A thought on Homo Sacer
Thursday, January 18, 2007
I am beginning to suspect that, whatever else it is, Homo Sacer is an example of the Heideggerian “etymological argument”:
The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred–that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed–and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment (83).
Walter Benjamin said we should look for the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of human life, and Agamben did so, by seeking out the original etymological meaning of the word–a very Heideggerian way of going about it. Beyond that typical move, there is another major feature of the book that is deeply Heideggerian: the epochal thinking that assumes the basic unity of the Western tradition. This is what underwrites things like, say, claiming to find the opposition between bare life and qualified life in Aristotle, but nevertheless basing his argument on a feature of ancient Roman law, or more generally his tendency to jump around between different thinkers and different eras without feeling he needs to make the genealogy explicit.
Foucault and Arendt are obviously more in the foreground, but I don’t think it’s possible to really understand Agamben’s procedure here without taking these important, though largely implicit, Heideggerian elements into account.
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 1:00 am
Yes.
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 2:25 am
What Amish said (where the fuck is your first post?!?).
This is why I think Agamben should not be written about but should be read. He writes broadly intellectual books that can attract a decent readership and educate them decently. I don’t know that his work really calls for all that much analysis, but it does genuinely help people to think about complex issues partly because of his overall style (short books, relatively simply sentences, almost journalistic). Incidentally Verso just put out Infancy and History (I think this is mainly on language) for $12.
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 9:12 am
SUNY reissued Language and Death recently, too — it’s a shame that they didn’t do that while I was doing my directed reading on Agamben, or else I probably would’ve gone ahead and read the complete works.
Looking back at this post, I was making an extremely minor point.
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 11:12 am
Nothing wrong with that!
Agamben strikes me, along with Schmitt, as a writer whose complete works should be collected into an affordable reader.
Monday, January 29, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I get this sense about Agamben as well. Although the man is a joy to read, he skips around so much from thinker to thinker that it makes for an incredibly difficult job to fill in all the connecting dots (for example, the movement from Schmitt to Foucault is very difficult, but so is the transiton from Schmitt to Arendt!). In this sense, he is one of those theorists that is very difficult to explain to others, especially for those who don’t want to spend the time reading all his works (and the ensuing history of philosophy, including the reconsideration of metaphysics in Heidegger). Afterall, Agamben only dabbles with the best, and the most difficult!
However, that said, I do think he has much to say about some very important matters, such as the possibility of moving beyond law-sovereignty models of power. The problem here then, becomes properly distinguishing him from more radical thinkers like Negri especially. Their stuff on “constituting” power, for example, is closely interrelated. By the way, I just finished homo sacer (again!) and found myself reading more Heidegger just to figure out what was happeing. In this sense, your comments were very useful for me. The book is all about Heidegger, who, as we know, had a tremendous impact on Schmitt himself.