The Agamben Effect

2012

This text is imitating a journey which tries to explore what is completely unknown. It starts Homo Sacer and traces some key concepts namely der Muselmann, bare life, state of exception, sovereignty and nihilism in law. Doing so, it hopes to reach a general picture of biopolitics or biopower according to Agamben. So, first part of this text generally tries to clarify some fundamental concepts or conceptions in order to use them for its aim. The second part suggests an alternative reading of Agamben, centered around his concept of der Muselmann which is the ultimate figure defined by Primo Levi and Agamben chooses the term because of its resemblance to or representation of Homo Sacer. Der Muselmann was a derogatory term in its origin and very meaning has still been unclear today. So, the second part tries to clarify the meaning of der Muselmann (and unbaptized babies) from a different outlook, not from outside but inside of the referred concept. It tries to show a Muslim’s image of a...

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.

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.

PhaenEx, 2007

Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (1999 [2016]), is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious, and yet controversial, contemporary tentative at redefining and re-actualizing the “geographies of terror” of the Lager (Murray & Whyte, 2011, p. 43). Ambitious, first, for Agamben’s intention is to venture in the exploration of what remains hitherto largely a terra incognita, as undefined in its contours as disorienting in its morphology: namely, the ethical-political significance of the extermination of European Jewry. At the present day, to Agamben’s preoccupation, “[n]ot only do we lack anything close to a complete understanding; even the sense and reasons for the behavior of the executioners and the victims […] still seems profoundly enigmatic” (Agamben, 1999, p. 11 [7]). Controversial, second, for Agamben’s Remnants eventually became the preferred target of repeated attacks – if not of real polemics – in contemporary literature. As insightful as Agamben’s application of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to the concentration camps and the structure of the Nazi state might be, Remnants systematically fails to “mention forms of political actions that took place inside Auschwitz” (Whyte, 2013, p. 92), if not “den[ies] the possibility of resistance” altogether (Betta, 2016, p. 259). The present investigation aims at mending Agamben’s lacuna, by restoring the import of a particular form of resistance unveiled by Levi’s testimony in If This is a Man (1959 [2014]): the so-called “moral survival” (Levi, 1959, p. 38 [32]). By invoking for the task Foucault’s later recuperation of Ancient ethics – the Foucault Agamben himself disavowed in favor of the ‘biopolitical’ Foucault –, I hope to reconstruct the ‘sense and reasons’ for the conduct of those Häftlinge who, like Steinlauf and Levi himself, attempted to resist the immanentizing pressure of the lex animata of the camp, i.e. the process of Muselmanization, by self-constituting themselves as the ethical subjects of their own moral acts. Setting this as its agenda, the present investigation is structured as follows: firstly I introduce Agamben’s preparatory reading of Levi’s testimony (§1); secondly, I discuss Agamben’s considerations on the juridical and ethical-anthropological liminality – or better, as we shall see, the meta-liminality – of, respectively, the Lager and the Muselmann (§2); thirdly, and finally, (§3) I resort to the much-debated status of acts of resistance in Agamben and Foucault.

Constellations, 2012

This article gives a critical account of Agamben's contention that the camp is the paradigm of 'bio-politics' in the west. It analyses the deficiencies of this paradigm by means of comparison with other approaches to juridical topics and political theory (e.g., the treatments of the topics of force and state power in liberalism and Foucault). First, I ask about the features Agamben ascribes to the camp space and in what respects they support his contention that the camp has general significance. Second, I question the reasons he gives for his view that the camp situation discloses the general tendencies of legal codes and practices in the West. In particular, I ask whether, as Agamben contends, his approach allows tendencies in the West that would otherwise be obscure to be identifiable, or whether his approach is too speculative to be useful as political theory.

usyd.edu.au

Postmodern Culture, 2016

Agamben argues that a philosophical separation between “bare life” and “qualified, political life” has been pervasive from the time of ancient Greece through to the present day. This conception is not merely philosophical, but perniciously subtends even contemporary politics—democratic and otherwise—containing the threat of the concentration camp at its core. I use Agamben’s work to establish the inadequacy of this pervasive conception of life and death, illustrating this necessarily political and philosophical project through a case study of the medical treatment of comatose patients and the closely related need for organ donation. I then move beyond Agamben’s work by proposing the direction that a necessary rethinking of politics and ethics would have to take in accordance with the concept of a “form-of-life”, which I give a much-needed elaboration, culminating in new possibilities for doing justice to ways of life in their diversity.