Catastrophe and Redemption

Jessica Whyte

Description

Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption

Katechon, Antichrist, Messiah
Flowers and Chains
Chapter Outline

1. The Politics of Life

Agamben and Foucault: On Biopolitics, Ancient and Modern
Biopolitics and Sovereignty
Biopolitical Being
The Rights of Bare Life
Hoping Merely Out of Stupidity

2. Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception

The State of Exception
Carl Schmitt: The Paradox of Sovereignty
Presupposition and the Problem of Application
The State of “Nature”
Challenging the Normalization of the Exception?

3. If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz

The Remnant Shall Be Saved
The Danger
Where Danger Is, Grows the Saving Power Also

4. “I Would Prefer Not To”: Bartleby, Messianism, and the Potentiality of the Law

The Law Is a Dry Canal
Aristotle and the Origins of Sovereignty
Past Contingent
Bartleby as Messiah?

5. A New Use: On Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Politics

Paying Pilgrimage to the Commodity Fetish
The Eclipse of Use and the “Dialectical Salvation of the Commodity”
A New Use for the Self: The Global Petty Bourgeoisie and the Coming Community
We Are Saved When We No Longer Want to Be

Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438448541
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Catastrophe and Redemption
The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben
JESSICA WHYTE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whyte, Jessica (Jessica Stephanie)
Catastrophe and redemption : the political thought of Giorgio Agamben / Jessica Whyte.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A striking new reading of Agamben's political thought and its implications for political action in the present”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4853-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942—Political and social views. 2. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.
JC265.A34W49 2013
320.01—dc23
2012048336
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
This book has been years in the making, and I have accumulated debts too numerous to do justice to. I would like to thank all those brilliant readers who provided critical responses to elements of it: Mark Kelly, Alison Ross, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Sarah Tayton, Vicki Sentas, Justin Clemens, Eve Vincent, Costas Douzinas, Liz Humphries, Nick Heron, Yoni Molad, Eric Santner, Sean O'Beirne, Craig McGregor, John Cleary, Daniel McLoughlin, Rory Dufficy. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose helpful comments enabled me to refine the manuscript and sharpen my argument, to Andrew Kenyon and Cathleen Collins at SUNY Press, and to Rory Dufficy for his fine work on the index. Alison Ross deserves special thanks for reading numerous drafts, starting with the first one and ending with the final draft, and providing feedback that was always critical, generous, and incisive. This work has benefited immensely from conversations (and arguments) with the following friends and colleagues: Ellen Roberts, Andrew Benjamin, Thanos Zartaloudis, Bryan Cooke, Sarah Roberts, Alex Murray, Andrea Maksimovic, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Adam Bandt, Damien Lawson, Adam Nash, Amir Ahmadi, Alex Ling, Ben Golder, Ihab Shalbak, Paul Patton, Kim Mereine, Lauren Bliss, Richard Bailey, Tad Tietze, Tyson Wils, Ben Noys, Andy Schaap, Juliet Rogers, Adam Bartlett and Jon Symons. This book would literally not have been possible without the experiment in the creation of a general intellect that is the Melbourne Agamben reading group. I thank all its past and present members. Finally, I am especially grateful to Ihab, for bringing such joy to my life. This book is for my brothers, Joe and Nick Whyte, and is dedicated to the memory of Liz and Don Whyte.
A portion of the first chapter appeared as “Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics,” Law and Critique (2009, 20:2), 147–161. An earlier draft of the third chapter appeared as “ ‘I Would Prefer Not To’: Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby and the Potentiality of the Law,” Law and Critique (2009, 20:3), 309–324. An early draft of a portion of the final chapter appeared as “A New Use of the Self: Giorgio Agamben on the Coming Community,” Theory and Event , vol. 13:1 (2010), http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.whyte.html .
Introduction
On Catastrophe and Redemption
This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past and not remember tomorrow in the story.
—Mahmoud Darwish, This Is Forgetfulness
In March 2009, Giorgio Agamben gave an address inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. In the audience were a number of high-ranking Church officials, including the Bishop of Paris. Although his talk has been described as a homily , its content was far from edifying. “An evocation of final things, of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the Church,” he told the assembled listeners, “that it has been said, not without irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window.” 1 Charging the Church with having abandoned its messianic vocation, he argued that, with the renunciation of the promise of salvation, the Church had become simply another worldly power dedicated to the eternal government of this world. Despite his addressees, Agamben's remarks were not simply an indictment of the Catholic Church. Rather, they touched on the structural analogy he has elsewhere employed between the Church's abandonment of its messianic vocation and contemporary governments' abandonment of politics. Lacking a redemptive horizon, he argues, all politics is “imprisoned and immobile” 2 —reduced to a technocratic, yet nonetheless bloody, management of survival. 3 “The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim,” Agamben told his audience, “are in reality a secularized parody of the Church's incessant deferral of the Last Judgment.” 4 Contemporary politics, as he sees it, is this parody, in which all worldly powers are fundamentally illegitimate and we are faced with the “complete juridification and commodification of human relations.” 5 In a bitter reproach to the gathered Church Officials, he noted that in Christian theology there is one “legal institution,” an institution founded on judgment and punishment, that continues eternally without interruption or end: hell. “The model of contemporary politics—which pretends to be an infinite economy of the world,” he continues, “is thus truly infernal.” 6
In this depiction of the permanence of the liberal capitalist present as hellish, we see the immense gap that separates Agamben from the liberal consensus that shaped the period in which many of his major works were written. The unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and rapid collapse of the Soviet Bloc gave rise to a form of liberal utopianism that was most starkly expressed in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man . In that book, which now has the feel of a relic from a bygone (post)-historical era, Fukuyama argued that despite the horror of the twentieth century, “good news has come” in the form of the demise of totalitarianism and the ascendancy of liberal democracy as the only coherent political idea with global reach. 7 Writing in 1992, he argued that although it is possible to imagine numerous political regimes that are worse than liberal democracy, we now have trouble imagining a “future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist” or in envisaging a political regime that could be better than the one currently in existence. 8 If we can no longer conceptualize a future that would be a fundamental improvement over our current order, he suggested, the “possibility that History itself might be at an end” is worthy of serious consideration. 9
This liberal utopianism was a paradoxical one—more a sigh of resignation in the face of the failures of previous, more compelling, utopias than a promised land. 10 Although even Fukuyama was unable to stifle a note of anxiety about whether such a posthistorical condition could actually make us happy, the purchase of his thought relied on its ability to capture a zeitgeist marked by the foreclosure of such anxieties, and the promise of happiness they recalled, and the affirmation of the eternal and uninterrupted continuation of the liberal democratic present. In stark contrast, for Agamben, it is this transformation of the liberal-capitalist present into an infinite horizon that is truly infernal.
Before long, it became clear that liberal capitalism had not produced the irrepressible movement toward a world of peace and democracy that had been proclaimed in the wake of the fall of the wall. Agamben's thought was particularly suited to analyzing the transformations the demise of the Soviet Bloc wrought on those liberal democratic states that Fukuyama had portrayed as the victors of the ideological battle against totalitarianism. By the time Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life appeared, with its striking claim that today “it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,” 11 liberal democratic states were transforming from within, suspending basic rights and opening spaces, like Camp X-Ray, that eerily evoked the repressive regimes that had supposedly been permanently defeated. By 2002, when then-U.S. President George W. Bush, echoing Fukuyama, told a military academy gathering that “the twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human progress,” the proliferating wars and draconian emergency regimes then in place in many liberal states made it more difficult to view this as cause for optimism. 12 By 2005, when State of Exception was published in the midst of the “War on Terror”—which saw the declaration of a state of emergency, the suspension of a host of basic rights and the utilization of Guantánamo Bay as an interrogation camp in which so-called enemy combatants were placed outside the reach of the U.S. court system—Agamben's analysis of our time seemed disturbingly prescient.
More than a decade later, it is clear that while the early reception of his explicitly political works was bound up with the events that seemed to confirm his central theses, the descriptive value of his thought was double-edged: while it led to enormous interest in his work across a range of disciplines, it tended also to obscure the underlying philosophical claims about the nature of Western politics and metaphysics that provided the hor