The Figure of the Slave as an Ethical Paradigm in the Work of Agamben (original) (raw)
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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.
Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben
2013
Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been “biopolitics” since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben’s thought as a call for the creation of new political forms. http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5759-catastrophe-and-redemption.aspx
Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben-Introduction
Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been “biopolitics” since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben’s thought as a call for the creation of new political forms. http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5759-catastrophe-and-redemption.aspx
“HUMAN WASTES”? CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF SLAVERY AND NEW ABOLITIONISM
After a general overview on the “slavery of the ancients” and the “slavery of the modern”, this paper focuses on the “slavery of the contemporaries” and its characteristics. The phenomenon can be described under a global perspective, bearing in mind the relevance of universal definitions such as those of “corps d’exception” and “human wastes” that can help to go towards a new abolitionism.
Life, Law, and Abandonment in Giorgio Agamben
2014
The present article deals with the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and explores his seminal concepts like ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exception’ to examine the relationship between law and human life and probes into the philosopher’s thoughts on the function of the biopolitical machine in the modern state to allocate the positions of terror vis-a-vis legality and the function of sovereignty. Working through Agamben’s body of thought and relating it to a host of other political thinkers like Schmitt and Mbembe for example, it sketches out the fundamental definition of politics and what it means to be in relation to that in our modern times. Keywords: Exception, Law, Modernity, Holocaust, Testimony, Agamben.
The STARACO project (STAtus, ‘Race’ and Colour in the Atlantic World from Antiquity to the Present), financed by the French Region Pays de la Loire, is offering support for doctoral students and post-docs (from Europe, Africa and the Americas) to participate in the Summer Programme in Nantes from 22-26 June 2015 on the subject “Freedoms and Slaveries in the Atlantic World.” Conference Focus Today, bibliography on the phenomenon of slavery in the Atlantic is incredibly vast. However, our research group on the definition of hierarchies of colours and of 'races' cannot avoid addressing this subject. It is clear that the deportation of millions of African captives towards the Americas constituted the most powerful impetus for the racialisation of slavery, leading to the ‘natural’ representation according to which all slaves are black. This simple equation, however, covers over a complex historical process that this research conference seeks to analyze more closely. We must begin by ‘denaturalizing’ the concept of slavery. The term slavery, in fact, includes situations that are very different in time and space, which the various specialists in our research network will be able to compare. This is why we use the word ‘slaveries’ in the plural. The diversity of slaveries mirrors that of the modes of liberation and the various statuses that freedom generated. Here, the goal is to show that slavery does not respond to a single definition, but rather describes a process. Similarly, coming out of a servile condition led to the creation of various statuses, ranging from full access to equal citizenship (in modern times) to certain situations of minority, for people who could no longer be identified as slaves but still carried its stigma in freedom. The condition of slave was certainly a status, but it was also a state that could, within certain limits and under certain conditions, be negotiated in social practice. In this perspective, the problem of abolitionism and its ambiguities may be explored through the implicit renewals of forms of slavery in the nineteenth century, beyond the legal abolition of that particular institution.
Philosophia, 2008
This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the "face" of political life and the importance of the concept of "home" for a cogent theory of freedom.
Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben
The Meanings of Violence : From Critical Theory to Biopolitics. Edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala
In his essay 'On the Limits of Violence,' 1 Giorgio Agamben seeks to determine violence's relation to politics in order to uncover the question of violence in and of itself. After Walter Benjamin, 2 Agamben notes that any theory of violence that situates the justification of violence outside of violence itself, that is to say, any theory 'that defines the legitimacy of revolutionary means through the justice of their end is as contradictory as legalistic theories that guarantee a just end by legitimizing repressive means.' 3 Agamben's reading of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' 4 has received attention in recent studies that have focused on the notion of bare life, 5 the sacrificial character of violence, 6 its relation to law 7 and to political theology. 8 Less attention, however, has been given to the meaning and function of the notion of violence within Agamben's archaeological project itself and to the relation between this notion and his critique of Western metaphysics and biopolitics. Here, the works of William Watkin 9 and Thanos Zartaloudis 10 constitute a fertile ground for considering the meaning of violence in the work of Agamben beyond the critique of violence as a means. Indeed, Zartaloudis focuses on the violence of 'the ontological model of constitutive vicariousness' 11 of power that Agamben's philosophical archaeology helps to trace and on the notion of pure violence as a radical suspension of mythic violence. Watkin, 12 for his part, treats the notion of violence in Agamben's work as a signature, providing a methodological framework for the interrogation of violence as it relates to signification.