Potentiality, Sovereignty and Bare Life: A Critical Reading of Giorgio Agamben. ideas y valores · vol. lxiii · n.o 155 • agosto 2014 • issn 0120-0062 (impreso) 2011-3668 (en línea) • bogotá, colombia • pp. - 99 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Potentiality, Sovereignty and Bare Life. A Critical Reading of Giorgio Agamben
Ideas y Valores, 2013
This article presents a critical account of Agamben's understanding of the logic of sovereignty and of the notion bare life, particularly Agamben's approach to the paradox of sovereignty and its relation to Aristotle's metaphysical category of potentiality. With regards to bare life, it brings together an analysis of the figure of the homo sacer with an account of Agamben's use of paradigms as methodological tools. The first part of the paper argues that Agamben ontologises sovereignty by dramatising the paradox of its structure as im-potentiality. The second part claims that even though an account of Agamben's methodology serves to respond to the different critiques that his notion of bare life has raised, Agamben's notions of sovereignty and of bare life ultimately rely on Schmitt's decisionism.
ETHOS: Dialogues in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 2019
In this paper, I will argue the layout of the notion of freedom in Giorgio Agamben's political thought by relying on his account of potentiality which is put in his two essays On Potentiality and Homo Sacer. It is claimed that while Agamben, in his earlier essay On Potentiality, associates freedom to his peculiar notion of im-potentiality, he later revises his thought and considers im-potentiality with sovereign biopower in which there is no possible way out. Against this reading, by looking into Agamben's conceptualizing of freedom and im-potentiality in his both essays, I will be discussing that im-potentiality continues to play an important role in Agamben's political thought which is, always, considered a way out from biopower.
In this paper, it will be claimed that Agamben’s critique of the western tradition of the sign - the separation between the signifier and the signified, the proper and the improper - that could be traced back to his Stanzas (1977) provides the methodological structure that underpins his philosophical system. Indeed, it will be argued that the dialectic proper/improper deciphered by Agamben in his critique of the western tradition of signifying allows him to develop what will be presented, through a critical reading of William Watkin’s Agamben and the indifference (2014), as the underlying structure of Agamben’s thought: The scheme common-proper-indifference. The common is an unconditioned element, a founding ground (e.g sovereignty) that founds the proper, that is, the conditioned fact, the founded element (e.g bare life). Paradoxically, what Agamben shows repeatedly in his works, is that it is the proper what founds the common, that is to say, it is the founded element what founds its own founding ground. Ultimately, both the common and the proper collapsed into a zone of indistinction in which it is no longer possible to distinguish them. This structure is always at operation in Agamben’s archeological investigations to the extent that, for him, it constitutes the core of the entire metaphysical tradition of the West. The aim of this presentation, therefore, is to make this structure intelligible as a precondition of a comprehensive understanding of the inclusion-exclusion paradigm. In order to do so, I will take Agamben’s reading of the isolation of the improper within the tradition of signification, as an incipient but nonetheless crucial development of the dialectic of the common and the proper. As a whole, the Homo Sacer project could be described as an attempt to decipher the political meaning of pure Being as a precondition to ‘master the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power’ but inversely, it aims at 'understanding the theoretical implications of the isolation of bare life in order to solve the enigma of ontology’ (Agamben, 1998:182). Neither of these tasks will be effectively accomplished if the constitutive processes of metaphysics and politics are not located within the oikonomia of the common and the proper, that is to say, within the linguistic-metaphysical machine that lies at the core of Agamben’s philosophy.
Power's Two Bodies: A Critique of Agamben's Theory of Sovereignty
Philosophy Today, 2024
This article seeks to problematize Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty in light of the “archaeological method” he uses in his Homo Sacer project. In contrast to Agamben’s exposition, which treats biopolitics as the original and ontological paradigm of Western politics, the essay discusses how, historically, sovereign power has been conceived as a “double body”—transcendent and immanent, sacred and sacrificial, absolute and perpetual—from whose tension conceptual and political metamorphoses of sovereignty arise. The first attribute of sovereignty—absoluteness, on which Agamben has often focused—should be seen as an ordering and essentially modern function of its second “body”: the perpetuity of power. The article illustrates, then, how the retrospective projections through which the Italian philosopher constructs his ontological reading of sovereignty depend on some logical and epistemological lacunae that characterise his “archaeological method,” which is based, essentially, on an arbitrary use of historical analogies.
Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
OPEN ACCESS. The last two volumes of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series are concerned with developing a theory of use. This article offers a critical assessment of the two concepts, use and form-of-life, that form the heart of this theory: how do these two notions offer a solution to the problem of bare life that forms the core of the Homo Sacer series? First, the author describes how the original problem of bare life is taken up in The Use of Bodies and how the notion of use offers an important additional characteristic of bare life. Second, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of ancient Cynicism, the author discusses in which sense the type of ‘solution’ Agamben offers to the problem of bare life might be seen as an heir to ancient Cynicism and how this interpretation clarifies his connection of form-of-life and exile. Third, the author critically assesses the different usages of use that we can find in Agamben, by comparing how Franciscan usus, Pauline chrēsis and Platonic chrēsis are taken up in his analysis. Fourth, following Foucault, the author deepens the Platonic sense of use and its relation to taking care of justice. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Agamben’s reading of Plato’s myth of Er, in which the motifs of use, exile, and care are gathered.
State of the Existentially-Exceptional: Agamben’s Biopolitics and Heidegger’s Ek-sistence
In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben proposes that the “the protagonist” of his book is “bare life,” particularly “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert” (12). Agamben’s interpretation of “the life of homo sacer” is derived from Roman law, but it is particularly appropriated with respect to how human life, generally, is included in or excluded from the overarching political structure. For Agamben, “bare life”—a simple form of human existence—becomes zoē constituted by (or separated from) the political order of bios, by sovereignty’s “state of exception.” Essentially, not only does sovereignty exist in a politicalized construct to, chiefly, stabilize it and make determinations about who should be included in (or excluded from) the bios, but the Sovereign has a Heideggerian “ek-sistence,” due to being existentially exceptional.
The use of bodies. Agamben's idea of a non- capitalist form of life
Journal for Cultural Research, 2018
With the notion of the form-of-life as a counter-figure to the notion of bare life, Agamben seems to invite us to place at the center of a critical theory of capitalism a reflection on bios. To envisage a form of emancipation that unfolds against bare life suggests, at first glance, another relation to the living body. Such a gesture seems to be inspired by the desire to think a natural life that would also be a politically qualified life. The idea with which Agamben closes the Homo Sacer series, namely that of a use of bodies, also gestures in this direction. In this paper I show how the categories of bare life and of the use of bodies fail to live up to their promise, before demonstrating in what sense the idea of a subtraction of law as a political project which subsumes all others ends up weakening the critical potential of the idea of a form-of-life that is to be realised against the force of production of bare lives.
Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics
Law and Critique, 2009
Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.