getting to Agamben

Music: Danzig: Danzing IV I managed to get some "scholarship" accomplished yesterday, and I’m itching to continue with it today, but I regret I have to hang it up and switch gears—from political theory to psychoanalytic squabbles among the culturalists and the essentialists. Anna Freud is not as fun as Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben, however, is not clear, and I'm getting all confused about "bare/naked life" (zoe) and bios or the life qualified by morality and socius. Or rather, I think I get this stuff, I just don't know how to transition from Rousseau's notion of popular sovereignty to Agamben's horrific re-reading of Schmitt. Any of you Agamben fans out there want to give me their slang-style definition of "naked life" in relation to the sovereign? I'll gladly steal it.

And my girl cat is meowing like crazy. It's starting to drive me slowly insane.

Well, here's a bit more from the essay "Staging the State of Exception" as I compose here. Today on tap is the short introduction to sovereignty before I dive headlong into Agamben-speak.

The Rhetoric of Exceptional States

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. --Carl Schmitt The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, inside and outside of the juridical order. --Giorgio Agamben

In the Western intellectual tradition, the concept of sovereignty descends from assumptions concerning how human beings would "naturally" behave in the absence of governance or the "state of nature." Perhaps among the most famous arguments made in favor an absolute sovereign were penned by Thomas Hobbes in 1660, who wrote in The Leviathan that in the state of nature humans would behave as if at war:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes argued that there are five fundamental "forces" of nature exemplified by humans most blatantly in war: egoism, competitiveness, distrust, and glory and power seeking. Only an absolute sovereign willed collectively by the people, he argued, could maintain justice and keep the peace. In the next century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would base his social contract theory on the opposite view of human essence: human beings in the state of nature are noble savages, "born free" and inherently good but perverted by society. Such perversion results from the scarcity of resources that are a consequence of increasing populations, and to escape a progressively degenerate and deadly state of nature people must contract with one another to subsist under the rule of morality or law. For Rousseau, passage "from the state of nature to the civil state" occurs when a people recognizes itself as the "body politic" or capital-S "Sovereign," which he likened to a rather large family. This comparison was obvious to Rousseau, who said the family was "the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children . . . ." For Rousseau, the sovereign is the people, and government fulfills the father function.

Of course, much has been written about the concept of sovereignty since the eighteenth century, and one could easily detail many different types. After the advent of fascism and the horrific holocausts of the twentieth century, however, scholars have been drawn to discuss the inherently paradoxical character of the sovereign as a law-giver or enforcer who has the power to transgress the law. Conceptually, Hobbes resolved this paradox in the absolute collapse of power and the law, the merging of the political and juridical: Whatever the sovereign decides the people should do is justice, as long as it is in the interest of peace (peace for Hobbes is defined negatively as the absence of killing). The issue is more complicated with the popular sovereignty advanced by Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and others, however, because the sovereign is the result of the "will of the people" contracting under the rule of law. The paradox of sovereignty then concerns relation between its power (or politics) and the rule of law, not in a state of normalcy, but rather when asserting something exceptional, like Marshall law. In his career-long assault on liberalism, the political philosopher and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt attempted to resolve the conceptual problem of the sovereign by embracing the paradox as its core: "it is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question of sovereignty."

For Schmitt, sovereignty is established or founded in moments of crisis and anomie. For This is why sovereignty is fundamentally a "borderline concept," which does not mean that it is vague or ambiguous, but rather, that the character of sovereignty cannot be discerned from the mundane or routine, but only at the extremes. The fundamental character of sovereignty is only discernable when events resemble the mythic state of nature, when a polis is unquestionably in some kind of emergency, because its power is fundamentally and decisively transgressive. "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception," writes Schmitt, meaning that the sovereign is the body or individual who paradoxically is legally sanctioned to declare an exceptional right to lawlessness in states of emergency.

As a number of scholars have commented, Schmitt's conception of sovereignty is easily illustrated by contemporary political and legal events. The most recent and familiar assertion of sovereignty in this Schmittian sense has been by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, whose "military order" on November 13, 2001 authorized the indefinite detention of suspected "terrorists" at prison camps in Guantánamo Bay. After the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has repeatedly declared that the country is in a state of emergency (or in a "war on terror") and has asserted that many of the controversial practices of the military and other government bodies (e.g., wire tapping, torture, and so on) are exceptions to the rule of law. The Italian philosopher and Giorgio Agamben argues that these more recent, post-9/11 assertions of sovereignty are problematic--indeed, dire--for two reasons. First, they reflect a more Schmittian view of human nature as fundamentally dangerous or "evil," which contributes to the kind of dehumanization of others that can lead to destroying them. Second, such assertions are symptomatic of a troubling political trend first noted by Walter Benjamin: "the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule," meaning that the norm has collapsed into the exceptional, thereby tempting atrocity and madness. I will discuss each objection in turn.

. . . but not now. I have to write it first. Stay tuned.