Taking a fossil from history and believe that it contains the secret to our contemporary world—this is sheer mysticism and irresponsible scholarship.
A lesson I learned from reading Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" is that I should not start talking about a book before I finish it. If after reading part 1 and 2, I still could defend Agamben before others, I am no longer willing to do that after reading part 3. Agamben's conclusion in part 3 that concentration camps are the paradigm of our age alarmed me and brought me to question and reject the whole chain of arguments he had put together in the book.
In this book, Agamben aims to establish the thesis that “the original political relation in the Western world is the state of exception, i.e. a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion.” By doing this, Agamben argues against the contractual origin of state power. Politics, according to Agamben, is not grounded on a community of “belonging”, founded on commonalities whether they are identities or contracts. Instead, he argues from investigation of Roman legal codes that since the Roman times, politics has been grounded on the logic of exception. From this concept of “exception” Agamben jumps to the conclusion in Part 3: since the concentration camp is a supreme example of “exception”, and since western politics has “originated” from the state of exception, then the concentration camp is simply a manifestation of this fundamental fact of politics. In other words, from ancient Roman legal codes, one can already anticipate the concentration camps of the modern times. This is, I believe, an extremely faulty claim.
Agamben establishes the idea of “exception” by sifting through ancient Roman legal codes and characterizing the legal provisions for two figures of “exception” in a state: the sovereign and the “homo sacer.” The sovereign is within law and above law at the same time. The “homo sacer” is someone who has committed a certain kind of crime, and as a consequence is striped of all protections from the city. Anyone could kill him without being punished. He is outside the law but within the law at the same time: outside it in the sense that he is not protected by it; within it because the law permits killing of him by anyone. Therefore, this “bare life” – another name Agamben calls the Homo Sacer--is stripped of all political protection yet remains political. Agamben uses the figures of the Sovereign and “Homo Sacer” to lay down his idea of the logic of “exception” in politics, and argues that “the originary political element” in the West is “the production of bare life.”
Ok, it is an interesting intellectual acrobatics to place the “homo sacer” and the Sovereign in a joint-reading, using one as a mirror to the other. This reading is illuminating as it shows some similarity in political logic for the two opposite ends of the society. Agamben further extends the reading of “homo sacer” to reflect on other “borderline” people in a given society. The underlying premise is: some of the society’s most essential political logic could be found in how “borderline” people are created and maintained. This is, I believe, a fair premise, though it is nothing new. Agamben was simply doing genealogy work like Foucault, only that Agamben’s genealogy of the “outlaw” went back to the ancient Roman times, with a much longer time horizon than Foucault’s.
Indeed Agamben was speaking to Foucault quite directly. Having extended the time horizon to ancient Roman times, he argued that what Foucault thought to be “modern” phenomenon actually had existed since the “origin” of Western politics. Agamben also wanted to revise Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics”. While Foucault used the Panopticon as a paradigm to talk about modern politics’ intrusion and surveillance of private lives (i.e. politics’ regulation of the biological life), Agamben went further to use the concentration camp to revise on Foucault. For Agamben, it’s not a matter of political power penetrating biological life; instead, the political power would create a space (the camp) for “bare life”—where biological life and political life are indistinguishable, and where people are included in the polity by their exclusion from it.
My problem with Agamben’s arguments is his extensive postulations from very limited genealogy work. While it is interesting for me to learn about ancient Roman law, I absolutely disagree that just in the figure of “Homo Sacer”, one can find the “originary political element in the western world,” and then from this “originary” element, one can postulate the appearance of the concentration camp. This is an extremely mechanical and deterministic way to look at history. I have always found this kind of master-narrative built on singular paradigms (whether Foucault’s panopticon, or Agamben’s concentration camps) very unhelpful: these images are almost like political slogans--visual and visceral, they persuade not by evidence but by the power of image.
I would propose to read Agamben’s book as historical fiction, rather than proper history or philosophy. There is certainly a place for historical fiction. We learn a lot from historical times, just as we learn from fossils: we learn how things had been different and could be different. However, taking a fossil from history and believe that it contains the secret to our contemporary world—this is sheer mysticism and irresponsible scholarship.
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