The Ideological Origins of Agamben’s Biopolitics
Foucault discussed the disciplinary power and micro-mechanisms of power in his Discipline and Punish, and most of us accepted his statements on power from this book. While in fact, late Foucault greatly reflected his study on power and its mechanisms and turned his attention to bio-politics, bio-power and bio-history.[1] Unfortunately, he died in 1984 which causes his bio-political project unfinished. Following his illumination on bio-politics, Agamben works on it and attempts to complete his unfinished project. Diagnosing the metaphysical character of the politics in the West, Agamben advocates political philosophers should turn their interests from the metaphysical politics to bio-politics. Focusing on bare life, camp and exception of state and absorbing ideas from Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin and other political theorists, Agamben constructs his bio-political theories and systemizes late Foucault’s ideas on bio-politics. In this paper, I want to explore the ideological origins of his biopolitics, discuss his biopolitical ideas and evaluate his influence in the history of political thought.
I
Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent philosophers in the 20th century, was known for his interpretation on destroying the history of Being. In Being and Time, Heidegger points out, “on the basis of the Greek’s initial contributions towards an Interpretation Being, a dogma has been developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect” and “this question has today been forgotten.”[2] Heidegger noticed the metaphysical tendency of western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle, then he advocated to re-examine western philosophical tradition in order to re-understand it. Heidegger thinks the history of Being is the history how Being has been forgotten in the western and it is necessary for philosophers to awaken western philosophy.
As one of five guests invited to one of the most singular seminars of the century, which took place in the village of Le Thor, in the south of France, presided over by Martin Heidegger in the summer of 1966, Agamben learnt how “philosophy became possible.”[3] Heidegger pointed out the metaphysics of western political tradition, following him, Agamben diagnoses that western politics is metaphysical for a long time, which excludes the natural life in its own political tradition. “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life.’ They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.”[4] However, when Aristotle and Plato classified the forms of life, and laid the foundation of western political tradition, the metaphysical character of western politics became much clearer. “When Plato mentions three kinds of life in the Philebus, and when Aristotle distinguishes the contemplative life of the philosopher (bios theoretikos) from the life of pleasure (bios apolaustikos) and the political life (bios politikos) in the Nichomachean Ethics, neither philosopher would ever have used the term zoe (which in Greek, significantly enough, lacks a plural).”[5]
Why there was no term to define “life” in the ancient Greece, while the distinction between bios and zoe became so clear since Plato and Aristotle? Why the Western politics on the way of emphasizing bios at the expense of the zoe? And why the history of zoe in Being became the history of the oblivion of zoe? In order to answer these questions, let us firstly take a look at the ideological origins of Agamben’s biopolitics.
II
Before Agamben, late Foucault discussed a lot on bio-power, bio-politics and bio-history. Concerning this issue, we can see clearly from his lectures at College of France: Society Must Be Defended (1975-1976), Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978), The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979) and The History of Sexuality (Vol. One: An Introduction, 1976).
During the period of 1975-76, Foucault gave lectures at College of France which was collected as a book named Society Must Be Defended. In the last lecture, Foucault firstly touched the bio-power and bio-politics. He stated one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, “sovereignty’s old right —— to take life or let live” was replaced by the right of “to make live and to let die,” and “the problem of life began to be problematized in the field of political thought, or the analysis of political power.”[6] Then in the second half of 18th century, racism connected with the biopolitics, which “justifies the death-function in the economy of bio-power by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.”[7] It is in this book that late Foucault firstly touched bio-politics and attempted to analyze political rights and life from the perspective of bio-politics.
Moreover, Foucault assumed two different series in the 18th century: “body-organism-discipline-institutions series and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State.”[8] The former mainly focused on the disciplinary power and its mechanisms, while the latter focused on the non-disciplinary power and its mechanisms; The former concerned with the sphere of anatomical-politics, while the latter mainly referred to the sphere of bio-politics. “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”[9] Comparing with the disciplinary power and its mechanism Foucault mentioned in his Discipline and Punish, rather than focus on the body-disciplinary technologies, Foucault paid more attention to race, life, nondisciplinary power and mechanisms. It is from this perspective that we say late Foucault reflected his own studies on power and turned his interest from anatomical-politics to bio-politics.
Working on bio-politics, Foucault firstly argued the natural life is included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. He explained, “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”[10] Foucault noticed the living existence was totally different from what Aristotle mentioned, and the living existence of modern man was in question. As far as Foucault concerned, the natural life was closely connected with the calculations of State power, and then he considered the relationships between life and power, and also the relations between history and politics:
“if one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.”[11]
Foucault discussed the relations between bio-power, bio-history and bio-politics and assumed bio-politics should be put into the bio-history.
When it comes to Security, Territory, Population, bio-politics became an important topic for late Foucault. On January 11th, 1978, Foucault gave a lecture at the College of France, and he clearly pointed out that he was going to study bio-power, which he meant “a number of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.”[12] Obviously, bio-power became an important topic which attracted Foucault’s attention. Foucault wrote, accompanying with the appearance of the Raison d'État in the 17th century and the transition of state from “territorial state” to “population state,” the “art of government” has greatly been changed, which were extended to the spheres of public health, population, territorial police and so on. During this transition, bio-politics connected with the government of man, the conduct of human being. Bio-politics became a theme of the art of government, which was not a problem of the Jews-Christian pastoral power, but became an important part of the Raison d'État. In the 19th century, it became a problem of police state, which was connected with how to govern the children, families, territories and so on.
Foucault also deepened his study on bio-politics, which we can see from his lectures on the birth of the biopolitics. Through his analysis of the crisis of governmentality and research on liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics, Foucault traced the birth of the biopolitics in German and America. Comparing with Security, Territory, Population which discussed about the external politics of the governmental rationality, the Birth of the Biopolitics directly examined the internal politics of police state under political rationality. The former discussed how the nation attempted to pursue its own best interest in the international environment, while the latter mainly concerned with the internally political economy of police state. Concerning with the origins of the biopolitics, Foucault broadened his studies to the neo-liberalism in contemporary German and America, however, he “never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.”[13]
From late Foucault’s works I mentioned above, we can clearly see late Foucault paid more attention to the bio-history, bio-power and bio-politics. So what is bio-politics and bio-power for late Foucault? We can draw a short conclusion for him:
“Biopolitics does not deal with disciplinary society, nor with the individual-body. What emerges with the introduction of biopower as a practice is the notion of a social body as the object of government…… Biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem, as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Biopower does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation, normalisation and institutionalisation. Rather, it acts on the population in a preventive fashion. Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances, and biopower operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and the regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’ phenomena on a global scale, by determining equilibrium and keeping events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a global scale, it is ‘the power to make live. Power won’t make die, but it will regulate mortality.’”[14]
Foucault introduced bio-power and bio-politics into history, but it is a pity that Foucault died in 1984 and didn’t finish his project on bio-politics. Foucault’s discussion on them was incoherent, however, they enlightened Agamben to work on bio-politics and complete Foucault’s unfinished project.
Foucault never described the concretely natural life in his works. In this situation, Hannah Arendt offered Agamben a good lens to explore biopolitics. In The Origin of Totalitarianism, Arendt described the living condition of the stateless people after World War I:
“with the emergence of the minorities in Eastern and Southern Europe and with the stateless people driven into Central and Western Europe, a completely new element of disintegration was introduced into postwar Europe. Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents.”[15]
Under the totalitarian politics, Arendt noticed the refugees or the stateless people were produced after World War I. Arendt argued that these kinds of political phenomenon should be put into the history of the totalitarianism in order to understand their living condition. Arendt thought “the end of the rights of man” was closely connected with nation-states. Without nation-states, it is impossible for us to understand the destiny of those stateless and refugees around the world. Although Arendt insightfully described the destiny of those who were forced to leave their hometowns, “lost all other qualities and specific relationships” and had to wander around the world, “a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking.”[16] Enlightened by Arendt, Agamben understands the political relation is based on sovereign ban, which created a large number of the sacred who were put into the concentration camps during Nazi rule.
Late Foucault paid attention to biopower and biopolitics and connected them with the govenmentality, yet he did not finish his project in all his life. Arendt analyzed nation-state and the rights of human, but in the perspective of how they were related to the totalitarianism rather than from the relationships between sovereign power and the biopolitics. In order to construct a framework of biopolitical paradigm, Agamben has to ask Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt for illumination.
For Agamben, he is intellectually indebted to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin’s consideration of extraordinary politics and sovereign power. Schmitt was famous for analyzing the extraordinary politics of the sovereign. In his opinion, comparing with normal rule, the extraordinary rule is much more interesting:
“The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”[17]
Generally speaking, Schmitt thinks that the general rule proves nothing, while the exception proves everything. That’s to say, political scientists should understand juridical constitution and modern politics from the perspective of extraordinary politics rather than normal politics.
As for Benjamin, he also discussed extraordinary politics:
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.”[18]
But comparing with Schmitt who reduced the politics to the extraordinary politics, Benjamin connected the oppressed and the “emergency situation” and assumed the history of the oppressed was the product of the “emergency situation.” Therefore, in order to understand the history of the oppressed, a “real state of emergency” should be put into history.
But who is the oppressed in history? And what’s the “real state of emergency”? According to the archaic Roman Law, there is a kind of punishment to the homo sacer, which not only excludes the sacred, but also includes the sacred. In punishing the sacred, the sacred had to sacrifice themselves, while they were killed without committing homicide. Noticing the contradictory phenomenon of the sacred, Agamben wants to pursue the history of the sacred and explore what’s the living condition of the sacred, and how they are treated in an inclusive exclusive way. Then he points out, the Jews who were treated as the “living death” under the German rule in the 1930s were the sacred in the modern history. Under the sovereign ban during the Nazi German rule, they lost their natural life, while only had their own bare life in the world. Following Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben attempts to explore the sovereign ban and the state of exception from the perspective of bio-politics.
Absorbing ideas and approaches from Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and other political theorists, Agamben attempts to save western political tradition and rediscover the history which has been forgotten in western political tradition. In doing so, he constructs his own political framework of bio-politics.
III
Concerning biopolitics, what does Agamben say about it? How does he construct his theories? And how can we understand it? In order to answer these questions, let us discuss how Agamben states his theories of biopolitics.
i. The Paradox of Sovereign and the Ambiguity of the Homo Sacer
In Political Theology, Schmitt mentioned the paradox of sovereignty, which enlightened Agamben a lot on the understanding of the “homo sacer.” When it turns to define sovereign, Schmitt defined it from the perspective of a real exception rather than a general norm. Schmitt pointed out, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”[19] It is a paradox that the sovereign not only stands outside the law, but also inside the law. The sovereign declares the juridical order, but can also suspend it for his own sake. It is a “borderline concept” that the sovereign is between the norm and the exception, between the inside and the outside of the legal order. Schmitt noticed this paradox of sovereign, but he still overemphasized the importance of the exception and distinguished the extraordinary from the normal rather than combine them together in order to understand politics. Agamben thinks Schmitt’s perspective is very valuable, and he recognized that “there is a limit-figure of life, a threshold in which life is both inside and outside the juridical order, and this threshold is the place of sovereignty.”[20]
Schmitt thought that there was a borderline between the extraordinary and the normal, but Agamben does not agree with Schmitt on this point. In the state of exception, Agamben thinks, there is no distinction between the extraordinary and the normal, and they both enter into the zone of indistinction. Then he states that it is very necessary for us to understand sovereign from this perspective:
“if the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it.”[21]
Obviously, there is an inclusive exclusion zone which connects the norm and the exception.
Following Schmitt, Agamben finds the ambiguity of the homo sacer. So who is the homo sacer? And how can we understand the destiny of the homo sacer? In On the Significance of Words, Pompeius Festus wrote:
“The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that ‘if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.’ This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.”[22]
It was so strange a phenomenon that the sacred were included under the Roman Law, however, they were also excluded by the people who were living under the Roman rule. The sacred were accepted by their communities, yet they were killed by others who didn’t commit homicide. Therefore, “the political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide.”[23]
Usually, political theorists interpret politics from the perspective of normal politics. Comparing with them, Schmitt preferred to explore politics from the perspective of a real exception, while Benjamin tried to connect the oppressed with the “emergency situation.” As far as Agamben is concerned, in order to precede his studies on politics, it is very necessary for him to put politics in the zone of indisctinction and reinterpret western political tradition.
ii. The State of Exception As a Paradigm of Government
Agamben thinks the state of exception as a paradigm of government. In the legal history of the West, it has been existed in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. In France, “after being established with the Constitutional Assembly’s decree of July 8, 1791, it acquired its proper physiognomy as État de Siège fictive or État de Siège politique with the Directorial law of August 27, 1797, and finally, with Napoleon’s decree of December 24, 1811;”[24] In Germany, “Article 68 of the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in cases where ‘public security was threatened in the territory of the Reich,’ granted the emperor the power to declare a part of the Reich to be in a state of war (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and limitations followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, concerning the state of siege;”[25] In Italy, the governments of the kingdom resorted to proclaiming a state of siege many times: “in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces in 1862 and 1866, in Naples in 1862, in Sicily and Lunigiana in 1894, and in Naples and Milan in 1898;”[26] It is so widespread a phenomenon that it is also existed in the England, Switzerland and other nations. But due to the limits of this paper, I do not want to discuss them one by one, and restrict my discussion mainly in America.
In American history, there is a long history concerning the state of exception since its constitution was created in 1787. Agamben thinks “the American constitution is in the dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress,” which “has taken shape historically as a conflict over supreme authority in an emergency situation.”[27] In Article 1, it establishes “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it,” which “does not specify which authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension; another point of conflict lies in the relation between another passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article 2, which states that ‘[t]he President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’”[28]
On September 25, 1862, the president Lincoln generalized the state of exception throughout the entire territory of the United States, authorizing the arrest and trial before courts marital of “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.”[29] By this point, the president of the United States was the holder of the sovereign decision on the state of exception.
President Woodrow Wilson personally assumed even broader powers than those Abraham Lincoln had claimed. From 1917 to 1918, Congress approved a series of acts (from the Espionage Act of June 1917 to the Overman Act of May 1918) that granted the president complete control over the administration of the country and not only prohibited disloyal activities (such as collaboration with the enemy and the diffusion of also reports), but even made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”[30]
During the Great Depression, through a series of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt achieved an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country. With the outbreak of World War Two, he extended these powers with the proclamation of a ‘limited’ national emergency on September 8, 1939, which became unlimited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, he renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the emergency:
“In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act……The American people can…be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every power vested in me to accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our own safety demands such defeat.”[31]
On November 13, 2001, the “military order” was issued by the president of the United States, which authorized the “indefinite detention” and trial by “military commissions of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.” Moreover, the USA Patriot Act issued by the U. S. Senate on October 26, 2001 “radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.”[32]
Through the examination of the history of the state of exception in the West and America, we can see clearly that it is a popular phenomenon that the state of exception has been existed around the world for a long time.
iii. The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern
What’s the living condition of the sacred in the modern world? And who are the sacred in contemporary world? In order to answer these questions, let us take a look at how Agamben discusses the camp and the Muselmann.
As we all know, during the 1930s, Hitler promoted his racism policies, namely the concentration camp policies, which put the Jews to the camp and made the Great Massacre on them. For Agamben, he thinks, the “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of daily life.”[33] Agamben connects Auschwitz with biopolitics, that’s because “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule,” which creates a kind of person who is named “der Muselmann,” literally “the Muslim:”
“The so-called Muselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. As hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations.”[34]
The Muselmann, who were put into the camps, were totally treated differently from the Germans. Under the state of exception, the Muselmann were separated from the human being.
The Nazis also used entwürdigen, literally to ‘deprive of dignity’ to express the legal status of the Jews. Comparing with the Germans, “the Jew is a human being who has been deprived of all Würde, all dignity: he is merely human-----and, for this reason, non-human.”[35] No matter what they are called as “the Muslim” or “the entwürdigen,” they are just treated unequal as the other Germans.
It is a paradox that the Jews are the same human beings as the Germans, while they lived as non-human. As the result of the national violence, under the state of exception, “the Muslim” or “the entwürdigen” are produced. Under the rule of Nazi German, the natural life of the Jews was changed and they were exposed to the bare life by the Nazi, which made them the sacred in the world history.
IV.
Following some political theorists and philosophers, Agamben redefined the politics from the perspective of his biopolitics:
“1. The original political relation is the ban.
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.”[36]
Attempting to save the Western political tradition, Agamben rethinks the political relation, the relations between sovereign power and the production of bare life and also the camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the West. Focusing on biopolitics, he constructs a comprehensively theory concerning it, which is very helpful for us to re-understand the Western politics.
Comparing with other political canons in the history of the Western politics, needless to say, Agamben’s biopolitics is very helpful for us to rethink politics. He attempts to save the Western politics and rediscover its own tradition, to some degree, his biopolitical project is very successful. However, if we consider it in much more detail, it still has its own limits.
Firstly, Agamben’s understanding of the political directly comes from Carl Schmitt, which narrows his reflection of the political. Living in the turbulent era of the Nazi German, Schmitt considered the state of the political was “the state of nature of all against all” explained by Thomas Hobbes, and Germans were “feared to be exposed to death,” thus, the sovereign must recognize the situation and distinguish who were the friends and who were the enemies:
“the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy……the antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on.”[37]
From a perspective of antithesis, Schmitt defined the nature of the political, the moral and the aesthetic. Following Schmitt, Agamben distinguished the zoe and bios, the nature and culture, the natural life and the bare life and advocated “once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism ad totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction.”[38] Although he analyzes them from the perspective of the zone of indistinction, he cannot reduce the political subjects to the sacred. The sacred is just a kind of political subjects and they cannot represent the whole political subjects. After all, there are still other political subjects who cannot be classified like these.
Moreover, the bare life is just a kind of special form of life rather than the normal life, which can not reflect the whole living condition of human beings in the world. Like Arendt who analyzed the living condition of the refugees in modern world, Agamben described the sadly destiny of the “the Muslim” or “the entwürdigen” who were forced to the concentration camps during the rule of the Nazi German. Focusing on the living condition of the sacred, Agamben reduced the political subjects to the sacred and the form of life to the bare life. Based on these statements, Agamben narrows the form of life.
Finally, the camp can’t be treated as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. Agamben argues, “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” and the key to understand modern political phenomena lies in their biopolitical character. We don’t deny that the history of the Jews were put to the camps and excluded can help us to understand the biopolitics in modern world. But there is no need to overestimate the biopolitical paradigm of the West as “the camp.” After all, the history of the Jews who were put to the camps was just an episode of the 20th century history rather than the whole. Agamben criticizes the metaphysic of politics in the West and tries to save it. However, when he treats the camp as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, his biopolitics goes to the other extreme.
Unlike Alex de Tocqueville who highly praised the American democracy during his travelling in America in the middle of the 19th century, Agamben notices the hidden darkness of modern society. Agamben explores the history of the zoe has been forgotten in the West for a long time and it is Agamben’s great contribution that we can rediscover this political tradition. He criticizes the metaphysics of the politics in the West, however, he also goes to the other side of the metaphysic. After all, his biopolitical theories based on the exception rather than the normal condition, while without the normal politics, we cannot understand the meaning of the political.
[1] Concerning the term of “bio-politics” or “biopolitics,” in Foucault’s works, sometimes he uses “bio-politics,” sometimes he uses “biopolitics.” In Agamben’s works, he prefers to use “biopolitics.” Although they touch the same topic, readers should notice the difference of “biopolitics” or “bio-politics” in Foucault and Agamben’s books.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, trans., (London and Southampton, The Camelot Press Ltd, 1962), p. 21.
[3] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1-2.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen trans., (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press), p. 1.
[5] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p.1
[6] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, David Macey trans., (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 241.
[7] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, ibid, p. 258.
[8] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended , ibid, p. 250.
[9] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, ibid, p. 242.
[10] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Robert Hurley trans., (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 188.
[11] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, ibid, p.143.
[12] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977—1978, Graham Burchell trans., (Palgrave Macmillan, 19), p. 1.
[13] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p.4
[15] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958), p. 269; also see Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p. 126.
[16] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p.4.
[17] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, George Schwab trans., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 15
[18] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans., Illumination: Essays and Reflections, (New York: Schocken, 2007), p. 257.
[19] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, ibid, p.5.
[20] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p. 27.
[21] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p. 28.
[22] Pompeius Festus, On the Significance of Words, cited from Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p.71.
[23] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p. 83.
[24] Agamben, Station of Exception, Kevin Attell trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 11.
[25] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p.14.
[26] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 17.
[27] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 19.
[28] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 20.
[29] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 21.
[30] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 21.
[31] Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), pp. 268-69. Cited from Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 22.
[32] Agamben, Station of Exception, ibid, p. 3.
[33] Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Daniel Heller-Roazen trans, (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 49.
[34] Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld trans., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 9; Cited from Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, ibid, p. 41.
[35] Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, ibid, p. 68.
[36] Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid, p. 181.
[37] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, George Schwab trans., (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 26.
[38] Agamben, Homo Sacer, Ibid, p. 122.
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