
terms the “zero-degree” of their content. “Any attempt to build on values
that have not been thoroughly purged by nihilistic crisis,” Vaneigem writes,
“must end in the same way: recuperation by the dominant mechanisms
of social organization.”115 It is through fidelity to this basic insight that
Agamben is able to assimilate his analysis of the spectacle to his broader
reading of nihilism and of the status of the law as an empty form at the
zero-degree of its content. If the commodity, too, is an empty form, emptied
of use value, Agamben’s analysis of the task it presents to us can be aligned
with his previous accounts of the task we must take on when faced with
the empty law: that is to a form of active nihilism, a playful creation of
a real state of emergency, which would overthrow the form itself, opening
the possibility for a free praxis.
Such an approach to the commodity is troubled, however, by what
Marx saw as central to its fetish character—the exploitative human labor
relation that lurks below the enchanted appearance. Despite Agamben’s
references to Marx, the problem of labor is entirely absent from his later
formulations of the commodity. This absence is reflected in his consis-
tent depiction of it as a dual structure, which “splits into use-value and
exchange-value and is transformed into an ungraspable fetish.”116 I have
already shown that Marx defined the commodity not simply as a use value
and an exchange value, but as a use value and a value, whose form of
expression was exchange value. This means that if the exchange value is
the form in which the value of the commodity appears, the content it con-
ceals is not use value, but value—a congealed quantity of abstract human
labor.117 Marx makes this explicit: as “use values commodities differ above
all in quality,” he writes, “while as exchange values they can only differ
in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use value.”118 If the
significance of this distinction is not yet clear, we should note that Marx
goes so far as to directly critique the position attributed to him by Agamben,
according to which a commodity is a use value and an exchange value.
For the “modern peddlers of free trade,” he writes, “there exists neither
value nor magnitude of value anywhere except in its expression by means
of the exchange relation, that is, in the daily list of prices current on the
stock exchange.”119 Marx must critique this position because, in positing a
free-floating exchange value, it serves to obscure what is fundamental to
the commodity and its fetishization: that the “substance of value is not at
all the particular natural substance, but rather objectified labor.”120 It is this
obscuration of the exploitative human relations that underlie the commod-
ity form that is central to its “theological niceties.”121
In an essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin notes that the “manufacture of
products as commodities for a market ensures that the conditions of their
production—not only societal conditions, in the form of exploitation, but
technological ones as well—will gradually vanish from the perceived world
of the people.”122 Despite the transparency of the crystal palace, this obscu-
ration of exploitation, and of the labor relation itself was a central aim
of the world exhibitions, which as Buck-Morss notes, portrayed industry
and production as mythic powers that would create a world of “peace,
class harmony and abundance.”123 In sending a message of progress without
revolution, the fairs sought to incorporate worker’s organizations, which
were sent in delegations, into the project of a consensual capitalist devel-
opment. “Indeed,” Buck-Morss writes, “the fairs denied the very existence
of class antagonism.”124 Today, this denial is ascendant, as the declining
strength of working class organizations is taken as evidence of a friction-
less capitalism, even in the face of economic crisis. In such a context, it is
worthwhile considering Agamben’s account of profanation and use in light
of Brown’s question: “When do certain political solutions actually codify
and entrench existing social relations, when do they mask such relations,
and when do they directly contest or transform them?”125 While supposedly
arraigned against the fetishism of spectacular society, it is my contention
that, in conceptualizing the commodity as simply a (fading) use value and
an exchange value, and thus avoiding any reference to labor and to the
reality of class relations in capitalism, Agamben’s redemptive proposals tend
to mask the relations of spectacular capitalism, even as they attempt to
transform them. In a context of seemingly perpetual financial crisis, we
would do well to remember that for many people throughout the world,
the use value of a commodity is of the utmost importance—food is still
something you eat to stay alive and a house something that shelters you
from the sun, rain, and snow. Although the spectacular purchase of useless
items is clearly an aspect of contemporary capital, so too is subsistence
living, which is still clearly marked by the paradigm of use value, even in
the restrictive, utilitarian sense that Agamben gives the term. This raises
the question: If things must be empty to be played with, or put to a new
use, how does the persistence of use value within capitalism disrupt the
positive possibilities Agamben sees in the spectacle?
Marx’s suggestion that human labor is central to the production of
commodities, and to their fetishization, directs us to the question of the
use value of human labor power under capitalism—a system in which the
A NEW USE / 143
laborer’s “life is the source in which his own use value constantly rekindles
itself up to a certain time, when it is worn out.”126 In highlighting the
importance of labor in Marx’s account of the commodity, I am not merely
suggesting that Agamben’s reading of Marx is inaccurate. Rather, I believe
that the exploitative labor relation through which human labor power is
transformed into a commodity is a serious impediment to the realization
of the noninstrumental relation to the world whose condition of possibility
Agamben sees in the spectacle. Moreover, without grasping this commodi-
fication of human potential, he is unable to adequately conceptualize the
redemptive moment of his thought, which turns on the free use of this
potential. As labor power is commodified, those who sell their labor must
enter into instrumental relations with their own capacities, putting them
to use, as it were, in order to survive.
Agamben’s lack of attention to the commodification of labor is no
doubt a product of his antipathy to every attempt to define the human in
terms of (a) work—an attempt he sees in Aristotle no less than in Marx. In
his view, the identification of a “work of man” underlies visions of politics
as the assumption of a task or destiny by a people, as well as productivist
conceptions of politics, which espouse the building of a new society and a
new man—with the help of labor camps. To grasp the significance of this
rejection of work, we must recognize the relation between work, (ergon)
and the Aristotelian “energeia” (being at work), which Aristotle counter
poses to dunamis (potentiality). If “man” has no work, Agamben argues,
“he would not even have an energeia, a being in act that could define his
essence: he would be, that is, a being of pure potentiality, which no identity
and no work could exhaust.”127 Although such an insight offers a valuable
contribution to the formulation of a noninstrumental politics, insomuch as
it draws our attention to the need for such a politics to challenge the defini-
tion of the human through work, it is not necessary to subscribe either to
a metaphysics of labor to a productivist politics in order to recognize that
those whose labor power is transformed into a commodity under capitalism
are, in Marx’s words, “doubly free”: free both of the forms of compulsion
that typified the feudal labor relation, and of any other option but to sell
their labor in order to survive.128 To translate this into Agamben’s terms,
those who sell their own labor power as a commodity are deprived of the
“potential not to” in which the possibility of freedom lies.
If this is true, if capital systematically deprives a large proportion
of the world’s population of any potentiality not to sell their labor as a
commodity then the attempt to formulate a nonutilitarian relation to the
world must grapple with this very real limitation on human freedom. While
Agamben is at pains to point out how inclusion, in the nation-state or the
category of the human, for instance, presupposes (inclusive) exclusion, such

an insight is largely missing from his analysis of the spectacle, which lacks
a consideration of the way in which spectacular consumption presupposes
(unspectacular) production by people who work merely to afford the use
values they need to stay alive. Just as he draws our attention to the ways
in which “democracy” and “freedom” presuppose the concentration camp,
we should attend to the ways in which the freedom to consume presupposes
the labor camp, and the free market presupposes the “free economic zones,”
in which labor laws are suspended and unionization punishable through
extra-judicial killing. Agamben acknowledges this reliance of capitalism on
economic abandonment in Means Without Ends, where he writes that “crisis,
having now become permanent, demands not only that the people of the
Third World become increasingly poor, but also that a growing percentage
of the citizens of the industrialized societies be marginalized and without a
job.”129 In my view, this is accurate, but it also troubles his account of the
eclipse of use, and his related claim that all of humanity is now a single,
global petty-bourgeoisie. To begin to adequately address this situation would
entail attention to how we could overcome the compulsion of the labor
relation to realize the noninstrumental relation to our own capacities, or
potentiality, that he seeks, and to how we could mitigate the inequality
that makes an indifference to use value a luxury reserved for few. In what
follows, I turn to his attempt to theorize such a noninstrumental relation
to the self, and to his suggestion that such a relation becomes increasingly
possible in spectacular society. I argue that his neglect of the problem of
labor and his one-sided emphasis on the nullifying force of the spectacle
reappear in his argument that the precondition for a life and a community
of potentiality lies in what he identifies as a “global petty-bourgeoisie,”
which now comprises all of humanity.
A New Use for the Self:

The Global Petty Bourgeoisie and the Coming Community
The significance of “use” in the redemptive aspect of Agamben’s thought

goes beyond the possibility that the commodity itself could be redeemed,
and plays a central role in his account of the new form of singularity with-
out identity that he terms “whatever being” and in the potential community
he terms the “coming community.”130 In the book of that name, Agamben
frames the nonidentitarian singularity that he sees as central to a politics
and a form of community that could escape the hold of the state as “a new
use of the self.”131 This concern with a singularity that “makes use” of itself,
A NEW USE / 145
rather than being bound within a naturalized and/or politicized identity, can
be related back to the discussion of potentiality in the previous chapter:
in Agamben’s view, a politics premised on substantive identities fixes its
subjects, and makes it a process of apportioning rights and representing
pregiven constituencies rather than a field of possibility and transformation
in which we could hope to be other than we are. Consequent to this fixing
of identities, politics is reliant on sovereign power to grant rights and rep-
resent social classes, and presupposes exclusionary forms of belonging and
border-control to police the borders of identity and entitlement. In order to
escape such a politics, he believes it is necessary to contest both the fixity
of personal identity and the substantivization of community as a community
of (women, Australians, etc.), which, in his view, brings into operation the
mechanism of inclusive exclusion of the sovereign ban. Like the new use
described above, a new use of the self would entail the denaturalization
and desacralization of the self, which would thus exist as a pure singularity,
rather than as an instance of a particular identity. Agamben terms such a
singularity—which is neither universal, and thus enshrined in the “rights
of man,” nor particular, and thus able to claim sectional rights—“whatever
being” and sees it as marking the possibility of a human community free of
any essential condition of belonging, common destiny or work, or principle
of inclusion and exclusion—a being-together of existences, rather than a
community of essence, as Nancy describes it.132
Given the blindness to the labor relation manifested in his account of
the commodity described above, it is noteworthy that Agamben’s account
of “whatever being” rests on the claim that the spectacle has produced a
“classless society,” albeit one that parodies the Marxian version; “there are
no longer social classes,” he writes, “but just a single planetary petty bour-
geoisie in which all the old social classes are dissolved.”133 Outlining the
extraordinary stakes in his engagement with this figure, Agamben writes:
the “petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving
toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie
represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it
must at all costs not let slip away.”134 It is doubtful that any thinker, broadly
speaking, of the left has ever placed such grand hopes in what Marx saw as a
“transitional class,” typified by “moral indignation.”135 In contrast to Marx’s
belief that such “transitional classes” would fade away, enabling a struggle
between “two great hostile camps,”136 the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in
Agamben’s view, the “petty-bourgeoisie has inherited the world and is the
form in which humanity has survived nihilism.”137 Agamben’s “planetary
petty bourgeoisie” is thus a product, or better, a remnant, of the process of
expropriation carried out by the spectacle. He provides an evocative image
of this expropriation: nothing “better resembles the condition of this new

humanity,” he writes, “than advertising footage from which every trace of
the advertised product has been wiped out.”138 Agamben’s petty-bourgeoisie
is the inheritor of a process of nullification that has expropriated identities
and rendered stable subjectivities and naturalized vocations meaningless,
just as it has erased the use values of commodities. If it represents an
opportunity, this is because it is precisely in its vacuity, in its indifference
to identity and to national dreams that he locates the germinating seed of
“whatever being.” What the nihilism of the spectacle reveals, he suggests,
is precisely the insubstantiality, the inessential nature, of human being.
For the first time in history, it is possible to discern that human being is
inessential being.
What can we make of this claim that social class has been dissolved
by the nihilism of the spectacle? In my view, it is troubled by the dramatic
inequalities of free market capitalism, and continuing class conflicts and
industrial struggles throughout the globalized economy.139 Brown has sug-
gested that the “middle class,” with its investment in universalizing gestures,
can best be understood as an articulation of a figure of class that depends
on the naturalization of capitalism, “the denial of capitalism’s power effects
in ordering social life,” and the representation of capital as providing all
with the good life.140 Although Agamben’s analysis of the petty bourgeoisie
makes clear that life in spectacular capitalism is not the good life, and
much less the happy life, in suggesting that it requires only a slight adjust-
ment, it nonetheless serves to obfuscate the domination and inequality
endemic to capitalism in its proclamation of a “classless society.” If class
is still a reality—a reality of exploitation inscribed in the labor relation,
if one that is less likely today to be expressed in explicit class politics, at
least in the West—this seems to make the task of forming a community
without identity a more difficult one, forcing it to confront not only dra-
matic inequalities and material interests, but also the ways in which their
naturalization fosters reactionary identity formations. Moreover, whether
Agamben’s account of the crisis of foundations for national identities is
correct, identity continues to function today as a marker of social status,
a determiner of movement across national borders, and a bearer of differ-
ential power. In what follows, I therefore critically examine his account of
whatever being, and its key presupposition: the planetary petty-bourgeoisie.
When Agamben wishes to explain “whatever being,” he does so
through a discussion of love. When one is in love, he contends, this
can be explained neither through the particular properties of the loved
one “(being blond, being small, being tender, being lame)” nor through
a neglect of these properties.141 Whatever beings—or “the Lovable,” as he
A NEW USE / 147
also calls them—have no unitary identity that would enable them to form
a community premised on a logic of inclusion or exclusion, but neither
are they marked by what he terms the “incipit generality” of concepts like
“universal love” (and presumably also universal human rights), which can
only subsume singularity in universality.142 In contrast, he writes, “the lover
wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The
lover desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particu-
lar fetishism.”143 In an unusual twist, Agamben links this theory of love
directly to his account of the potentiality of language: love, he suggests,
is simply “seeing something in its being-thus”—in its being-in-language.
Being-in-language is, he suggests, the “non-predicative property par excel-
lence,” existing in a realm prior to those linguistic judgments, which must
divide into classes in order to signify.144 A community of such “Lovable”
beings would itself be without presuppositions (and classes)—it would not
be a community of identity, and thus would not be premised on a logic of
inclusive-exclusion.145 While this being may be modeled on love, it is in
the society of the spectacle that he believes it is germinating; “contempo-
rary politics,” he writes, “is this devastating experimentum linguae that all
over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and
religions, identities and communities.”146 It is within this process of nul-
lification, which expropriates the very potentiality of language, but thereby
frees it from its abandonment as the foundation of particular languages
and peoples that he sees the possibility of such a community appearing
for the first time.
Although Agamben gives his own inflection to the relation between
community and love, it is nonetheless worth asking how his coming com-
munity compares to Christian attempts to found a community in love.
Adam Thurschwell has suggested that if “the coming community is a com-
munity of love, it is one so far from being modeled on the Christian ‘com-
munity of love’ that its members have forgotten God’s very existence.”147
While it is true that the coming community is not striving for heaven but
content in limbo, existing between good and evil in blissful vacuity, it is
in Paul, who preached love against the law, that we find the inspiration
for the free use of the self that Agamben believes would lead humanity to
its “second, happier, nature.”148 In I Corinthians, we read, “Let every man
abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a
slave? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (I
Cor. 7:17–22). While it would be possible to read the phrase “use it rather”
in this exhortation to signify a use of freedom, Agamben argues that what
is to be used is the condition of slavery itself. Like Bartleby’s prison cell,
after his supposed transformation into a “new creature,” social conditions
and identities are, in Agamben’s view, nullified by the messianic vocation,

which strips them of meaning while leaving them factually unchanged.
This interpretation, in which we can find an analogue for his account
of the status of identity and class in the society of the spectacle, rests on
a reading of the following Pauline passage, in which he finds what “may
be his most rigorous definition of messianic life”:149
But this I say brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that
even those having wives may be as not [hōs mē] having, and those
weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing,
and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world
as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world.
(I Cor. 7:29–32)
In this “as not” (hōs mē), Agamben sees “the formula concerning mes-
sianic life” and the model for a nullification that revokes factical positions
in the same act as maintaining them.150 The Pauline “as not,” he suggests,
serves not to establish a new vocation or condition but to place each
vocation in tension with itself, preparing its end. To depict this messianic
urgency, “Paul uses a peculiar expression that gave his interpreters much
to ponder: chresai, ‘make use.’ ”151 “To live the messianic life” is to use, but
this is not a naturalized form of use, such as that which would attain to
simply living out the station in life granted by a combination of biology
and chance, but one premised on the hollowing of substantive vocations
introduced by the messianic one. “Use:” he writes, “this is the definition
Paul gives to messianic life in the form of the as not.”152 The messianic life
is premised on the expropriation of every juridical/factual identity “(circum-
cised /uncircumcised, slave/free, man/woman)” through the as not.153 And
yet, he writes, in terms that take us back to Bartleby, this “expropriation
does not, however, found a new identity; the ‘new creature’ is none other
than the use and messianic vocation of the old.”154 Thus, the one who
“uses” a factical condition does not establish a new condition, but continues
to inhabit the empty form of the old one. Agamben makes this clear by
returning to the example of the slave, stressing that, in Paul’s exhortation
to use, the factical-juridical condition of the slave is not negated in such
a way that a new factical-juridical condition could be established in its
place. The point of use is thus not to establish a new identity that could
in turn be granted rights and legal status, but, to take up the old identity
“as not,” thus transposing it “to a zone that is neither factual nor juridical,
but is subtracted from the law and remains as a place of pure praxis, or
simple ‘use’ (‘use it rather!’)”155
A NEW USE / 149
Agamben derives the substance of this reading of the hōs mē from
Heidegger, who devoted a significant component of his 1921 lecture course
to Paul and the “Characteristics of Early Christian Life Experience.”156 Hei-
degger too reads I Corinthians to say that the slave should remain a slave,
suggesting that in the enactment of a Christian life, “something remains
unchanged and yet is radically changed.”157 For Heidegger, what is decisive
for Paul is “not the anticipation of a future event that is futurally situated
in temporality,” but a “complex of enactment,” a way of being in a world
that is unchanged, yet radically changed.158 For Paul, Heidegger writes, “the
parousia depends on how I live.”159 What Heidegger terms the “authentic
complex of enactment” of the Christian is thus defined by the hōs mē;
the Christian, he writes, does not “cling to this world” but instead divests
all that is worldly of significance.160 In The Time That Remains, Agamben
briefly mentions Heidegger’s lecture course, and his contention that the
slave should remain a slave, and cites the following important passage:
These directions of meaning, toward the surrounding world,

toward one’s calling, and toward that which one is, in no way
determine the facticity of the Christian. Nevertheless, these rela-
tions are there, they are maintained, and thus first appropriated
[zuggeeignet] in an authentic manner.161
Agamben devotes less than half a page to Heidegger’s lecture course, but
what he does say is significant not only in understanding his own depar-
ture from the thinker to whom he dedicated Stanzas, but also for helping
us to understand why, despite his own (Heideggerian) suspicion of “use,”
demonstrated in that early book, he later formulates the need not for an
appropriation, but for a new use. It is in his lectures on Paul, Agamben
suggests, that Heidegger anticipates what will become the dialectic of the
proper and improper, or authentic and inauthentic, (eigentlich and unei-
gentlich) in Being and Time. What matters about this “dialectic” for our
purposes is that the “authentic does not have any content other than the
inauthentic” but is simply a modified way of seizing upon the inauthentic.162
Heidegger sees the Christian way of life as determined not by the content of
worldly relations, but by the way in which these inauthentic, or improper,
relations are “appropriated in their very impropriety.”163
Nonetheless, “for Paul,” he writes, “what is at stake is not appropria-
tion but use, and the messianic subject is not only not defined by propriety
[authenticity], but he is also unable to seize hold of himself as a whole,
whether in the form of an authentic decision or in Being-toward-death.”164
This is particularly significant because Heidegger’s account of inauthentic
life provides a crucial background for Agamben’s account of spectacular

society: in a fragment from Idea of Prose, he writes “if we want to look for
an image of our estrangement and social misery, it is still to the description
of everyday life in Sein und Zeit”165 What is essential to Agamben’s account
of use is that, just as there is no authentic use value that could be recovered
from the commodity, but only the possibility of its dialectical salvation,
neither is it possible to recover or even re-create a form of authenticity or
propriety. Bereft of great decisions and destinies, all that remains is to make
use of the inauthentic, nullified identities revealed by the society of the
spectacle. Yet if the spectacle offers an unprecedented opportunity, this is
because it is in the dreams of authenticity that he locates both the desire
to fix and determine a human essence, and the concomitant expulsion (or
at worst, extermination) of all that is deemed inauthentic, or improper;
“every affirmation of the authentic,” he writes, “had the effect of pushing
the inauthentic to another place, where morality would once again raise its
barriers . . . every consolidation of the walls of paradise was matched by a
deepening of the infernal abyss.”166 Humans, Agamben suggests in an essay
on Heidegger, neither originally dwell in the proper (which would assume
a form of authenticity, an essence, a destiny), nor nihilistically inhabit the
improper. “Rather, human beings are those who fall properly in love with
the improper.”167 To fall in love with the improper is to learn not to treat
existence as a property, and to be open to the possibilities that flow from
having nothing we have to be. It is not a fact but an embrace, an experi-
ence, of potentiality. It is to be, in Agamben’s terms, “whatever.”
We Are Saved When We No Longer Want to Be
What then becomes of that salvation that I have suggested he locates in

the closest proximity to danger? In the Coming Community, Agamben offers
a description of salvation that can help shed light on this: the “innermost
character of salvation,” he writes, “is that we are saved only at the point
when we no longer want to be. At this point, there is salvation, but not
for us.”168 This profane salvation is found between good and evil, in the zone
of indistinction in which such terms lose all meaning. We are saved only
at the point at which we abandon all dreams of destiny and substantial
belonging, at the point at which the claim of the state to save us from
the dangers of the state of nature is undone by the blurring of the border
between norm and exception, at the point at which we are “unsavable.”
Like the nullified characters that inhabit the world of Robert Walser’s fic-
tion, “the truly unsavable life,” Agamben writes in The Coming Community,
A NEW USE / 151
“is the one in which there is nothing left to save.”169 Agamben would
therefore agree with Paulo Virno’s observation that danger manifests, for
the most part, as a form of refuge, as “a horrifying strategy of salvation.”170
Those who seek salvation in the arms of the state, or in the assertion of
a particular identity or exclusionary belonging, are, Agamben writes in
an essay on Heidegger, like the animal protagonist of Kafka’s “The Bur-
row” who is “obsessively occupied with constructing an impregnable bur-
row, which reveals itself, little by little, to be instead a trap with no way
out.”171 This means that the former’s vision of salvation begins with collapse
of the nation-states and their collective identities, which claimed to offer
homes for peoples but provided “only lethal traps.”172 What remains, in the
wake of this process of nullification and expropriation is what he terms “the
un-savable that renders salvation possible, the irreparable that allows the
coming of the redemption,” that is, a life in which there is nothing left to
save—the life of the global petty-bourgeoisie.173
This account of the use of inauthenticity can be concretized if we
compare Agamben’s position briefly with that of Alphonso Lingis, who
has also sought to formulate a new basis for community beyond identity.
Here, I confine this comparison to a single essay, entitled Anger, in which
Lingis—in stark contrast to Agamben’s vision of a world “without classes”—
sees the basis for community in a shared anger at the dramatic inequality
of a world in which the consumer culture of what he terms the “techno-
cratic commercial archipelago” is built on the massive exploitation of cheap
labor in the “outer zone.”174 Before returning to Lingis’s account of this
inequality, it is worth focusing on the differing ways in which these think-
ers conceptualize the possibility of community in a world in which both
agree that at least a substantial section of us (in Lingis’s case, those in the
archipelago) “are present to one another alienated in technicizations and
simulacra.”175 For Lingis, those in the archipelago are alienated not merely
from the products of their labor, but from their world, which is consumed in
advance, while those in the “outer zone” live lives of massive exploitation
and poverty. Thus, he argues, it is only in anger that we can oppose both
the walls of simulacra that keep us apart, and the literal “Berlin walls” that
are increasingly appearing to keep those from the “outer zone” out. This
anger “does not arise in the midst of the shifting, spontaneous, and capri-
cious, instantly gratified, individual freedoms of our fellow activists in the
archipelago” but only when we come into contact with those in the outer
zone, in the “significance of their singular and communal forms of life.”176
It is not in the meaningless frenzy of consumption of the spectacle that
he locates the possibility of community, but outside it, in the communal
lives of the “outer zone.”
Lingis acknowledges that “much has been written about the illusions
now dissipated of class consciousness and worker solidarity among the
disinherited,” and even quotes Jesse Jackson’s relief, at hearing footsteps
behind him on a dark night, to find they weren’t those of a black man.
Nonetheless, the image he provides of the “outer zone” is in stark contrast
to the vacuity and atomization that he sees in the archipelago. “In the
favelas of Rio, the crumbling buildings of Havana, the swampy shanty-
towns of Jakarta, men and women rejoice at the singular beauty of their
faces, the singular passions of their loins,”177 he writes. Thus, those in the
archipelago who wish to discover the possibility of a more “meaningful”
life must shake themselves from their consumption-induced stupors, and
travel to the “outer zone.” “Anyone who leaves the television set with its
images of consumer euphoria and goes out to visit someone’s village in
the Isaan, in the favelas of Rio, the slums of Jakarta, the villages of Africa
discovers the character, the bravery, and the pride of singular people,”178 he
writes. While this analysis recognizes that the “outer zone” is enmeshed in
the circuits of consumption and production that sustain the spectacle, it
nonetheless fails to account for the fact that millions of people each year
do leave their television sets to “visit someone’s village,” usually returning
home not with a greater sense of the meaning of life and the “distress and
anger” addressed to them by those they encounter, but with an array of
digital photographs and a suitcase of cheap, authentic shawls and necklaces,
which are valued all the more highly if those who produced them are not
only poor but also traditional.
That Lingis leaves the tourism industry out of his indictment of spec-
tacular society is curious, but symptomatic of his broader desire to emphasize
the gulf that separates the archipelago from the “outer zone.” Thus, as those
in the outer zone are experiencing a “meaningfulness which is given in
singular pulses of enjoyment,”179 meanwhile in the archipelago:
It is in the culture of spectacle and simulacra that individuals are

called upon to devise the meaning and worth of their individual
and collective identities. They are called upon to devise them
out of forms, images, games, spectacles, that is, the excess over
the necessities of life, and from which the meaning of existence
is eclipsed before the instant gratification of the spectacle.180
It is undoubtedly true that there are numerous people in the world, who,
despite their poverty and the difficulty of their lives—lives spent “laboring
in assembly plants without job security or health benefits, or in contrived
and transitory street occupations”—indeed “devise ways to get along with
A NEW USE / 153
each other and support each other.”181 It is undoubtedly true that forms
of solidarity and tenderness, forms of character, bravery and pride, exist
among those whose lives are devoted to producing exchange values for their
employers, in order to afford use values for themselves. While Lingis sees
this as a specific characteristic of the “outer zone,” for Agamben, there are
no spaces outside the spectacle in which people live more meaningful or
authentic lives. It is precisely within the spectacle, even as Lingis describes
it, that he identifies the possibility of a new form of life; the fact that the
spectacle, even in a form mediated by consumption, calls on people to
“devise the meaning and worth of their individual and collective identi-
ties” provides an important break with the belief that these identities are
dictated by biology or by tradition; that we are invited “to devise them
out of forms, images, games” suggests that we no longer believe humanity
has a content (or essence) and are free to play with forms of life, opening
identity to a form of movement it had previously lacked.182 And if “the
meaning of existence is eclipsed,” this suggests existence has no meaning, in
which case we are free to give our existence meanings that are not imposed
on it, but that arise only in existing.183
This account of the spectacle enables us to avoid the romanticiza-
tion of poverty that pervades Lingis’s depiction of the outside. Not only
is there nothing about poverty and exploitation that make life inherently
meaningful, neither in and of themselves do poverty or exploitation nec-
essarily lead to solidarity or to “singular pulses of enjoyment.” As Jackson
highlighted, poor or oppressed people are not always each other’s greatest
allies. People in the favelas of Rio (also) shoot each other in drug wars,
people in the crumbling buildings of Havana (also) crowd into boats des-
perate to reach the less crumbling walls of the United States, people in
the swampy shantytowns of Jakarta (also) join Islamist groups dedicated to
instituting extreme forms of Sharia law, like that instituted in the Prov-
ince of Aceh, which dictates death by stoning for infidelity.184 In my view,
Agamben’s account of inclusive-exclusion, of the way those included are
simultaneously excluded and vice versa is more helpful in understanding the
topology of global capitalism than the geographical stratification implied
by Lingis’s demarcation of an outer zone. If Agamben’s account allows us
to avoid romanticizing a space that supposedly exists outside the spectacle,
however, we must nonetheless ask: what becomes of inequality, exploitation
and labor in his vision of a petty-bourgeoisie? And what becomes of anger?
Lingis reminds us that we are not all computer programmers and service
staff, that labor is not only immaterial but also material, worked in fields
and factories by people with broken bodies. He reminds those of us in the
West of the fact that the commodities we consume are produced by people
who earn in a month a fraction of what we spend on them. He reminds

us that this is something to be angry about.
If we are to bear this in mind, without romanticization, we should
turn our attention to the differential temporality of capitalism, which has
seen not the creation of a single class but a proliferation of social forms
that were thought to have been consigned to the past. What Benjamin
said of fascism in the last century is true of slavery and forced labor in our
century: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are
‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement
is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the
view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”185 Not only are there
still those who sell their labor power as a commodity and those who live
off the profits created by exploiting such labor power, but the teleological
framework of “development” is belied by the continuation, and creation,
of supposed archaisms, from bonded labor, to new forms of slavery, sexual
and otherwise.186 If the petty-bourgeoisie is not the only one of Marx’s
“transitional classes” that has proved surprisingly resilient in the society
of the spectacle, if Kevin Bales is correct to suggest that there “are more
slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of
the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” this gives a new, nonmetaphorical weight
to Agamben’s Pauline assertion that the slave should remain a slave, living
his factical condition “as not.”187
If, in fact, we are not all a global petty-bourgeoisie, if the spectacle has
not nullified all social classes and identities, then the view that we should
continue to inhabit these social identities, living them “as not” turns our
attention away from the ways in which they continue to mark relations
of social subordination and of exploitation that are violently enforced by
national and local “sovereigns.” Agamben’s suggestion that these identi-
ties are no longer meaningful would seem to offer little consolation to
those whose possibilities in life are thoroughly constrained within them.
As Catherine Mills highlights, his account of the expropriation of identity
in the society of the spectacle “precludes analysis of the various regimes of
identification and disidentification that currently operate to establish the
different political and ethical valuations of lives in their manifold expres-
sion.”188 This means that he turns our attention too far from the extent
to which these identities are produced by power, and caught up in more
or less reactionary or emancipatory political projects. To choose only one
example, Richard Pithouse, in his insightful analysis of “resistance in the
shantytown,” points out that the Hindu fascist movement Shiv Senna,
which built its first base in Bombay’s (Mumbai’s) shantytowns, “is one of
the many instances of deeply reactionary responses to the need for social
A NEW USE / 155
innovation” and warns that “there is no guarantee that the need to invent
new social forms will result in progressive outcomes.”189 Agamben’s account,
in contrast, is inattentive to the extent to which commodification not only
challenges identity by eroding its naturalistic ontological foundations, leav-
ing its empty forms “in force without significance,”190 but also produces new
identities, whether in the form of politicized identity claims that seek to
contest the differential distribution of power under capitalism, reactionary
responses to the erosion of previous regimes of hierarchical power, or niche
markets generated by the production of new desires and identifications.191
If, with Agamben, we remain interested in the possibility of a non-
utilitarian relation to the world and a community without identity, where
do its prospects lie? Agamben’s own answer to this question suffers from
the same defect as Marx’s enthusiastic account of the nullifying force of
capital—it assumes that “capitalism (or whatever other name we might
want to give to the process dominating world history today)” moves in a
single direction, eclipsing use values and hollowing out substantive iden-
tities. Although this theorization of the spectacle is perspicacious to the
extent that it reveals possibilities for praxis where some have seen only
a source of despair—for instance, in the rampant fetishism of consumer
culture and expropriation of stable identities consequent to processes of
capitalist globalization—it is nonetheless unable to address the other side
of spectacular capitalism, for instance, its reduction of millions of people
to a level of bare subsistence and its creation of new reactionary identity
formations (“No cliché is more stupefying,” writes John Gray in Al Qaeda
and What it Means to be Modern, “than that which describes Al Qaeda as a
throwback to medieval times. It is a byproduct of globalization”).192 Simi-
larly, while Agamben’s analysis draws attention to the possibilities that exist
for a humanity that is not defined by labor, it neglects the extent to which
labor continues to be central to the production of commodities and to the
maintenance of the society of the spectacle. While it draws our attention
to the liberating potential of a freedom from those vocations that are cast
as natural or traditional, it is less able to account for capitalism’s ability
to sustain the most “archaic” and rigid forms of “vocation,” among them
slavery and bonded labor.
The strength of Agamben’s theorization of the spectacle lies in his
rejection of every attempt to return to a supposedly more meaningful period,
whether one marked by an authentic relation to objects or one in which
identities and social classes were naturalized and stable. To the extent that
he derives his image of happiness from within this world, he draws our
attention to possibilities for praxis and areas of contestation where none
seemed to exist, encouraging us, through profanation and play, to seek
ways to open up the world to a new use no longer inscribed in nature

or tradition. Nonetheless, in focusing only on forms of praxis premised
on the nullification of utility and sense, he provides a one-sided image of
our world, which is inattentive to the ways in which use value is still the
central value of many commodities and in which identities continue to be
invested with meaning. Thus, while his thought enables us to challenge the
social relations derived from rampant consumerism, he offers little to those
whose problem is not that they are constantly seduced to consume useless
items but that they do not have enough to eat. By basing the entirety of
his account of praxis on the nullifying aspect of the spectacle, Agamben’s
analysis seems to preclude the possibility that forms of redemptive praxis
could arise where capitalism has created not vacuous idleness but the drudg-
ery of daily labor, not useless consumption but consumption to stay (barely)
alive—praxis like the massive protests against the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank across the African continent, for instance.193
While profanation and play may provide possibilities for resisting certain
aspects of spectacular capitalism, consumer culture, the global media and
entertainment business, the subsistence of the empty forms of previous
political eras (such as those labor parties that have thoroughly outlived
their names), it is not clear that these strategies are adequate to contesting
poverty or labor exploitation, or indeed the concentration camp.
Faced with the recognition that use value, identity, labor, and so on,
still exist, we could, on the one hand, conceive them as relics that remain
in force without significance, and will ultimately be expropriated and nul-
lified by the spectacle, leading to a truly global “petty bourgeoisie.” In this
case, any inaccuracy in the descriptive element of Agamben’s account of
the spectacle could be dismissed as simply a sign that he is ahead of his
times, just as, it could be argued, was Marx in identifying the decisive role
of the proletariat at a time when this class was still numerically insignificant
on a global scale. On the other hand, if capitalism does not have such a
teleological thrust, and I believe it does not, it may well be that it con-
tinues to produce massive poverty, forced labor, and politicized identities.
Capitalism, as Benjamin noted, is “the expansion of despair, until despair
becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to
salvation.”194 If, as I have suggested, we cannot rely on the conversion of
despair into salvation, it is necessary to develop a political thought capable
of taking into account the fact that, in contrast to the myth of “develop-
ment,” capitalism does not have one telos, but is just as good at waking
the dead as it is at reducing life worlds to debris.
Perhaps then what is necessary is to begin to formulate a political
thought within a society in which the spectacular consumption of use-
A NEW USE / 157
less commodities exists alongside subsistence living and in which a highly

mobile and flexible class, unbound of the strictures of national identity and
vocation, have their houses cleaned by people with few other possibilities
for survival, their shoes made in third-world sweatshops, and worry about
reports that planes are being hijacked by “Islamic fundamentalists” or that
their holiday destination is engulfed in a separatist struggle. If we are to
do justice to such a world, which may not resemble Agamben’s world to
come quite as much as the world he describes, it may be that we need to
start asking those questions that would guide us in transforming it. Among
these would be the following: How do we challenge the massive inequality
that sees some able to spend sums on useless commodities that would feed
those who produced them for a month? How can we generalize a condition
in which we all have the potential not to sell our labor power to survive?
How can we interrupt capitalism’s ceaseless colonization of the future, in
order to create new possibilities for living? How do we ensure that playful-
ness does not simply mask its own presupposition: the labor necessary for
the production of commodities? How do we play with identities in a way
that not only recognizes but also contests the fact that this is not an option
open to all? How can we create the conditions in which a trip to someone’s
village could mark the possibility of real engagement and an awareness of
inequality, rather than treating the poor of the world as raw material for
the tourism industry? How can we create forms of solidarity or community
that unite both Agamben’s petty-bourgeoisie and Lingis’s inhabitants of the
outer zone in shared anger at a system that expropriates them both? These
questions cannot be answered here, and will have to remain, like many of
Agamben’s tasks, bequeathed to the coming politics. It seems certain, how-
ever, that any attempt to answer them, any attempt to develop a political
thought adequate to our time, will have to recognize that capitalism, in
the words of the theologian Paul Fletcher, can offer only a “deficient form
of redemption.”195 Thus, to begin to formulate such a thought it will be
necessary to drop the teleological fascination with capitalism—that Marx
and Engels shared and that Benjamin warned had corrupted the working
class by leading it to believe “it was moving with the current”—and begin
to develop ways to contest it.196
Conclusion
Unemployment and the Ungovernable
Tear gas refreshes the army of bondholders; the Greek for General
Strike is on everyone’s lips; Goldman Sachs rules the world.
—T. J. Clark, For a Left With No Future
If further evidence is needed that the present is indeed catastrophic, we

need look no further than contemporary Greece to find it. In a context of
intractable financial crisis, one of “the most drastic drops in living standards
that post-war Europe has seen” has reduced large sections of the population
to mere survival.1 In today’s Greece, Médecins du Monde calls for urgent sup-
port to feed children, provide essential medicines, and address what it terms
a “humanitarian crisis.”2 Soup kitchens in Athens serve eight thousand
people each day. “It is like during the war, we just can’t afford to buy what
we need,” a seventy-seven-year-old pensioner remarks. “The soup kitchens
remind me of the Nazi Occupation.”3 To enforce deeply unpopular auster-
ity measures, emergency laws were introduced, labor regulations abolished,
and exceptional repressive measures utilized against demonstrators: for the
first time, a protest against the privatization of a gold mine was met with
rubber bullets.4 Immigrants have borne the worst of this repression, as the
state has taken to arresting them en masse.5 What’s more, fascism is once
again a real presence, both in official politics, where the neo-Nazi Golden
Dawn entered the parliament, and on the streets where its thugs, dressed
in their signature black shirts carry out violent, xenophobic attacks. The
imposition of longer working hours has led to the further commodifica-
tion of human potentiality and Greece is subjected to the open rule of a
spectacular and globalized capital, which expropriates all that remained of
159
older, noncommodified forms of life. Greece, as Stathis Kouvelakis puts it,

is truly undergoing a “social catastrophe.”6
Throughout this book, I have argued that we should resist the temp-
tation to see catastrophe as presaging redemption, and suggested that only
political action, and not the intensification of the expropriative logic of
capital, holds the possibility of a new form of life in which we could make
free use of our own capacities. With Agamben, I have suggested that the
destructive force of capital does open up possibilities for the form of life he
has characterized as “redemption,” but I have argued that actualizing such
possibilities requires a rupture with capital. To conclude, I examine contem-
porary Greece, in light of what his thought can lend to understanding and
responding to the quintessentially capitalist catastrophe it is undergoing.
Today’s Greece offers a paradigmatic example of a political system
that is, in Agamben’s terms, “in force without significance.”7 The govern-
ment elected in June 2012—the so-called grand coalition of the center-
left PASOK, the center-right New Democracy and the ex-Euro-communist
DIMAR, or Democratic Left—received only 2.9 million votes, barely 29
percent of the total electorate.8 This contrasts dramatically with the decades
following the fall of the Junta in 1974, which saw the combined support for
two main parties at 80 to 85 percent. Today, it is clear that the real power
is not wielded by the people’s representatives, but by the Troika and the
representatives of the financial markets. As Kouvelakis suggests, even “the
remnants of national sovereignty and democracy that still existed in Greece,
already largely formal, are now a thing of the past.”9 Goldman Sachs, as T.
J. Clark observes, really does rule this part of the world.10
In this context, most of the political solutions on offer run directly
counter to Agamben’s suggestion that the exhaustion of the content of older
political forms provides an opportunity to render them inoperative and put
them to a new use. For many, the imposition of austerity measures is a sign
that Greece has become a testing ground for a “post-democratic condition,
with limited sovereignty and accountability,” which calls for a reassertion
of sovereignty against the dominance of the globalised economy.11 Others
criticize the “loss of sovereignty that has turned the country into a neocolo-
nial fiefdom of bankers in Germany” and see in the protests that have filled
Athens’ Syntagma Square the return of a classical paradigm of politics that
harks back to the Athenian agora.12 The square, as Costas Douzinas notes,
takes its name, Syntagma (constitution) from nineteenth-century demon-
strators, who demanded that the King grant them a constitution. Today’s
protestors, he argues, repeat this struggle: “they are standing upright,” he
writes, “demanding a new political arrangement to free them from neolib-
eral domination, political corruption, and post-democratic malaise.”13
CONCLUSION / 161
In a rare public intervention about the Greek election, Agamben

mirrored this language, arguing that the elections provided an opportunity
to reconsider a political model, the European constitution, which lacks a
constituent power, and is thus without legitimacy. Without a constituent
power, he continued, there can be no constitution but only an agreement
between governors to produce an economic unity without political unity,
which means subjecting the peoples of Europe to the ravages of globalized
capital without defenses. And yet, it is in Greece, he suggests, that “finance
capitalism could be unmasked once and for all and that a true European
constitution could find its form.”14 Agamben’s intervention was surprising,
both because, as we have seen, he has previously argued that constituent
power cannot be distinguished from the sovereign power he sees premised
on the abandonment of bare life, and because he is profoundly aware of the
extent to which modern constitutional projects relied on ethnic unities, or
at least on “the common presuppositions of language and public opinion.”15
If we turn instead to The Kingdom and the Glory, we find important
resources with which to challenge the recourse to sovereignty to contest
economic government. This is so despite the fact that Agamben’s focus in
that book is not on the debates taking place within the corridors of the
European Union or in Syntagma Square. Rather, in reconstructing the
genealogy of contemporary government he turns to the debates between
the early Church Fathers that resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Two distinct paradigms emerge from Christian theology, he argues. The
first, political theology gives rise to political philosophy and the theory of
sovereignty. The second, to which this major work is devoted, is that of
“economic theology”: an economic or governmental strand of Christianity
in which he finds a crucial precursor to contemporary nonjuridical gov-
ernmental practices. The central concern of The Kingdom and the Glory is
to discover why power in the West “has taken the form of an oikonomia,
that is, a government of men.”16 For Agamben, it is only if we come to
grips with economic theology that we can adequately grasp the genealogy
of contemporary liberal democracies, which he sees as characterized by
economic management, consensual, democracy, and spectacle.
The “first seed of the division between the Kingdom and the Govern-
ment”—Agamben writes in The Kingdom and the Glory—“is to be found
in the Trinitarian oikonomia, which introduces a fracture between being
and praxis in the deity himself.”17 He finds a paradigmatic instance of the
split between reigning and governing in the words of the Church Father
Tertullian, who stressed that although monarchy may mean a single or sole
ruler, this does not preclude that the one who rules has a son who will
administer his monarch; “no kingdom is in such a sense ones man’s own, in
such a sense single, in such a sense a monarchy,” he writes, “as not to be

administered also through those other closely related persons whom it has
provided for itself as officers.”18 Monarchy and economy, Tertullian stresses,
are necessarily compatible. Christianity may be a monotheistic religion,
but the Trinitarian oikonomia is an economic and administrative paradigm,
“which extends from the heavenly house to its earthly manifestation.”19
Just as his earlier works highlighted the fact that Ancient Greece’s
democracy relied on the permanent abandonment of those whose lives
were devoted to necessities of mere life, his more recent work provides a
caution against understanding the fate of contemporary Greece as a struggle
for sovereignty and democracy against the rule of the economy. By stressing
that sovereignty and government form a bipolar machine, it allows us to
reconceptualize forms of opposition in a context in which the resurgent fas-
cism that has accompanied the talk of violated sovereignty in Greece give
pause for thought about a strategy that mobilizes sovereignty and democracy
against economy and government. In a chilling speech in the aftermath
of the electoral victory that propelled the neo-fascists into the parliament,
the leader of Greece’s Golden Dawn Party Nikolaos Michaloliakos warned
“the hour of fear has come for the traitors of my country,” and declared
that his first priority would be to rid Greece of illegal immigrants: “Out of
my country! Out of my home!” he thundered. The strength of Agamben’s
account is that by identifying the complicity of the exclusionary politics of
sovereignty and the technocratic oikonomia, it makes it possible to undercut
the nostalgia for sovereignty that characterizes much opposition to transna-
tional economic government, and challenge both simultaneously.
The weakness of his account, however, is that in failing to specifically
analyze capitalism, it is unable to adequately conceptualize the contours of
the global catastrophe that takes its paradigmatic form in Greece. The cur-
rent crisis is not just a crisis of “the economy,” which can be traced back
to Aristotelian oikonomia or the Christian economy of salvation, but also
a specifically capitalist crisis. Nowhere is it clearer than in contemporary
Greece that only a rupture with capital will prevent the reduction of ever-
increasing sections of the world’s population to bare life. Understanding
the nature of the catastrophe is essential if we are to be able to discern
the conditions of possibility it harbors and formulate political responses
to it. I have suggested that central to formulating a response to the catas-
trophes of the present is an examination of possible sources of agency,
or forms of political action. Malcolm Bull has argued that today the key
political agents of the twentieth century have either disappeared or been
dramatically weakened, leaving only two forces that still seem to have the
power to shape the world: “market globalization, propelled by governments
CONCLUSION / 163
and multinational corporations, and populist reactions that seek to assert

national or communal sovereignty.”20 This captures the oscillation between
the Troika’s technocratic economic rule and Golden Dawn’s neo-fascist
reaction. And yet, in today’s Greece, we see another possibility: a form of
withdrawal that takes us closer to Benjamin’s mobilization of Sorel’s “pro-
letarian general strike,” which I have suggested provides a better figure of
withdrawal from labor than does Bartleby’s individual passivity.21
In the context of the crisis, it has become common to hear the Greek
people cast as lazy, and thus as “responsible” (along good neoliberal lines)
for their fates. Unsurprisingly, part of the economic remedy imposed by
the Troika has been an attempt to undo labor regulations to enable the
further imposition of work, including by increasing the working week to six
days22—all this in a nation in which unemployment reached 24.4 percent
in June 2012, and in which youth unemployment is at 55 percent.23 As
wages decline, Greeks are subjected to lectures about how they must work
harder for less. As Marx noted in The Grundrisse (in a remark that has
a contemporary ring after the crash of the “Celtic Tiger”): the worker is
lectured in self-denial and industriousness, while if he did what he implored
to do, it would “degrade him to the level of the Irish, the level of wage
labor where the most animal minimum of needs and subsistence appears to
him as the sole object and purpose of his exchange with capital.”24 That
OECD statistics suggest that Greeks work longer hours than citizens of any
other European country is not really the point.25 What seems significant
about the myth of Greek laziness is that the specter of the voyou desouvré,
(or “lazy rascal”)26 is a threat to the capitalist imposition of work, which
must be exorcised to ensure the continued submission of the populations
of other European states. What is really disquieting about “Greek laziness”
is that it points to the possibility of a life that is not reduced to work: a
life in which we could make free use of our own capacities.
While, as we have seen, classical Greek thought largely shared an
antipathy toward labor, which was seen as the imposition of necessity on
freedom, the privilege of the few who could avoid it was premised on the
slavery of many. In a context in which more than half of the young people
in a major European nation are unemployed, this is not the Faustian pact
with which we are faced. Instead we are offered a choice: embrace the
possibility that life could be other than working for survival, or abandon a
rapidly increasing surplus population, transforming a large part of the world’s
citizens into bare life. Here we see starkly posed the alternative: catastrophe,
conceived as the continuation of a present in which crisis has become a
structural norm, or redemption, understood as the creation of a world in
which we are able to make free use of our own capacities: the former, a
world defined by the imposition of work alongside the reduction of life to

survival. The latter, a world organized around the possibility of happiness.
In a world marked by a “growing gap between the possibilities gen-
erated by the development of capitalism and its actual form,”27 we see
the conditions of possibility of a new politics and a noncapitalist form of
life. This emphasis on the contradictory nature of the present, as Moishe
Postone stresses, should in no way be understood as assuming the auto-
matic breakdown of capitalism or the emergence of oppositional forms of
consciousness or agency pointing beyond it. Golden Dawn, after all, drew
the largest proportion of its vote from the unemployed, from those who
described themselves as “facing financial difficulty” and from the young.28
Instead, if we are to identify the possibility of a form of life in which we
are able to make free use of human capacities we must look to the “his-
torical non-necessities” in the present on the basis of which capitalism’s
determinate negation becomes possible.29
Central to this is that structural unity of capitalist production and
unemployment that Marx characterizes as the “absolute general law” of
capital.30 It is the belated recognition of this “general law,” in which in
Fukuyama’s terms, “every great advance for Silicon Valley likely means
a loss of low-skill jobs elsewhere in the economy,” that led this prophet
of the end of history to suggest in 2011 that history may indeed have a
future.31 While Fukuyama finds this thought “very troubling,” it is possible
to see it instead as the condition of possibility of a politics that would
refute the eternity of the capitalist present by asserting the non-necessity
of capitalist work and orienting itself to that disposable time that Marx
saw as real wealth. To recognize that capital puts an increasing proportion
of the world’s population out of work, as Frederic Jameson suggests, allows
a “welcome recoding” of the misery and enforced idleness “of naked life
in all the metaphysical senses in which the sheer biological temporality of
existences without activity and without production can be interpreted.”32
To recode such abandonment in terms of unemployment, “rather than this
or that tragic pathos,” he suggests, would recommit us “to the invention of
a new kind of transformatory politics on a global scale.”33
Such a politics, if we follow Agamben, would be premised not only
on the contemporary historical non-necessity of the imposition of work,
but also on its metaphysical non-necessity—that is, on the recognition
that the human is not an animal laborans. In The Kingdom and the Glory,
he writes that a life that contemplates its own power to act, “renders itself
inoperative in all its operations, and lives only (its) livability.”34 Inopera-
tivity, he argues, is a life that lives only its own power of living—a life in
which a bios coincides entirely with its own zoē. In “The Work of Man”
CONCLUSION / 165
he considers Aristotle’s attempt in The Nichomachean Ethics to answer the

question of whether man qua has a specific work. Here, Aristotle explicitly
considers the possibility that man, as man, may be without work. Just as the
good for the flute player consists in the work of playing the flute, so, too,
should it be for man, if man has work, Aristotle reasons. “Or,” he writes,
“[must we say] that there is a certain work and an activity for the carpen-
ter and the shoemaker, and for man there is none, that he is born with
no work (argos)?”35 Ultimately, Aristotle identifies the work of man in a
particular form of life: the life according to logos. In contrast, for Agamben
the properly human praxis is not labor but contemplation, or Sabbatism,
which opens life to possibility. “Contemplation and inoperativity are, in
this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which, by liberat-
ing the living man from his biological or social destiny, assign him to that
indefinable dimension that we are accustomed to call ‘politics.’ ”36 A model
of the operation that would render human and divine works inoperative,
Agamben suggests, is the poem. By deactivating the communicative and
informatic functions of language, the poem opens it to another, noninstru-
mental use. “What the poem accomplishes for the power of saying,” he
writes, “politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting?”37
The question that remains is that of the form of political praxis that could
enable a life that is able to embrace its own potentiality. In today’s Greece,
we find the beginnings of an answer.
In Greece, October 28 marks what is known as the “Day of the ‘No’ ”
(Επέτειος του «‘Οχι»)—a day dedicated to the commemoration of Greece’s
rejection of Mussolini’s 1940 ultimatum that if Axis troops were not allowed
to enter Greece, it would be war. In 2011, the day was transformed into
a day of opposition to the Troika’s austerity package. Greece’s President
Karolos Papoulias was forced to flee the ceremonies. The regular army
march was canceled and school students, civilians, and reservists marched
in their place, fists raised. Slogans linked the current leaders with the col-
laborators of World War II, and “chants and songs from the Resistance
mingled with those from the struggles against the military dictatorship.”38
Here we see a different legacy of World War II: not the persistence of Aus-
chwitz but a history of refusal and resistance, which forms a Benjaminian
constellation with the struggles of today. Combined with the practical No
of the general strike, the withdrawal from political parties, and the refusal
to pay new taxes, this No is the emergency brake that could draw the
juggernaut of capitalist austerity to a standstill. It is only on the basis of
such a No—a No to the end of history, to the reduction of life to survival
and the unadorned state power that imposes it, to the meaningless spec-
tacle of parliamentary politics, and the imposition of yet more unnecessary
work—that it becomes possible to think what Benjamin termed a “state of

the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be
appropriated or made juridical.”39
In the Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben makes the enigmatic sugges-
tion that it may be possible today to “think an Ungovernable [un Ingoverna-
bile], that is, something that could never assume the form of an oikonomia.”40
The ungovernable appears, again in an enigmatic form, in the short book
What is an Apparatus?, where it is defined as “the beginning and, at the same
time, the vanishing point of every politics.”41 While he is clear that this
ungovernable is not a revolutionary subject, Agamben nonetheless suggests
that it constitutes the only hope in the face of a providential governance
that is producing not redemption but catastrophe. Producing this ungovern-
able, he suggests, means intervening into our processes of subjectification:
every subject, as he sees it, is a subject of government. The “first operation
of the governmental dispositif, of every governmental dispositif,” as Nicholas
Heron explains it, “thus consists in making the living being governable,
which is to say, by transforming it into a subject.”42 While Agamben bor-
rows the term “dispositf,” or “apparatus,” from Foucault, he traces it to the
term “oikonomia”: government, he suggests, is an apparatus that must first
produce its subjects.
Today in Greece, in the No of those who are no longer offered any-
thing by the system—those for whom there are no jobs, and no pacifying
social compromise—we hear the call of this ungovernable. The “people of
the squares,” as Kouvelakis notes, were largely those who were alienated
from the major parties and excluded from the traditional systems of rep-
resentation.43 In this alienation we see the beginnings of an escape from
the forms of subjectivity produced by the governmental apparatus. This
withdrawal hurt the radical left electoral front Syriza, which had anticipated
capturing much of this section of the population for its anti-austerity left
reformist agenda.44 Yet, in this withdrawal, we can perhaps see a tiredness
with the broken promises of parliamentary reform—promises that have been
abandoned too many times in the face of the necessary realism of assuming
power in a global capitalist economy. This No is the starting point on the
basis of which something new could emerge—neither a catastrophe nor an
ultimate redemption but the real possibility of a politics that could contest
the reduction of human potentiality to a presupposition that founds mur-
derous national projects or to a commodity that confronts and dominates
its seller. In that case, as Fukuyama conceded in 2011, history may indeed
have a future.45
Notes
Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption
1. Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland De La

Durantaye (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 27.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 11.
3. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment” in One Way Street
and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso,
1985), 155.
4. Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 40.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Ibid., 41.
7. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, 1992), xiii.
8. Ibid., 47.
9. Ibid., 65.
10. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press), 2010.
12. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise
of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York” (The West Point
Speech), June 1, 2002, http://www.nti.org/e_research/official_docs/pres/bush_wp_
prestrike.pdf.
13. René ten Bos, “Giorgio Agamben and the Community Without Identity,”
Sociological Review (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 18.
14. Dominick LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Citing Agamben,” in
Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 155.
15. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 305.
16. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And other Essays, trans. David
Kishik and Simon Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 22.
17. Giorgio Agamben, The Open, 76.
18. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 305.
167
168 / NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
19. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Konvulut N, (N10,2), 474.

20. Giorigo Agamben, “Halos,” The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993), 54.
21. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort
(New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73.
22. Giorgio Agamben, “The Irreparable,” The Coming Community, 102.
23. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’ ” in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jen-
nings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 401.
24. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
(London: Penguin, 1993), 307.
25. Walter Benjamin, cited in Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the
Sovereign,” 160.
26. Wendell Kisner, “Agamben, Hegel and the State of Exception,” Cosmos
and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 3:2–3 (2007), 249.
27. Mark Mazower, “Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis,” 34.
28. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and
Fragments, ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1998),
243.
29. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 12.
30. Ibid., 12.
31. Ibid.
32. Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory and Transference,” in Geoffrey H.
Hartman Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
254.
33. Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, Folio 98a, http://www.come-and-
hear.com/sanhedrin/sanhedrin_98.html.
34. Aviezer Ravitsky, “The Messianism of Success in Contemporary Judaism”
in “Apocalypse in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age,” The Ency-
clopaedia of the Apocalypse, vol. 3, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum,
1999), 201.
35. Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Sur-
vive the Decline of the Middle Class?” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2012,
n.pag.
36. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Continental
Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
37. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’ ” 402.
38. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt,
224.
39. This is an English translation of Agamben’s own translation of the
Greek. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to
the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
110. The English Revised Version of the New Testament reads: “For the mystery of
lawlessness [anomia] doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION / 169
he be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the
Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought by the mani-
festation of his coming.” II Thessalonians 2, Holy Bible, English Revised Version.
40. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 109.
41. Ibid., 109.
42. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sover-
eignty, trans. George Schwab (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988).
43. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus
Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), 59–60.
44. Carl Schmitt, “Three Possibilities . . .” quoted in Heinrich Meier, The
Lesson of Carl Schmitt, trans. Marcus Brainard (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 161.
45. The phrase comes from Jacob Taubes, cited in Giorgio Agamben, The
Time that Remains, 104.
46. Carl Schmitt, quoted in Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 10.
48. Maurice Glucksman, “Bernard Kouchner,” Time, April 26, 2004, http://
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994044,00.html#ixzz1wb0VROED.
49. For a defense of a katechonic form of politics that refuses to see capitalism
as “the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of our time,” see Benjamin Noys, The Persistence
of the Negative, 171.
50. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory.
51. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M.
Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 131.
52. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 8.
53. Ibid., 38.
54. Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 35.
55. Ibid., 35.
57. Ibid., 162.
59. See for instance, Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 95.
60. Ibid., 110.
61. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Vintage, 2004), 135.
63. Ibid., 111.
64. G. M. Tamás, “Telling the Truth About Class,” Socialist Register, vol. 42
(2006):2.
65. Ibid., 3.
66. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115.
67. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics,” Means Without Ends, 109.
68. Ibid., 109.
69. Ibid.
170 / NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
70. Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History,” n.pag.

71. Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right,” (1844), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-
jahrbucher/law-abs.htm.
72. G. M. Tamás, “Telling the Truth About Class,” 29.
73. As I suggest in chapter 5, however, capitalist development is not linear,
and is just as good at awakening supposed archaisms, like slavery, as it is as expro-
priating fixed vocations.
74. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), 174.
75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London:
Phoenix, 1996), 36.
76. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso,
1980), 18.
77. Moishe Postone (with Timothy Brennan), “Labor and the Logic of
Abstraction: An Interview, South Atlantic Quarterly, 108 (Spring 2009):2, 325.
78. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Classics, 1990).
79. Charles Wentworth Dilke, “The Source and Remedy of the National
Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy,” in a letter to Lord John
Russell, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/dilke/1821/sourceand
remedy.htm.
80. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396.
83. Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital (London and New York: Verso,
2011).
84. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative, 170.
85. Stacke Roderick, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (New York:
Routledge, 2007), 260.
86. T. J. Clark, “For a Left With No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March–
April 2012), 67.
87. See Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life” in Means Without Ends, 3–12.
88. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception.
89. Ibid., 2.
90. Ibid., 88.
91. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Aus-
chwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), 9.
94. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,”
eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
vol. 2, part 2, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 881.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 / 171
Chapter 1: The Politics of Life

1. President George W. Bush, “Address on Initial Operations in Afghani-
stan,” October 7, 2001, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911inti-
alafghanistanops.htm.
2. Chris Johnson, Afghanistan (Herndon, England: Stylus Publishing, 2004),
31.
3. Laura Flanders, “Killer Food Drops” Common Dreams, October 8, 2001,
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1009–14.htm.
4. See, for instance, Chris Johnson, Afghanistan; and Laura Flanders, “Killer
Food Drops.”
5. See Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy
Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4; and Slavoj Žižek,
“Are We In a War? Do We Have an Enemy?” London Review of Books, May 23,
2002, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/zize01_.html.
7. Benjamin writes: “The dissolution of legal violence stems (as cannot be
shown in detail here) from the guilt of a more natural life, which consigns the living,
innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and
doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law. For with mere
life, the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythic violence is bloody power over
mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake
of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.” Walter Benjamin,
“On the Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 250.
8. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesaro Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2.
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).
11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), 28.
12. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 77.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. Giorgio Agamben and Vacarme, “I am sure that you are more pessimistic
than I am . . .”: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 16,
no. 2, April 2004, 123.
16. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.
17. Antonio Negri, “The Discrete Taste of the Dialectic,” in Giorgio Agam-
ben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 117.
172 / NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

19. Martin Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 341.
20. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 121.
21. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, 296.
23. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview,
1966,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. T. Sheehan, trans. W. Richardson
(London: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 45–67.
24. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 121.
25. Aristotle, The Politics (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1942), 114.
26. Ibid., 28.
27. Much of the first book of Aristotle’s Politics, which deals with the differ-
ences between the political sphere and the household, can be seen as a critique of
Plato. “It is an error,” he writes, “to suppose that the relationships between states-
man and state, between king and subjects, between householder and household,
between master and slaves, are all the same” (25). Aristotle’s rigid separation of
political life from life in the home is the basis of Agamben’s characterization of
him as inaugurating the caesura between life and politics.
28. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 37.
29. Aristotle, The Politics, 28.
30. Cited in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 147.
31. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson Tancred (London: Penguin
Classics, 1986).
32. Ibid., 166.
32. Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 230.
34. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143.
35. Michel Foucault, The History Sexuality, 137.
36. Ibid., 139.
37. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Middlesex, England: Penguin,
1942), 46.
38. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 142.
39. Michel Foucault, “The Mesh of Power,” trans. Christopher Chitty, View-
point, issue 2 (September 2012), n.pag.
40. Michel Foucault, “The Mesh of Power,” (n.pag.).
41. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 94.
42. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, 138.
43. Ibid., 137.
44. Ibid., 138.
45. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. Emphasis in original.
46. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 241. As Mark G. E. Kelly

notes, while the older sovereign power continues to operate in tandem with bio-
politics and discipline, those who are kept alive are separated from those who are
subjected to “the lethal technology of sovereignty”—criminals and foreigners for
instance. “Sovereignty,” he notes, “only operates insofar as the newer technologies
don’t.” Mark G. E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (New York and
London: Routledge, 2009), 43.
47. See for instance Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7. While Agamben sees
biopolitics as securing the relation between life and politics via what he terms the
exception, Foucault is concerned with normalization as the mode of operation of
biopolitics. See Catherine Mills, “Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics and Nihilism,” in
Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 180–202.
49. Ibid., 4.
50. Ibid.
51. For an insightful account of the problem of state racism in Foucault’s
Society Must Be Defended, see Mark Kelly, “Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics:
Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended, 2003, Contretemps, September 2004.
52. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, 143.
53. Ibid., 143.
55. Ibid., 6.
56. Ibid., 7.
57. Jean Luc Nancy, “Abandoned Being” in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian
Holmes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 36–47.
58. Ibid., 44.
60. Ibid., 61.
62. Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political
Thought,” Social Research, vol. 69, no. 2 (2002), 258.
63. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 183.
65. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Par-
vis Emad and Kenneth Maley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
66. Ibid., 84.
67. Ibid., 83.
68. See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 84–86.
69. Ibid., 88.
70. Robert Sinnerbrink, “From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical
Critique of Biopower,” Critical Horizons, 6 (2005):1, 244.
71. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 68.

73. Cited in Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 92.
75. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1996).
76. Robert Sinnerbrink, “From Machenschaft to Biopolitics,” 258.
77. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 2.
78. Giorgio Agamben, “Experimentum Linguae,” Infancy and History: On the
Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 6.
79. The lecture, given in Lisbon in 1986, was later published as Giorgio
Agamben, “On Potentiality,” in Potentiality: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 177.
81. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans.
Karen Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 33.
83. See, for instance, Etienne Balibar, “(De) Constructing the Human as
Human Institution,” Social Research, 74:3 (2007); Wendy Brown, “The Most We
Can Hope For: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly,
103 (2004); Costas Douzinas, The End Of Human Rights (Oxford and Portland;
Hart, 2000); Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of
Cosmopolitanism, (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007); Jacques Rancière, “Who
is the Subject of Human Rights?” and Slavoj Žižek, “Against Human Rights,”
libcom.org (2004).
84. Marx Karl “On the Jewish Question,” 1843, http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/.
86. Ibid., 133.
87. Ibid.
88. Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the
Rights of Man,” The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976),
299.
89. Etienne Balibar, “(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution,”
728.
90. Ibid., 732.
91. Ibid., 732, and Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of Human Rights,”
297. Burke cited in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 127.
92. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Classics, 1990)
(especially 59–140). Notably, Arendt favorably compares the American Revolu-
tion to the French, due to the relative prosperity that ameliorated the pressures of
necessity (i.e., poverty) on the quest for freedom. She notes, however, that it is
tempting to ask “if the goodness of the poor white man’s country did not depend to
a considerable degree upon black labor and black misery” (71). Indeed, as Arendt is
referring to slavery, a similar question could well be asked of the Greek polis, where,
as we have seen, the distinction between zoē and bios presupposed the exclusion
from the polis of slaves, and of all those whose lives were bound to the biological
life process through the necessity to labor.
93. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 60.
94. Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of Human Rights,” 298.
96. Ibid., 9.
97. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 60.
98. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843), http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. Emphases in original.
99. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 280.
100. Arendt, On Revolution, 61.
101. Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” Means Without Ends, 20.
103. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 145.
105. See Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Paulo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude,
trans. Isabella Bertoletti James Cascaito Andrea Caisson (New York: Semiotext[e],
2004); and Roberto Esposito Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy.
106. See my essay: Jessica Whyte, “Human Rights: Confronting Govern-
ments?: Michel Foucault and the Right to Intervene” in New Critical Legal Thinking,
eds. Matthew Stone, Illan Wall, and Costas Douzinas (London: Routledge, 2012).
108. Ibid., 121.
110. Ibid., 128.
111. Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French
Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 99.
112. Ibid., 53.
113. Ibid.
114. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 270.
115. Ibid., 260.
115. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” in Means Without Ends, 3.
118. Ibid., 3. “Naked life” is an alternate translation of what is elsewhere
translated as “bare life.”
119. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” in Means Without Ends, 3.
120. Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” 2.
121. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities, 182.
122. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 105.
123. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, 4.

128. Ibid., 3.
129. Walter Benjamin, On the Critique of Violence, 153.
130. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, eds. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), X11a,3.
131. Marx, Karl. 1843. Letter to Arnold Ruge. Cologne: Marxists Internet
Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05-alt.htm.
Chapter 2: Politics at the Limits of the Law:

On the State of Exception
1. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 71–72. These feasts occurred peri-
odically throughout the classical, the medieval, and the modern eras respectively.
3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, especially 71–115.
4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 71. Agamben is referring to Meuli’s
Besammelte Schriften. 2 vols. (Basel-Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1975).
5. Karl Meuli, cited in Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 73.
7. Cavalca cited in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104.
10. Ibid., 2.
11. Ibid., 88.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Ibid.
14. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 2004), 61.
15. Ibid., 99.
16. Paulo Virno, “General Intellect, Exodus, Multitude,” Generation Online,
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm. Ernesto Laclau, “Bare Life or
Social Indeterminacy,” in Calarco and DeCaroli, Sovereignty and Life, 22.
17. Matthew Sharpe, “ ‘Thinking of the Extreme Situation . . .’ On the New
Anti-Terrorism Laws, or Against a Recent (Theoretical and Legal) Return to Carl
Schmitt,” Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol. 24 (2006), 109.
18. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics,” Means Without Ends, 109.
19. Wendy Brown and Janet E. Halley, Left Legalism, Left Critique (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 31.
20. Anatole France, cited in Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Vio-
lence,” in One Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1985), 151.
21. See George W. Bush, “We’re Fighting for Our Way of Life,” CNN Access,
September 6, 2006, http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/bush.transcript/
index.html.
22. Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 1997), 46.
23. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos” in Friedrich Hölderlin Poems and Lectures,
trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968),
462–463.
24. William E. Scheuerman, “Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law after
9/11,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, issue 1 (March 2006), 61.
25. Ibid.
26. Lincoln cited in Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship (New York:
Harbinger Books, 1963), 3. (Emphasis in original.)
27. As of writing, this state of emergency was still in place.
28. George W. Bush, Declaration of a National Emergency by Reason of
Certain Terrorist Attacks, September 14, 2001, Federal Register: September 18,
2001, vol. 66, no. 181, Presidential Documents, page 48199, http://www.fas.org/
irp/news/2001/09/fr091801.html.
29. Elaine Scarry, “Resolving to Resist,” Boston Review (March, 2, 2005), 2.
http://www.bostonreveiew.net/BR29.1/Scarry.html.
30. Sotirios A. Barber and James E. Fleming: “War, Crisis and the Constitu-
tion,” in The Constitution in Wartime: Beyond Alarmism and Complacency, ed. Mark
Tushnet (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 236.
31. Editorial, “Politics Over Principle,” New York Times, December 16, 2011,
A42.
32. John Locke: “An Essay Concerning the True, Original, Extent and End
of Civil Government,” in Social Contract: Locke, Hume, Rousseau (London: Oxford
34. William E. Scheuerman, “Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law after
9/11,” 68.
36. Anomie, as Agamben uses it, is counterposed to nomos. “Anomia,” he
writes, “can only mean absence of law.” Giorgio Agamben, Time That Remains, 110.
37. Nasser Hussein, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, 2003, 18.
39. John McCormick, “The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and
Constitutional Emergency Powers,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of
Liberalism, ed. David Dyzenhaus (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1998), 239.
40. Vladimir Lenin, “Message of Greetings to the Bavarian Socialist Repub-
lic,” April 27, 1919. Available at Marxists.Org, http://www.marxists.org/archive/
lenin/works/1919/apr/27.htm.
41. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt
(London: Verso, 2000), 20.
43. Matthew Sharpe, “ ‘Thinking of the Extreme Situation . . . ,’ ” 101.
44. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 66.
45. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 35.
47. Antonio Negri, “Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of

Earthly Life,” trans. Gabriele Fadini, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 9.1,
Winter 2008, http://www.jcrt.org/archives/09.1/Negri.pdf, 97.
48. Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, “Constitutional Crisis: The
German and American Experience,” in Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis, eds.
Jacobson and Schlink and trans. Belinda Cooper, (University of California Press,
Berkeley, 2002), 2.
49. Frederick Watkins, The Failure of Constitutional Emergency Powers Under
the German Republic (Cambridge University Press, Harvard and Massachusetts,
1939), 5.
50. Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship (Harbinger Books, New York,
1963), 33.
51. Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, “Constitutional Crisis: The
German and American Experience,” 1.
52. Ibid., 3.
54. Ibid., 13.
56. William Rasch, “From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty,” in Gior-
gio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli,
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2007), 96.
57. Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer, (Duke Uni-
versity Press, Durham and London, 2004), 54.
58. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
(Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2005), 4.
59. Ibid., 1.
60. Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, 74.
62. Ibid., 5.
63. Ibid., 6.
64. Ibid., 69.
65. Ibid., 12.
67. Ibid., 64.
68. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt,
19.
69. Carl Schmitt, quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 162.
70. Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, 46.
71. Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship (New York: Harbinger Books,
1963), 34.
73. Ibid., 36.
74. Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 162.

80. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 51.
81. Roman Jakobson, “Langue and Parole, Code and Message,” in Roman
Jakobson, On Language, eds. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Melville-Burston (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 93.
83. See Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), 19–26.
84. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, 20.
85. Cited in Giorgio Agamben Infancy and History, 46.
86. Emile Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems in General Lin-
guistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press,1971),
220.
87. Agamben, State of Exception, 37.
88. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1976), 186.
89. While some would dispute the categorization of Hobbes within the lib-
eral tradition, given his absolutist conception of power and antipathy to individual
rights, in my view his formulation of the state of nature and the social contract
are founding contributions to that tradition.
90. Fernando R. Tesón, “The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Interven-
tion,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas, eds. J. L.
Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 95.
91. Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics, and as Idolatry,” The Tan-
ner Lectures on Human Values (Princeton, New Jersey, 2000), 311.
92. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 70
93. Peter Fitzpatrick, “Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of
Law,” in Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,
ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 52.
95. Ibid., 37.
96. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 183.
98. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
99. Ibid., 169.
100. William Rasch, “From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty,” 101.
102. Ibid., 187.
103. Ibid.
105. Ibid., 184.

106. Ibid., 186.
107. See, for instance, William Rasch, “From Sovereign Ban to Banning
Sovereignty.”
108. George Schwab, “Introduction,” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, xxiiii.
109. Ibid., xxi.
112. Ibid., 392.
113. See, for instance, Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s
“On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005); and Wer-
ner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence” in Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew E. Benjamin and
Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2002).
117. Ibid., 57.
118. Ibid., 87.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., 188.
121. Ibid., 7.
122. Ibid., 114.
123. Ibid., 114.
124. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, 114–115.
125. Matthew Sharpe, “Thinking of the Extreme Situation,” 112.
Chapter 3: If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz
1. In Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 50.

2. Primo Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London:
Abacus, 2000), 94.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 48.
4. Ibid., 51.
5. Ibid., 41.
6. Améry writes: “the entire question of the effectiveness of the intellect
can no longer be raised when the subject, faced directly with death through hun-
ger or exhaustion, is not only de-intellectualized but in the actual sense of the
word dehumanized. The so-called Mussulman (sic), as the camp language termed
the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had
room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual
or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its
last convulsions.” Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 9.
8. Giorgio Agamben, “Example,” The Coming Community, 10.

9. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, xiv.
10. Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth
Century,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, eds.
Moishe Postone and Eric Santner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 99.
11. Many of these questions are considered in detail in the essays collected
in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, eds. Moishe
Postone and Eric Santner.
12. See Anson Rabinach, “ ‘The Abyss that opened up before us’: Thinking
About Auschwitz and Modernity,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and
the Twentieth Century, eds. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner; and Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London
and New York: Verso, 1997).
13. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Lon-
don: Abacus, 1999), 9.
14. Michel Foucault, “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings: 1927–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon,
1980), 137.
15. Ibid., 134.
16. Ibid., 106.
17. Ibid., 51.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Politics and ethics are barely distinguishable in Agamben’s thought, as
both of them are conceptualized in terms of “human life as ethos, as ethical way.”
See Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, 11.
20. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, 115.
21. Aviezer Ravitsky, “The Messianism of Success in Contemporary Juda-
ism,” 201.
22. Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory and Transference,” 254.
23. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory
(Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1994), 5.
24. Robert Meister, After Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
25. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 28–31.
26. Ibid., 162.
27. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (epigraph).
28. Ibid.
30. In Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell,
1990), 34.
31. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 34. Agamben notes: “Not
without reason, a few years later [after Heidegger’s lecture on technology] the objec-
tion was raised that for an author implicated even marginally in Nazism a cursory
allusion to the extermination camps is, at the very least, out of place.” Giorgio
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 74.
32. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin

Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 339.
33. Ibid., 311–341.
34. Freidrich Hölderlin, “Patmos” in Friedrich Hölderlin Poems and Lectures,
trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968),
462–463.
36. Ibid., 188.
37. Robert Sinnerbrink, “From Machenschaft to Biopolitics,” 254.
38. Rieff, David, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2002), 216.
39. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 311–341.
40. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 322.
41. Ibid., 321.
42. Ibid., 333.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 34.
47. Ibid., 35.
48. Martin Heidegger “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’ ” in Martin
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 65.
50. Joan Stambaugh, Thoughts on Heidegger (Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, 1991), 138.
52. Ibid., 156.
53. Cited in Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127.
54. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its
Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publish-
ers, 1998), 133.
55. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Middlesex, England: Penguin,
1962), 177.
56. Enzo Traverso, cited in Anson Rabinach, “The Abyss That Opened Up
Before Us,” 59.
59. Ibid., 8.
61. Giorgio Agamben, The Open, 22.
63. J. M. Bernstein, “Bare Life; Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornog-
raphy of Horror,” in Parallax, 10:1, 2004, 6.

65. Ibid., 69.
68. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de
France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 254.
70. Ibid., 156.
71. I owe this observation to Daniel McLoughlin, who incisively examines
the relation between the political and the ontological fracture in Agamben’s reading
of Aristotle in his essay “On Bare Biological Life: The Politics of the Voice,” in
“Form of Life: Agamben, Ontology, Politics,” eds. Richard Bailey, Daniel McLough-
lin, and Jessica Whyte, Theory and Event, 2010.
73. Ibid., 148.
74. Daniel McLoughlin, “On Bare Biological Life.”
75. Clemens, Justin, “The Role of the Shifter and the Problem of Reference,”
in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, eds. Justin Clemens, Nicho-
las Heron, and Alex Murray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 47.
76. Levi, in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 33.
77. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford
78. Robert Meister, After Evil.
79. Freidrich Hölderlin, “Patmos” in Friedrich Hölderlin Poems and Lectures,
trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968),
462–463.
80. Martin Heidegger, “The Turning,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1993, 42.
81. Ibid., 37.
82. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writ-
ings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 248.
83. Martin Heidegger, “The Turning,” 41.
84. Ibid., 44.
85. Fred Dallmayr, “Rethinking the Political: Some Heideggerian Reflec-
tions,” The Review of Politics, vol. 54, no.4 (Autumn 1990), 542.
86. Martin Heidegger, “The Turning,” 42.
87. Reiner Schürmann, “Heidegger on Being and Acting,” 37.
88. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Geneal-
ogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, with Matteo Mandarini
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
89. Ibid., 252.
90. Ibid., 253.
91. Ibid.
93. Cited in Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 13.

95. Ibid., 185.
96. Agamben resists the absolute separation between the mute living being
and the linguistic subject by conceptualizing a form of testimony in which the lin-
guistic subject speaks only in the place of the impossibility of speaking represented
by the Muselmann.
97. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 24. Leland de la Durantaye
notes that the Muselmann is treated as a figure of resistance in Homo Sacer, and
suggests that nothing in Remnants of Auschwitz suggests Agamben has changed his
mind. In my view, de la Durantaye’s depiction of the Muselmann as “a figure—and
a paradigm—of singular resistance,” overstates the case, and ignores the extent to
which Agamben’s elaboration of an ethic of testimony—which involves not only
the Muselmann, but the survivor also—represents a move beyond the earlier, and
in my view more crude, depiction of the Muselmann. See Leland de la Durantaye,
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009), 268. Conversely, Eva Geulen notes that Agamben’s thought is marked by
“ambivalence,” in which danger and salvation coincide, and highlights the cen-
trality of Auschwitz to this ambivalence. Yet, she states that an “ontologization
of politics which justifies itself in reference to the camp inmate’s form-of-life dis-
credits itself” (25) and concludes that Agamben’s attempt to found a new ethics
is unnecessary and problematic, and should be separated from his critical analysis.
Yet, because Geulen ignores the specificity of this ethics, and misreads Agamben
as proposing a romantic “originary unity of life and its form,” (my emphasis) this
redemptive reading of the Muselmann is not illuminated but treated as an inex-
plicable (and self-evidently preposterous) scandal. Eva Geulen, “The Function of
Ambivalence in Agamben’s Reontologization of Politics,” trans. Roland Végso in
A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, ed. Carsten Strathausen
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
98. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, 114–115.
99. See Primo Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, 198.
101. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 42.
103. Heidegger writes: “Death is the ownmost possibility of Da-sein. Being
toward it discloses to Da-sein its ownmost potentiality-of-being in which it is con-
cerned about the being of Da-sein absolutely” (243). Heidegger describes authentic
being-toward-death as anticipating death not as a possibility that could be actual-
ized by Da-sein but as the possibility of its own nonexistence. He contrasts this
with inauthentic being-toward-death, which attempts to evade the impossibility
that death could be bypassed. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 219–246.
104. Heidegger, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 74.
106. Cited in ibid., 76.
107. Ibid., 79.

109. Primo Levi, cited in ibid., 44.
111. Ibid., 20
112. Salman Lewental, “Diary” in eds. Jadwiga Bezwinska and Danuta Czech,
Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of Prisoners in Crematorium Squads Found
at Auschwitz, trans. Krystyna Michalik (New York: Howard Fertig Press, 1992), 160.
113. Salman Lewental, “Diary,” 172–173. The ellipses indicate points that
are illegible due to damage to the manuscript.
114. Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz (Cambridge, England: Polity,
2005), 18.
115. Salman Lewental, “Diary” in eds. Jadwiga Bezwinska and Danuta Czech,
Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of Prisoners in Crematorium Squads Found
at Auschwitz, trans. Krystyna Michalik (New York: Howard Fertig Press, 1992), 172.
116. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal
(London: Abacus Books, 1999), 122.
117. Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, 17.
118. Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” in eds. Matthew Calarco and
Steven DeCaroli, Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2007), 6.
119. Cited in Jerry A. Grunor, Let My People Go: The Trials and Tribulations
of the People of Israel (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Books, 2005), 56.
120. Ibid., 56.
121. Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 19.
122. Cited in Ibid., 57.
123. Benjamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and its Place Among the
Nations (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1999), xiii.
124. Ibid., 355.
125. Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion, 28.
126. Gisha: Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, “A Guide to the Gaza
Closure in Israel’s Own Words,” Gisha, September 2011, http://www.gisha.org/User-
Files/File/publications/gisha_brief_docs_eng_sep_2011.pdf.
127. Ibid.
128. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from
Arendt to Gaza, London: Verso, 2011, 85.
129. Cited in ibid.
Chapter 4: “I Would Prefer Not To”:

Bartleby, Messianism, and the Potentiality of the Law
1. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997), 57.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 302.
7. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby, or, the Formula” in Essays Critical and Clinical
(London: Verso, 1998), 90.
9. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, 70.
10. Ibid., l35.
12. An exception to this is Catherine Mills, “Playing with Law: Agamben
and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice,” in The Agamben Effect: South Atlantic Quar-
terly, ed. Alison Ross (Winter 2008), 107:1.
14. Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” in Potentialities,
ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 163.
15. Ibid., 162.
18. Ibid., 64.
20. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 19.
22. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b, http://www.come-and-hear.com/san-
hedrin/sanhedrin_98.html In Gershom Scholem’s, The Messianic Idea in Judaism,
and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, this quote is instead referenced as Sanhe-
drin 98a. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken,
1995), n.13, 342.
23. Ibid.
25. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 62.
26. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwin C. Hoskins (London:
Oxford University Press, 1968), 65.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 72.
30. Ibid., 74.
31. Cited in Giorgio Agamben, 1998, 51.
32. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, 101.
33. Gershom Scholem, “Letter to Walter Benjamin: September 20, 1934,”
in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed.
Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 142.
35. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 3.
37. Ibid., 39.
38. Ibid.
39. See Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State,
trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 1.
40. Ibid., 2.
41. Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence,” 2003.
43. Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Vio-
lence,’ ” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew
Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 112.
44. Ibid., 44.
45. Ibid., 48.
47. Ibid., 46.
48. Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3: On the Essence and
Actuality of Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
49. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book Theta, 1046b29 (London: Penguin,
1999).
50. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” Potentialities, 182. Heidegger writes
that the Megarian thesis is “thought in a good Greek manner”—that is, on the
basis of Being as presence. In contrast, Aristotle’s novelty consists in his attempt
to think the existence of that which, as he puts it, does not exist in “complete
reality,” that is, in actuality (in Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3,
154, and Aristotle The Metaphysics, 228).
51. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 182.
52. Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3, 146.
53. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Potentialities, 246.
58. Ibid., 45.
59. In an essay devoted to Aristotle’s conception of potentiality, Agamben
suggests that if Aristotle had meant only to suggest that the possible is that in
regard to which nothing is impossible he “would then have uttered a banality or a
tautology” (Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 183). Yet, the “traditional inter-
pretations” are given weight by the fact that Aristotle devotes the following chapter,
entitled “Impossibility,” to refuting this very tautology. Here he writes, “if we are to
suppose that something which is not but which is possible either exists or has come
into being, we must make sure that nothing impossible is involved” (in Aristotle,
Metaphysics, 229). For example, he notes that we cannot say that it is possible to
calculate the diagonal of a square from the side because this is impossible.

61. Ibid.
62. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” Potentialities, 184.
63. Ibid., 18.
64. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book Theta, 242.
65. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1993), 220.
67. Ibid.
68. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book Theta, 228.
70. Ibid., 64.
71. See Stefano Franchi, “Passive Politics” Contretemps, December 2004, 33.
73. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” 261.
74. Ibid., 262.
75. Ibid. Here, Agamben’s analysis seems to suffer from his earlier reduction
of the ambiguity in Aristotle’s account of the status of impotentiality after the
passage to the act. In the Bartleby essay, he suggests, in regard to the principle of
conditioned necessity, that “Aristotle himself seems to belie it,” citing as evidence
Aristotle’s claim that what is potential can be or not be. Central to the principle
of conditioned necessity is whether that which is happening is capable of not hap-
pening (or of happening otherwise), and thus it is closely linked to the question
of the status of adynamia in the passage to actuality. Interestingly, in describing
the principle of conditioned necessity, Agamben seems to depart from his central
argument that Aristotle’s formulation leads to the preservation, not the nullifica-
tion of impotentiality in the act. Once more citing Aristotle’s remark, “A thing is
said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized,
there will be nothing impotential,” Agamben asks: “how is one to understand this
nullification of the potential not to be?” (In Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On
Contingency,” 262–264).
76. Ibid., 262.
77. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 315.
78. Cited in ibid., 315.
79. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 316.
80. Ibid., 316.
81. Giorgio Agamben, “Philosophy and Linguistics,” Potentialities, 76.
82. Zartaloudis, Thanos, “Soulblind, or On Profanation” in The Work of
Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, eds. Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and
Alex Murray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
84. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or The Formula,” Potentialities, 90.
86. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, 39.
87. Ibid., 41.

90. Ibid., 392.
91. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume Three, The Guermantes
Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage Books,
2000), 94.
92. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (N8,1), 471.
93. Ibid., 471.
94. Benjamin is citing the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold
von Ranke. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391.
95. Eric L. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” with Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner,
and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 87.
96. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (N8,1), 471.
97. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History, 187.
98. Walter Benjamin, cited in Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the
Sovereign,” 160.
99. Ibid.
103. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463.
104. Walter Benjamin, “Konvulut N,” The Arcades Project, 463.
106. Ibid.
108. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 3.
109. Ibid., 39.
110. Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Power,” Idea of Prose, trans. Michael
Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (New York: State University of New York, 1995), 71.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Study,” Idea of Prose, 65.
114. Ibid.
117. Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” Potentialities, 174.
120. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,”
in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 257.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid.
123. “Spectres of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Politi-
cal in Agamben and Derrida,” www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/thurschwell/nietzsche.
pdf, 13.
124. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London:
Routledge, 1994), 167–168.
126. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge
(London: Routledge, 1992), 259.
127. Gershom Scholem, “The Crisis of Tradition in Jewish Messianism,” The
Messianic Idea in Judaism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 35.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid.
134. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 63.
135. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 38.
136. Ibid., 39.
138. Ibid., 20.
139. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 204.
140. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” 259–271.
141. Simone Weil, “Decreation” in George A. Panichas, Moyer Bell, Wake-
field, Rhode Island and London, 1999, Simone Weil Reader, Moyer-Bell, Wakefield,
2007, 353.
142. Simone Weil, “Decreation,” 353–354.
149. Ibid., 20.
Chapter 5: A New Use:

On the Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Politics
1. Giorgio Agamben, “Halos,” The Coming Community, 53. I thank Eric

Santner for bringing to my attention the fact that this tale can in fact be attributed
to the young Gershom Scholem. See also Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of
Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 122, 52.
Indeed, in a letter to Benjamin, dated July 9, 1934, Scholem writes: “And
one question: Who is actually the source of all these stories? Does Ernst Bloch have
them from you or you from him? The great rabbi with the profound dictum on
the messianic kingdom who appears in Bloch is none other than I myself; what a
way to achieve fame!! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah.” Gershom
Scholem, “Scholem to Benjamin,” July 9, 1934, in The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary
Smith and Anson Rabinach (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 123.
2. In Giorgio Agamben, “Halos,” The Coming Community, 53.
4. Ibid.
6. Giorgio Agamben, “Shekinah,” The Coming Community, 79.
7. Giorgio Agamben “Without Classes,” The Coming Community, 65.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 299.
11. Antonio Negri, “The Discrete Taste of the Dialectic,” 117.
12. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, ix.
13. Ibid., 60.
14. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 321.
15. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 27.
16. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” Means Without Ends, 10.
17. The “life that begins on earth after the last day,” Agamben writes, “is
simply human life.” Giorgio Agamben, “Limbo,” The Coming Community, 7.
20. Ibid., 76 and 82.
21. Agamben’s concern is to shift the focus from the expropriation of labor to
the expropriation of language. Although he never precisely defines the understand-
ing of the expropriation of labor that he is seeking to avoid, it seems to be one
that sees the human as an animal laborans. In contrast, many thinkers in the post-
Operaismo tradition of Italian Marxism, most prominently Antonio Negri and Paulo
Virno, have used the concept of “immaterial labor” to signify the way in which
linguistic, communicative and affective powers are put to work under contemporary
capitalism. In such a conception, the rigid distinction between the expropriation
of labor and the expropriation of language is replaced by a more subtle account of
the way in which capital exploits the entirety of human potentiality. See Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, and Paulo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude
(Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext[e], 2004).
23. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 14.
24. Benjamin Noys, “Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis,” n.pag.
25. I use “gay and lesbian” rather than queer here because the term queer,
where not used simply as an umbrella term, has generally been used to destabilize
rather than consolidate the nexus of identity and politics.
26. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1991), 83.
27. Ibid.
28. Dubech and d’Espezel, cited in Walter Benjamin, “[G4,4] Konvulut G:
Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville,” The Arcades Project, 180.
29. In Walter Benjamin, “[G2a,4] Konvulut G,” The Arcades Project, 176.
30. Ibid., 181.
31. It was only with the development of capitalism that the wealth of society
began to appear as an “immense collection of commodities.” Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 1, 125.
32. In Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 38.
33. Ibid.
34. Guy Debord, “Separation Perfected,” Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI:
Black and Red, 1983):42. n.pag.
35. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1.
36. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” Profanations, 74.
37. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 25.
40. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 138.
41. Ibid., 126.
42. Ibid., 163.
43. Ibid., 151.
44. Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Penguin Classics, 125.
45. Ibid., 124.
46. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, 127.
51. Ibid., 145.
52. Ibid., 151.
53. Ibid., 164–165.
54. Ibid., 165.
55. Ibid.
56. In Walter Benjamin, “[G5,1] Konvulut G: Exhibitions, Advertising,
Grandville,” The Arcades Project, 181.
57. Antonio Negri, “Giorgio Agamben: The Discrete Taste of the Dialectic,”
123–124.
58. Ibid., 124.

59. Ibid.
60. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 38.
61. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 36.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. 1, 126.
66. Ibid., 200.
68. Ibid.
69. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 46.
70. Ibid., 47.
73. Ibid., 83.
74. Ibid., 86.
75. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cam-
bridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 260.
76. Ibid., 285, note 1.
77. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 32.
78. Ibid., 39.
79. Ibid.
80. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Konvulut H, (H1a,2), 205.
81. Ibid.
82. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 39.
83. Theodor Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” August 2, 1935, in The-
odor Adorno, Walter Benjamin et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1990),
119.
84. Theodor Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” August 2, 1935, 114.
85. Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, trans. Kevin McLaughlin, Amanda Minervini
(Chicago: Seagull Books, 2013).
86. Ibid., 85.
87. Ibid., 73.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 78.
90. Ibid., 79.
91. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” 74.
92. Giorgio Caproni, “Ritorno,” cited in Giorgio Agamben, Language and
Death, 98.
94. Giorgio Agamben “Dim Stockings” The Coming Community, 50.
96. Ibid., 91.

97. Ibid., 74.
98. Ibid.
99. Giorgio Agamben, “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play” in
Infancy and History, 75–96.
100. Emile Benveniste, cited in “In Playland,” 78.
101. Giorgio Agamben, “In Playland,” 79.
103. Ibid.
106. The Situationist International with Students of Strasbourg, “On The
Poverty of Student Life,” in Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach,
May 1968, (collected texts) (San Francisco: AK Press, 2001), 25.
107. Guy Debord, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” 1959, Bureau of
Public Secrets, http://bopsecrets.org/SI/3.detourn.htm.
108. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press,
1994), 264.
109. Guy Debord, “On The Poverty of Student Life,” 26.
111. See Guy Debord, “On The Poverty of Student Life” for a description
of the “re-use” of a student union. The quote about the reuse of the Cathedral is
from Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 259.
112. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 265.
113. Ibid., 265. Emphasis in original.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid., 266.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid., 153.
122. Walter Benjamin. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,”
in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 64.
123. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 86.
124. Ibid.
125. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, 12.
127. Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” 2.
128. Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International
Publishers, 1965), 121.
130. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.

131. Giorgio Agamben, “Maneries,” The Coming Community, 28–29.
132. This quote appears on the back cover of Giorgio Agamben, The Com-
ing Community.
133. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 28–29.
134. Giorgio Agamben, “Without Classes,” The Coming Community, 64.
135. Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France (Sydney, Australia: Resistance
Books, Sydney, 2003), 38.
136. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in David
McLelland, 188.
137. Giorgio Agamben, “Without Classes,” The Coming Community, 63.
138. Ibid., 64.
139. Ibid., 63.
140. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, 206.
141. Adam Thurschwell, “Specters of Nietzsche,” 33.
142. Giorgio Agamben, “Whatever,” Coming Community, 2.
143. Ibid.
144. Giorgio Agamben, “Homonyms,” Coming Community, 73.
145. Giorgio Agamben, “Whatever,” Coming Community, 2.
146. Giorgio Agamben, “Shekinah” The Coming Community, 83.
147. Adam Thurschwell, “Specters of Nietzsche,” 33.
148. Giorgio Agamben, “Maneries,” Coming Community, 29.
150. Ibid.
151. Ibid., 27.
152. Ibid., 26.
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid., 28.
156. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matth-
ias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004).
157. Ibid., 85.
158. Ibid., 75.
159. Ibid.
160. Ibid., 70.
161. In Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34.
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid.
164. Ibid., 26.
165. Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Music” in Idea of Prose, 89.
166. Giorgio Agamben, “Taking Place,” The Coming Community, 14.
167. Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” Potentialities, 204.
168. Giorgio Agamben, “The Irreparable,” The Coming Community, 102.
169. Giorgio Agamben, “Limbo,” The Coming Community, 6.

170. Paulo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Bertoletti, Cascaito
and Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 34.
171. Giorgio Agamben, “Heidegger e il nazismo,” La potenza del pensiero (Neri
Pozza, Vicenza, 2005), 321–331. Trans. Nicholas Heron, original on file, 328.
172. Ibid., 328.
173. Giorgio Agamben, “Tiqqun de la Noche,” Postface to The Coming Com-
munity, 2001, online at Notes for the Coming Community, http://notesforthecoming-
community.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html.
174. Alphonso Lingis, “Anger,” in The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc
Nancy, eds. Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997).
175. Alphonso Lingis, “Anger,” 208.
176. Ibid., 213.
177. Ibid., 200.
178. Ibid., 214.
180. Ibid., 210–211.
181. Ibid., 214.
183. Ibid.
184. See Hotli Simanjuntak, “Students Demand Harsher Sharia Law Imple-
mentation” Jakarta Post, September 9, 2009, http://www.thejakartapost.com/
news/2009/09/09/students-demand-harsher-sharia-law-implementation.html.
186. In Disposable People, Kevin Bales estimates that there are currently
approximately 3,000 household slaves in Paris and 27 million people trapped in
forms of slavery (including bonded labor) across the globe. Kevin Bales, Disposable
People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2004).
187. Kevin Bales, Disposable People, 9.
188. Catherine Mills, “Playing With Law: Agamben and Derrida on Post-
Juridical Justice,” in The Agamben Effect: South Atlantic Quarterly 107, ed. Alison
Ross, (Winter 2008), 169, 32.
189. Richard Pithouse, “Thinking Resistance in the Shantytown,” Mute
Magazine, August 2006, 5.
190. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 51. Agamben does warn, in Means
Without Ends, that the failure to think the end of history simultaneously with the
end of the state sees the “increasingly powerful resistance of historical instances
(of a national, religious or ethnic type).” See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without
Ends, 111.
191. In a seminar by Alain Badiou in Paris, Agamben responded to the
critique of his suggestion, in the Coming Community, that the “planetary petty-
bourgeoisie has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable
social identity” (163), by stating, “if this book is republished, I am going to remove
NOTES TO CONCLUSION / 197
this definition of the planetary petite bourgeoisie.” See Alain Badiou, Intervention
dans le cadre du Collège international de philosophie sur le livre de Giorgio Agamben: la
Communauté qui vient, théorie de la singularité quelconque, (transcription de François
Duvert), http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/Agamben.htm.
192. John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber
and Faber, 2003), 1.
193. See, for instance, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and Ousseina Ali-
dou, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African
Universities (Asmara: Africa World Press, 2000); Richard Pithouse, “Thinking Resis-
tance in the Shantytowns.”
194. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in eds. Marcus Bullock and
Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cam-
bridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 289.
195. Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine, 155.
Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable
1. Stathis Kouvelakis, “The Greek Cauldron,” New Left Review 72, Novem-
ber–December 2011, 23.
2. Anastsia Balezdrova, “The Humanitarian Crisis in Greece is Deepening,
Medecins Du Monde is Warning,” GRR Reporter, October 26, 2011, http://www.
grreporter.info/en/humanitarian_crisis_greece_
deepening_medecins_du_monde_warning/5337.
3. Giorgos Kaminis, “Athens Soup Kitchens Serve 8000 People a
Day,” Kathimerini, September 22, 2012, http://article.wn.com/view/2012/09/22/
Athens_soup_kitchens_serve_8000_people_a_day/.
4. Yiannis Mavris, “Greece’s Austerity Election,” New Left Review 76, July–
August 2012, 76.
5. Ibid.
6. Stathis Kouvelakis, “The Greek Cauldron,” 31.
8. Yiannis Mavris, “Greece’s Austerity Elections,” 95.
10. T. J. Clark, “For a Left With No Future,” 55.
11. Panagiotis Sotiros, “Greece: From Despair to Resistance,” The Bullet,
February 14, 2012, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/598.php.
12. Costas Douzinas, “Stasis Syntagma: The Names and Types of Resistance,”
in New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, eds. Matthew Stone, Illanrua
Wall, and Costas Douzinas (London: Routledge, 2012), 34.
13. Ibid., 45.
14. Giorgio Agamben, “La Grèce, berceau d’une nouvelle Europe,” trans.
Joël Gayraud, Libération (Juin 11, 2012), http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2012/06/11/
la-grece-berceau-d-une-nouvelle-europe_825486.
198 / NOTES TO CONCLUSION
15. Giorgio Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 257.

16. Ibid., 1.
17. Ibid., 111.
18. Cited in Ibid., 43.
19. Ibid., 37.
20. Malcolm Bull, “The Limits of Multitude,” New Left Review 35, Septem-
ber–October 2005, 19.
22. No author, “Leaked: Troika Requires Six Day Working Week in Greece,”
RT News, September 4, 2012, http://rt.com/news/troika-greece-week-six-345/.
23. Panagiotis Sotiros, “Greece: From Despair to Resistance,” The Bullet,
February 14, 2012, https://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/tag/panagiotis-sotiris/.
25. OECD, “OECD Better Life Index: Greece,” 2011, http://www.oecdbet-
terlifeindex.org/countries/greece/.
26. See Stefano Franchi, “Passive Politics” Contretemps, December 2004, 33.
27. Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, 369.
28. Yiannis Mavris, “Greece’s Austerity Election,” 103.
29. Moishe Postone, Time Labour and Social Domination, 375.
30. See Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital, 150.
31. Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History.”
32. Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital, 150.
33. Ibid., 151.
35. Cited in Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” in Giorgio Agamben:
Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007), 5.
37. Ibid., 252.
41. Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 31.
42. Nicholas Heron, “The Ungovernable,” Angelaki, vol. 16, issue 2, 2011,
166.
44. Yiannis Mavris, “Greece’s Austerity Election,” New Left Review 76, July–
August 2012.
45. Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History.”
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Index
abandonment, 1, 9, 15, 16, 29–34, 37, Améry, Jean, 16, 74, 180n6
39, 47, 61, 68, 79, 85, 103, 106, Anderson, Perry, 12
109, 144, 147, 161, 162, 164 Anschütz, Gerhard, 57
abstraction, 13, 50, 65, 130, 133 Antelme, Robert, 89
Adorno, Theodor, 123, 126, 127, 135, apparatus (dispositf), 9, 10, 88, 138,
136 139, 166
Agamben, Giorgio, works: Arendt, Hannah, 13, 20–21, 25, 28,
Church and the Kingdom, The, 1 30, 35, 36–38, 40, 174n92
Coming Community, The, 4, 5, 17, Aristotle, 19, 20, 25–29, 33, 43, 45,
123, 125, 144–51, 196n189 66, 70, 78, 81, 84–85, 98, 99,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and 106–09, 110–12, 116, 131–32,
Bare Life, 2, 3, 21–24, 28–35, 140, 143, 165, 172n27, 183n71,
40–41, 48, 79, 83–83, 89, 104, 187n50, 187n59, 188n75
184n97. See also homo sacer Auschwitz, 4, 16, 72, 73–87, 89–95,
Idea of Prose, 116, 150 165. See also Agamben, Giorgio,
Infancy and History, 33–34, 139, works
181n19 authenticity, 90–91, 125, 132, 149–51
Kingdom and the Glory, The, 8–9, Avicenna, 106
55, 68, 161–66. See also oikonomia
Language and Death, 137 Badiou, Alain, 196n189
Man Without Content, The, 11 Balakrishnan, Gopal, 54
Means Without Ends, 20, 43–44, Bales, Kevin, 154, 196n184
70, 90, 126–27, 144, 196n188 Balibar, Etienne, 36
Potentialities, 174n79, 187n59 Barber, Sotirios A., 52
Remnants of Auschwitz, 73, 77–78, bare life, 4, 20–21, 26, 30, 33, 35–46,
89–92, 181n31, 184n97. See also 47–48, 60, 61, 64, 66, 70, 79,
Auschwitz 82–86, 89–90, 161, 162, 163,
Stanzas, 129, 133–35, 149 175n18
State of Exception, 3, 9, 16, 33, Barth, Karl, 102, 104, 116, 118, 120
47–72, 99, 107. See also state of Bartleby, 16–17, 97–100, 109–10, 111,
exception 112–13, 115, 117, 119–22, 147,
Work of Man, The, 164 163, 188n75
Althusser, Louis, 132 Bataille, Georges, 100
211
212 / INDEX
Baudelaire, Charles, 142 contingency, 13–14, 41, 82, 110–13,

Benjamin, Walter, 4, 5, 7, 14, 17, 20, 115
44–45, 55, 59, 68–70, 78, 99, 100,
103, 105, 110, 113–15, 117–18, Darwish, Mahmoud, 1
119, 121, 123–25, 127, 129, 132, Debord, Guy, 13, 22, 125, 127, 129,
134, 135–36, 142, 154, 156, 157, 130, 134–35, 140
163, 165–66, 171n7, 190–91n1 decreation, 120–21
Benveniste, Émile, 62, 85, 139 de la Durantaye, Leland, 100, 184n97
Bernstein, J.M., 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 112
biopolitics, 4, 6, 9, 15–16, 22–24, democracy, 2, 11, 21–22, 24, 35, 37,
26–32, 34–35, 38–45, 51, 70, 71, 49, 113, 126, 144, 160, 161, 162
75–79, 81–82, 84–86, 89, 90, 92, Derrida, Jacques, 117–18
124, 126, 133, 173n46 désoeuvrement, 100, 119, 120–21. See
Blanchot, Maurice, 100 also inoperative
Bloch, Ernst, 123–24, 126, 190–91n1 Douzinas, Costas, 160
Blumenberg,Hans, 8–9 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 111
Brown, Wendy, 64–65, 104, 114, 128,
142, 146 Esposito, Roberto, 19, 39
Buck-Morss, Susan, 129, 142 ethics, 70, 73, 77–78, 83, 89–91, 131,
Bull, Malcolm, 162 165, 181n19, 184n97
Burke, Edmund, 36
Bush, George W., 3, 19, 52, 53, 71, Felman, Shoshana, 74
111 fetishism, 128–130, 132, 135, 141–42,
Butler, Judith, 49 147, 155
Fitzpatrick, Peter, 64
Cannetti, Elias, 74 Fleming, James E., 52
capitalism, 2, 5, 10, 12–13, 17, 24, 27, Fletcher, Paul, 157
31, 38, 44, 45, 103, 127–28, 132, form-of-life, 5, 15–16, 31, 43–45, 86,
135, 138, 142–44, 146, 153–57, 184n97
161, 162, 164, 191n21, 192n31 Foucault, Michel, 9, 15, 20, 24, 26–29,
Caproni, Giorgio, 137 31, 32, 34, 39, 75, 84, 128, 166,
Carpi, Aldo, 73 173n46, 173n47
catastrophe, 3–11, 15, 16, 17, 42, 51, France, Anatole, 50
69, 76–78, 81, 85, 94–95, 101, Friedlander, Saul, 77
111, 116, 121, 124, 140, 160, Fuchs, Eduard, 135
162–63, 166 Fukuyama, Francis, 2–4, 6, 11, 79,
Cavalca, Domenico, 48 164, 166
Christ, 7, 98, 112, 119
Christianity, 2, 4, 6, 8–9, 31, 100, 116, Geulen, Eva, 184n97
119, 123, 147, 149, 161–62 Glucksmann, Maurice, 8
Clapmar, Arnold, 81, 84 government, 1, 4, 8–9, 13, 39, 44, 52,
Clark, T.J., 15, 159, 160 55–57, 65, 68, 70, 95, 161–62,
Clemens, Justin, 85 166
Coetzee, J.M., 10 Gray, John, 155
Collodi, Carlo, 139 Guantanamo Bay, 3, 49, 52
INDEX / 213
Hamacher, Werner, 105 Kouvelakis, Stathis, 160, 166

happy life, 6, 44, 70, 90, 100, 124,
146 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 42
Hardt, Michael, 39, 120, 191n21 Laclau, Ernesto, 49, 176n16
Heidegger, Martin, 23–24, 29, 31–33, Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 78, 80–81,
77–82, 86, 87–91, 106, 108, 83
110, 126, 149–50, 151, 181n31, language, 33–34, 59, 61–62, 85, 106,
184n103, 187n50 111–12, 137, 147, 165, 191n21
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 108 Laub, Dori, 74
Heron, Nicholas, 166 law, 7–8, 9–10, 16, 17, 20, 29–30,
Hitler, Adolf, 14, 55 39, 47–58, 59–72, 83, 89, 91,
Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 47, 50, 63–68, 70, 98–103, 105–10, 112, 115–19,
179n89 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133,
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 5, 23, 51, 87, 91 138, 139–41, 144, 147, 148, 159,
homo sacer, 3, 21, 30–31, 48, 60, 63, 171n7, 177n36
64, 106, 137, 184n97. See also Lenin, Vladimir, 54
Agamben, Giorgio, works Levi, Primo, 73, 75, 85, 86, 90, 91,
Horkheimer, Max, 114, 123, 126, 135 93
human rights, 6, 15, 21–22, 35–42, 43, Lewental, Salmen, 92–93, 185n112
79, 81, 83, 89, 147 liberalism, 2–3, 8, 10, 49–50, 53, 56,
humanitarianism, 8, 19–20, 39–41, 77, 63–67, 71, 77, 98, 101, 104–05,
86, 89 161, 179n89
limbo, 147
Ignatieff, Michael, 57, 63 Lingis, Alphonso, 151–53, 157
indistinction, 23, 37, 44, 48, 58, 63, Locke, John, 53
66, 73, 101, 108–10, 150 love, 126, 146–50
inoperative, inoperativeness, 7, 9–10,
11, 88, 100, 136–37, 160, 164–65. Mairet, Gérard, 105
See also désoeuvrement Marcuse, Herbert, 127
Marx, Karl, 5, 7, 10–14, 19, 22, 24,
Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 94–95 31, 35, 38, 42, 44, 45–46, 100,
Jackson, Jesse, 152, 153 127, 130–35, 141–43, 145, 154,
Jacobson, Arthur J., 56 155, 156, 157, 163, 164
Jakobson, Roman, 62 Marxism, 6, 10–15, 45, 49, 100, 127,
James, C.L.R., 42 132, 135, 191n21
Jameson Fredric, 14, 164 McLoughlin, Daniel, 84, 183n71
Judaism, 6, 76–77, 94–95, 100–01 116 Megarians, 106, 109, 187n50
Melville, Herman, 16, 97, 99, 106,
Kafka, Franz, 29, 103, 117, 118, 151 112, 119, 121
Katechon, 7–12, 14–15, 21, 51, 53, 68, messianism, 1, 4–6, 9–10, 16, 17, 68,
69, 87 77, 94–95, 98–102, 110, 113–21,
Kelly, Mark G.E., 173n46, 173n51 123, 136, 148–49, 190–91n1
Kelsen, Hans, 57, 104 Meuli, Karl, 47
Kojève, Alexander, 79, 100 Michaloliakos, Nikolaos, 162
Kouchner, Bernard, 79 Mills, Catherine 154, 173n47
214 / INDEX
Muselmann, Muselmänner, 16, 20, 22, 103–13, 116–17, 121, 126, 128,
45, 73–79, 81–86, 88–94, 184n96, 143–44, 145, 147, 150, 159, 165,
184n97 166, 187n59, 188n75, 191n21
profanation, profane, 4–5, 10, 17, 30,
Nakba, 77, 78, 95 70, 89–91, 126, 130, 137–39, 142,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 29, 63, 109, 117, 150, 155, 156
145 Proust, Marcel, 113
Nazism, 14, 42, 55, 79, 84, 85, 86, pure means, 45, 100, 126, 138–39
181n31
necessity, 25, 36–37, 43, 48, 111–12, Queneau, Raymond, 100
163, 174–75n92, 188n75 Quinlan, Karen, 20, 22
Negri, Antonio, 22, 39, 55, 104, 109,
120, 125, 132–33, 134, 137–38, Rancière, Jacques, 37
191n21 Rasch, William, 56, 65
Netanyahu, Benjamin, 95 Ravitsky, Aviezer, 6
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 32, 80 redemption, 3, 4–11, 16, 17, 68–69,
nihilism, 10, 31–32, 49, 67, 80–82, 76–78, 90, 94–95, 100–01, 112,
112, 117, 127, 140, 141, 145–46 114–17, 121, 123–25, 151, 157,
normalization, 4, 6, 16, 50, 51, 68–72 160, 163, 166
Noys, Benjamin, 7, 12, 14, 128, remnant, 77, 137, 145. See also
169n49 Agamben, Giorgio, works
Renan, Ernst, 129
Obama, Barack, 53 Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 133, 135, 137
oikonomia, 4, 55, 161–62, 166 Rose, Jacqueline, 94, 95
Ophir, Adi, 95 Rossiter, Clinton, 56, 59
Origen, 119
sacred, 4, 30, 70, 91, 137–39. See also
Papoulias, Karolos, 165 homo sacer
Paul, the Apostle, 7, 9, 17, 77, 99, sacrifice, 30, 71, 129–30, 137, 171n7
102, 110, 115–16, 119–20, 121, salvation, 1, 8, 9, 13, 16, 23, 24,
147–49, 154 76–77, 89, 90, 94, 108, 115, 119,
Paxton, Joseph, 132 120, 127, 136, 150–51, 156, 162,
Pithouse, Richard, 154 184n97
Plato, 32, 172n27 Santner, Eric L., 31, 114, 190–91n1
polis, 13, 15, 21, 23, 25–26, 29, 30, 32, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 62, 106
33–34, 37, 43, 44, 85, 174–75n92 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 61
politics, political action, 1–15, 20–28, Scheuerman, William E., 52, 53
30–31, 33–46, 48–72, 86–89, Schlink, Bernhard, 56
92–95, 100–01, 124–28, 144–47, Schmitt, Carl, 7–8, 16, 47, 51, 54–59,
154–57, 160–62, 164–66, 172n27, 63, 66, 67–70, 82, 99, 104,
181n19, 184n97, 192n25 107–09, 117
pornography, 128, 138 Scholem, Gershom, 6, 101, 103, 109,
Postone, Moishe, 12–13, 74, 75, 164 117, 118, 119–20, 123, 141,
potentiality, idea of, 5, 11, 12, 17, 22, 190–91n1
32–34, 43, 45, 51, 61, 62, 99–100, Schürmann, Reiner, 88, 90
INDEX / 215
Schwab, George, 67 Taubes, Jacob, 102, 116

secularization, 5, 8, 51, 70 Tertullian, 7, 161–62
Sharpe, Matthew, 50, 55, 71 Tesón, Fernando R., 63
Shoah, 76–77, 78, 95 testimony, 85–86, 89–90, 93, 184n96,
singularity, 78, 144–145, 147 184n97
Sinnerbrink, Robert, 32, 79 Thälmann, Ernst, 14
Society of the Spectacle, Spectacle, Thoma, Richard, 57
4, 13, 17, 21, 125, 127–30, 133, Thompson, E.P., 12
134–38, 140–56, 161, 165 Thurschwell, Adam, 118, 147
Sorel, Georges, 163 Traverso, Enzo, 81
sovereignty, 6, 7, 9, 11, 17, 22, 27–28,
30–1, 35, 38–40, 45, 49, 55, Vaneigem, Raoul, 140–41, 194n108,
57–58, 61, 63–67, 70–71, 79, 90, 194n111, 194n112
98–100, 104–10, 120, 121, 129, Virno, Paolo, 39, 49, 151, 191n21
135, 160, 161–63, 173n46 vocation, 1, 5, 110, 125, 127, 146,
Spinoza, Baruch, 70, 90 148, 155, 157, 170n73
Stambaugh, Joan, 81 voice, 33–34, 63
state of exception, 4, 6, 9, 10, 16,
48–64, 66–72, 79, 99–100, 103, Wahnich, Sophie, 42, 44
106, 107, 109, 117, 119, 121, 124, Walser, Robert, 150
133. See also Agamben, Giorgio, Watkins, Frederick, 59, 178n49
works Weil, Simone, 120–21
suspension, 47, 48, 52–54, 56–57, whatever being, 144, 145–46
59–60, 61, 62, 70, 99, 106–109, Wiertz, A.J., 129
124
Zartaloudis, Thanos, 112, 188n82
Tamás, G.M., 10, 11 Žižek, Slavoj, 19, 111, 125

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SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

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Whyte, Jessica (Jessica Stephanie)

Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption 1

1. The Politics of Life 19

2. Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception 47

3. If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz 73

4. “I Would Prefer Not To”: Bartleby, Messianism, and the

5. A New Use: On the Society of the Spectacle and the

Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable 159

In March 2009, Giorgio Agamben gave an address inside the Notre-Dame

and commodification of human relations.”5 In a bitter reproach to the

the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,”11 liberal democratic

seeking to revive the categories of Western politics that he believes are

Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah

concrete eschatology,” Christianity accommodated itself to the permanence

The katechon, he argues, whether conceived as the Roman Empire

Flowers and Chains

If we reconceptualize Agamben’s argument about the katechon in political

The Politics of Life

A German Aristotle who wished to construct his Politics on the basis

This severe diagnosis seemingly precludes the possibility of meaningful

Agamben and Foucault: On Biopolitics, Ancient and Modern

In a passage from The Politics that takes on a decisive importance in Agam-

For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was

This new exercise of power over individuals “insofar as they constitute a

In contrast, Foucault is concerned to trace the distinctions between sov-

Biopolitics and Sovereignty

inaugural moment.52 This assessment relies on the problematization of what

This ability to hold life in a ban by abandoning it is, for Agamben,

operate in our apparently postmodern time, by depicting modernity, in Eric

of Being is concealed in what Heidegger terms machination, in which the

contemporary political developments. And unlike Heidegger, Agamben’s

The Rights of Bare Life

in the valorization of natural life at the foundation of rights declarations—

[T]hat the multitude rushed to the assistance of the French

As Jacques Rancière highlights, Arendt’s critique of rights “rested on the

who irrevocably shaped modern politics by challenging their exclusion from

Whether or not it was a Utopia that was wanted is of little

In Agamben’s view, in contrast, the human as a living being, the body,

and declarations as biopolitical mechanisms that entrap bare life in the

It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive

It is not possible to understand the ‘national’ and biopolitical

contemporary blurring of militarism and humanitarianism? Were there not

Hoping Merely Out of Stupidity

It is for this reason that he refuses every attempt to return to those

in On the Critique of Violence. “Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide

Politics at the Limits of the Law

In State of Exception, Agamben discusses a series of lawless feasts—the Sat-

Matthew Sharpe argues, an “uncanny proximity with the anti-terroristic

answers to these questions have motivated those liberal-legal critiques of

I can see that figure now . . . It was Bartleby.