The Death Penalty

Reportedly, several of Derrida’s final seminars were on the death penalty. I don’t have access to the seminars, so I only know the basic outlines of his argument as found in various interviews — basically, the death penalty isn’t just one penalty among others; its removal would change the concept of law. Drawing on Agamben, however, I would note that even in non-death-penatly countries, police power has been steadily increasing, so that in the UK, for example, the state can’t officially sentence you to death, but police can murder someone in cold blood for running to catch a train while being brown. If I had to choose between a highly ritualized and regulated use of state violence to kill and a completely discretionary and situation-based use, I think it’s pretty clear what I’d choose. Obviously those aren’t the only options, but getting rid of the former without getting rid of the latter doesn’t seem to get us much further. The real sea-change will be when police officers can no longer expect impunity when they use violence on the job.

Frequently Asked Question

Yes, a translation of Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria is planned. As of now, two translators are under contract with Stanford University Press and are working on it, but it won’t be coming out for quite a while — you probably have ample time to learn to read Italian by then. Failing that, it has been translated into French and (I believe) German.

On reviewing Agamben

This weekend, I have been leafing through my Agamben books and looking at my underlinings, in preparation for writing my contribution to Anthony’s edited volume listed here on my unlikely-to-be-completed to-do list (Anthony has also been crossing things off for those keeping score at home).

I have been idly thinking about what a book on Agamben akin to my Zizek book might look like, and one thing that has really struck me is the extent to which a “developmental” narrative of Agamben’s thought wouldn’t be nearly as plausible as was the case with Zizek — to a remarkable degree, all of his ideas seem to be “there” already from the very beginning, and it’s just a matter of when he gets around to following up on them in more detail. For instance, there are several essays in Potentialities that, read in retrospect, seem to contain virtually his entire project in a few short pages, and The Coming Community could be read in the same way.

I’m also noticing that I find the shorter and less programmatic books to be more interesting, or at least more suggestive, than the Homo Sacer series for the most part — and as I think about it now, it may be a matter of pacing. Agamben seems to be in such a huge hurry in the Homo Sacer series, in sharp contrast to the more meditative style of other works. Something like The Idea of Prose — which verges on something like a collection of “devotional readings” for a secular age — seems to be almost a performative enactment of his “messianic” program, whereas the Homo Sacer books are rushed and often cranky.

It’s impossible to fully gauge this oneself, but it also strikes me to what a degree my own theological project, at least the constructive portion of my dissertation is influenced by Agamben — not so much on the level of specific claims as of the general “ethos” of his thought, or perhaps I could be bold enough to claim that I’m attempting to make what I take to be a similar “gesture” to what he’s doing.

As the publication status of my dissertation continues to be uncertain, I have thought about reworking it considerably, potentially into two separate books (one straight-up theology and the other doing the more polyvalent interdisciplinary thing), and I have consistently envisioned the more interdisciplinary one starting off with an account of what I take away from Il Regno e la Gloria — perhaps that’s a symptom of a larger unacknowledged debt. I’ve thought of doing some kind of project on Nancy, but maybe Agamben would be a better choice, though of course by the time I was able to do it, the obvious venue of the “and Theology” series probably would’ve already covered Agamben. Doing the Zizek book was in part a way of “taking ownership” of his influence on my thinking; obviously I can’t do that with every thinker who influences me, but it seems like good practice to do that with at least one or two.

A thought on The Sacrament of Language and The Shepherd of Hermas

As I read The Shepherd of Hermas, I’m struck by a theme that resonates throughout Christian literature — the concern with speaking the truth and rejecting all lies and slander. Obviously this theme seems like common sense and not particular to Christianity, but in Agamben’s terms from The Sacrament of Language, I think this has to be understood as an attempt to get past the oath, according to Christ’s saying in the Sermon on the Mount. The prohibition of slander means to stop using your words as blugeons — instead, only use them for truth. (And avoiding swearing means your words can’t be used as blugeons against you.)

But I wonder if Agamben would say that this doesn’t go far enough — we need to do more than get rid of lies, we need to get rid of truth as well. The upshot of this would be twofold: first, the Christian attempt to eliminate lies foreshadows the history of persecution of heretics, infidels, etc. When the Christians didn’t have power, it was subversive and wonderful, but it quickly took a different turn once they did. Second, maybe the people “speaking in tongues” in the Pauline communities had a point.

I only post this because as I’ve been reading The Shepherd of Hermas, I’ve been thinking, “Wow, if I could figure out a way to make this text interesting, that would be my greatest achievement.” This is my initial attempt.

It begins

There has already been two edited volumes on Agamben, along with a special issue of a journal, and now we’re finally starting to see book-length treatments, including one specifically on law.

Even taking into account the inherent slowness of academic publication, I’m surprised it has taken this long for the secondary literature on Agamben to build up. Thinking of other continental types of within Agamben’s “tier,” Zizek is obviously well-covered by now, and the literature on Badiou was already a big part of his becoming popular in the English-speaking world. Even Nancy has had a couple intros, an edited volume, and a journal issue — and he doesn’t have an obvious “big book” on the level of Homo Sacer.

Compilation of notes over Il sacramento del linguaggio

Please enjoy the PDF compilation of my notes over this book, complete with a bonus spellcheck. There were not many comments to the posts this time around, but those who want to look at the original serialized notes can always find them here or by clicking the drop-down box for “Categories” on the right and selecting the appropriate option under “Agamben.”

Since the last time I did this a year ago, to my knowledge the only people who have followed my example have been Andy, who provided great notes over Foucault’s final lecture course, and Thomas Bridges, who’s been sharing various notes over Hegel and the scholarship thereon. (If I’m wrong and you’ve done something similar, let me know in comments.) I am happy to do these notes as a service to the scholarly community (and as a way of motivating myself to generate the notes for my own use) — but I can’t personally do this for every book that would be helpful to people. So in short: go and do likewise.

More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§22-29

§22. This section discusses so-called “ontological arguments” for the existence of God. Agamben claims that what’s really at stake in Anselm’s argument is that id quo maius cogitari non potest is the most fitting name for God — which ammounts to “that experience of language in which it is impossible to separate name and being, speech and thing.” Agamben highlights the places where Anselm explicitly mentions saying “God” (or the definition) as well as the original title Fides quaerens intellectum, which seems to link it up with the oath. The name of God, then, represents “the status of the logos in the dimension of the fides-oath, in which nomination immediately realizes the existence of that which it names.” He then says that Alain of Lyle and Aquinas do basically the same thing with the argument. In the end, pure existence (God) can be neither stated nor deduced logically: it can’t be signified, only sworn.

More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§13-21

§13. Agamben now turns to another institution closely tied to the oath: sacratio (also called a devotio), by which a person is declared sacer. This act consecrates a person to the gods and separates him from human society — either voluntarily or because they have commited some grave crime. He then quotes a ton of sources, with the goal of showing that the sacratio helps us understand why the curse or malediction is so often tied to an oath (i.e., in the formula). Tons of sources occur again, and Agamben says that it’s important to note that in the most solemn form of oaths, a benediction and malediction are paired — both can be dropped, but the malediction is most often retained. The most common elements of an oath seem to be some kind of affirmation, the invocation of the gods as witnesses, and a curse in cases of perjury — a combination that leads Agamben to believe that the oath combines elements of pistis and sacratio-devotio and that both of those two seemingly separate institutions find their origin in the oath.

More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§7-12

§7. Agamben refers back to the section of Homo Sacer I mentioned last time, where he critiques theoreticians of religion, and he continues that critique here, characterizing the notion of the “sacred” based on the concept of mana as a “scientific mytholegeme.” Theorists found a concept similar to mana in many “primitive” societies and came to believe that it named some kind of invisible force that it central to religious experience. This concept has even shaped the work of one of Agamben’s favorites, namely Benveniste. But everyone should’ve known better because in 1950 Levi-Strauss critiqued the religious interpretation of mana, saying that it is nothing more complex or mysterious than a word to designate something whose precise nature has not yet become clear, like the x of algebra. For Levi-Strauss, therefore, the only mysterious force associated with mana is its bizarre influence over the scholarly community. Agamben proposes that scholars are projecting their own lack of understanding of any religion, including that of their own culture, into the data of “primitive” cultures.

More Agamben Notes: Il sacramento del linguaggio, §§1-6

Last summer I produced a series of reading notes over Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria, a text that is still unavailable in English as of this writing. Since then, a follow-up volume has come to my attention. Designated as Homo sacer II, 3, it is entitled Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archealogia del giuarmento (The Sacrament of Language: Archeaology of the Oath). The book itself is constructed as a long essay, with 29 numbered sections adding up to just under 100 pages — more on the scale of State of Exception than Homo Sacer or Il Regno. I currently plan to divide the notes into five installments, pausing to summarize when I get through 5 or 6 sections. This first post will cover the first six sections, as indicated in the title. (It will likely seem much less substantial than my previous summaries, but that’s because of the short pagecount combined with larger type.)