(4:04 PM) | Anonymous:

The Open: Biopolitics

Agamben conveniently summarizes his argument in chapter 17. In my remarks, I restate the argument as clearly as I can, in part in an effort to represent Agamben's view, in part to identify places where there might be debate, in part to locate sites where I am mistaken or confused.

Western philosophy relies on an anthropological machine. In this tradition of thought, questions of being, particularly of human being, are inextricably tied to the animal. But, this tie has not simply negative, simply a drawing of a line or a determination of what humans are not. Rather, from Aristotle through Heidegger the essence of ontology, the very categories through which it unfolds, depend on the animal or are variations on animal existence. As variations, they are ways that ‘man suspends his animality’ (79) and open a zone of life that exceeds the human even as the human requires it.

What this means for politics is that all politics is essentially biopolitics. The polis itself, as Heidegger makes clear, is a site of conflict. It is a site of conflict between what is revealed and what is concealed. And this conflict is also a conflict between what in man is human and what is animal, a biopolitical conflict. Historically politics was not only biopolitical—that is, politics could and did distance and separate itself from animality and in some ways it understood this distancing as a political imperative. But, there was nonetheless a biopolitics at its core.

So biopolitics is not simply a dimension of modernity, coincident with discipline and the organizing of bodies; instead, it is politics as such. (One could consider whether this essential account of politics should be read in opposition to Schmitt's emphasis on the friend/enemy distinction, which itself relies on the idea of sovereignty and the exception. This line of thought can suggest how Agamben is trying to think politics outside of sovereignty, or outside of an essential relation of politics and violence to law; so, engaging Heidegger here provides an alternative trajectory. Both the end of The Open and "The state of exception"--included in Andrew Norris's Agamben collection, end with Benjamin, so this might be promising. Additionally, one might consider why an appeal to an 'essential' conception of politics and the political is so appealing today, given the primacy of anti-essentialism in the late eighties and nineties; it makes me think of a kind of 'fundamentalist' core at the heart of postmodernity. Really, how is that an Italian classicist can become the darling of postie academics when he paints in such broad, broad strokes? It might be because his books are very short--one of my major criteria for reading. More generously, the project is bold, exciting, and new; still, might it not be worth contextualizing a bit?).

Anyway, what does this "essential bipolitics" mean for the present, or for twentieth and twenty-first century life, for life at the “end of history”? Now, Agamben says, the anthropological machine no longer functions; the distancing or separation from the animal is no longer plausible. We could also say (although Agamben doesn’t go very far in this direction in this text) that the zones of indistinction (the animality in the human) are now more prominent, more pressing. And, this new indistinction entails a depoliticization (76). (Here I think Agamben’s themes are Arendt’s in The Human Condition: the primacy of the economy and social welfare, of needs, is the loss of the political, of the public as a sphere in which something new is revealed; Arendt’s closeness to Heidegger no doubt accounts for the similarity.)

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