Agamben and Animals and Anthropogenesis, Again

Well, yesterday was an Agamben day. Stuart Elden posted a visual image of the current entire 'order' of the Homo Sacer series. Then, a facebook friend posted this EGS video from 2011 of Agamben on "Animal, Man, and Language."

So, then I found this interview with Agamben from 2013 conducted by Leland de la Durantaye. (Sidenote, I found this interview while trying to find a transcript to the lecture above. Both because I don't really like watching long lectures on youtube, but also because I was having trouble hearing large parts of the lecture. During some of the Q&A, I had my volume up so loud, I was worried my neighbors would complain about my blaring my philosophy).

Now, anyone who has been following my work for a while knows that I something of a hate/love relationship when it comes to Agamben, especially in his relationship to other animals (there are plenty of blog posts on Agamben, but if you are really interested, I suggest reading my articles "Beyond Biopolitics" and "Species Trouble"). But this blog post is trying to update the debate with work from Agamben after the more commonly cited sources of Homo Sacer and The Open.

In the video above, Agamben makes a claim for the event of anthropogenesis (which he glosses in The Sacrament of Language as "the becoming human of man"(p. 68)). Anthropogenesis occurs, for Agamben, when "man" enters into language. In this case, man entering language matters for two different reasons: First, it means she does not have language naturally, but most be constantly acquiring language. This is opposed to the language (or communication) of nonhuman animals, which is already plentiful and natural (yes, this pretty much Bataille's claim about language, humans, and other animals in The Theory of Religion). So, Agamben claims in the interview: "Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They, too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." In this move, Agamben enters into a series of thinkers who construct a human exceptionalism that operates on the otherside of the coin of the usual justifications for human exceptionalism. Normally, human exceptionalism is argued for by contending that humans are distinctly more important and impressive than other animals. We are smarter, we build things, we have morals, etc. However, there also exists an understanding of human uniqueness that argues we are special because we are less than animals, usually because there exists a gap between nature and ourselves that animals do not have to deal with. We see this, as I already mentioned, in Bataille, but also in Lacan, Schelling, even Deleuze, along with several others. Such moves sometime take on obvious description of the religious. In such moves, it is humanity's fallen nature, as opposed to the animal's non-fallen nature, which results in the gap from nature. Agamben from the interview: "that animals were never expelled from Eden. [...] If Elsa and Kafka were right, then through animals we remain close to paradise. Given that we live in the same world, however, this means that not even we have been expelled from paradise, only that for some reason we imagine that we have been. This is why we are so hard for other animals to understand." If animals still exist in Eden, and exist fully in communication and nature, they are therefore pre-political and pre-ethical beings. This is why in the talk above, Agamben is interested in distinguishing anthropogenesis from one of cognition (humans are like other animals, and then we somehow achieve a certain level of intelligence, and then we become somehow the human that is not the animal), but rather existing as principally one of language. We are the beings that can speak, and it is our speaking that is the on-going event that makes us human (first there was the word...). Why is it important that it is an issue of language, and not cognition, for Agamben? As he explains earlier in Sacrament of Language, "With a tenacious prejudice perhaps connected to their profession, scientists have always considered anthropogenesis to be a problem of an exclusively cognitive order, as if the becoming human of man were solely a question of intelligence and brain size and not also one of ethos, as if intelligence and language did not also and above all pose problems of an ethical and political order, as if Homo sapiens was not also, and of course precisely for that reason, a Homo iustus" (p. 68). Furthermore, "something like a human language was in fact only able to be produced in the moment in which the living being, who found itself co-originarily exposed to the possibility of both truth and lie, committed itself to respond with its life for its words, to testify in the first person for them. [...] [T]he oath express the demand, decisive in every sense for the speaking animal, to put its nature at stake in language and to bind together in an ethical and political connection words, things, and actions. Only by this means was it possible for something like a history, distinct from nature and, nevertheless, inseparably intertwined with it, to be produced" (p. 69). This is the second reason that man entering language matters for Agamben, for her entering of language is also the way in which she is able to exist politically, ethically, and have history instead of mere nature. "[A]nthropogenesis, is not in fact an event that can be considered completed once and for all; it is always under way, because Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being" (p. 11). So, that which originally existed as a negative to other animals (language interrupts communication, we are confused and think we are fallen) becomes instead the very grounds upon which a certain power and potentiality exist (politics! ethics! history!). As an aside, this is why Derrida's critique of Deleuze, where Deleuze maintains that animals are not capable of stupidity and Derrida objects, is so important. Stupidity, like being confused if you are still in Eden, is a type of power. But I want to point this discussion in a different way.

Agamben's insistence on anthropogenesis is a bit of a strange one. In particular, in both Sacrament and in the above video, he wants to insist on his conception of anthropogenesis against any scientific understanding of the human. At one point during the Q&A, he goes out of his way to say he is not engaging in a scientific understanding, but rather a "thought experiment." And earlier, during his talk, he has an aside that it is clear that the scientists have an agenda (as if philosophers didn't?). I point this out, because this discourse of a human exceptionalism (found here in Agamben, but found much worse in other thinkers) is a type of creationist thinking. I have tried to argue this before, but let me try again. Evolution, as we know, is the name we give to the forces that help select for traits that allow one to reproduce, and reach the age of reproduction, in certain environments (I know that is a little b-flat of an explanation). Evolution doesn't really care who you are. As such, it tends to repeat adaptive traits across multiple species. To believe that humans are inherently unique and exceptional against requires a certain, shall we say, faith. That there exists a group of beings with a certain cluster of traits, and that this group has fuzzy boundaries, and that almost individual trait can be found in another type of being, that makes sense to me. But that there exists an indivisible line between animals and humans (so that the phrase human animal sounds odd), well, that requires a certain transcendental intervention into what it means to be a human. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise the the creationist advocacy organization, The Discovery Institute, has a Program in Human Exceptionalism, and whose Senior Fellow, Wesley Smith, spends most of his time attacking vegans and animals rights advocates. To think the human as an exception from other animals, is to think the human as an exception from evolution, in other words, to think as a creationist.

Now, Agamben always makes this weird. Because at the same time he thinks the human exception, he also thinks it opposite. Twice in the interview, Agamben affirms that he is an animal. He further argues: "If the anthropological process I sought therein to analyze is founded upon an articulated division between “human” and “animal,” then their reconciliation is a philosophical task, consisting in deactivating both notions. Giorgio Colli once gave a definition of contact that seems to me prescient in this regard. Two things are in contact only when they are united by a representational void. The point at which the human and the animal are in contact is interrupted by what I have called the anthropological process." This exists in tension with his moves about the never ending nature of anthropogenesis, doesn't it? And perhaps the tension between myself and Agamben is over how to deactive these notions of man and animal, I'm not sure.

Holy pre-ordering, Batman!

Well, three major books are finally coming out in English translation, all now available for pre-ordering off of Amazon.

The second volume of Derrida's lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign are set to come out. Excitement.

Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is up for pre-order. I get a lot of emails and search hits of people looking for news on the English translation, so here you go.

And lastly, Foucault's The Courage of Truth. I haven't been able to pick up a French version of this yet, so when I get the book will be my first time reading these lectures in any language.

In the case of Derrida and Foucault, these are the last lectures of their life.

Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler

Recently, I and Joshua Miller got into a discussion over the importance of Judith Butler over at his blog (bonus, see what books and essays actually changed his mind about something. Which is a great meme that I would like to see reproduced). One of the points he made was that he felt that much of what Judith Butler has been arguing about with precarity is secondary literature on Agamben. I don't think so, and I think this is a great opportunity to clarify the relationship of these two thinkers.

I think it is pretty clear that Agamben has long been an influence on Butler's work. However, I doubt you could call her work on precariousness as secondary literature. First of all, it has none of the form of that (no long textual exegesis, etc.). But the more substantial point is to distinguish Agamben's notion of bare life from Butler's notion of precarious life.

Much of Giorgio Agamben's work is centered around identifying and explicating a series of metaphysical machines that produce modernity. Thus, we have the state of exception in law, we have the anthropological machine in anthropology broadly construed, and we have the providential machine in theology. All of these machines operate in zones of indecision, and all of these machines are fundamentally empty, kenotic. What this means is that each iteration of the decisions of these machines are completely up for grabs each time. There is always a chance that what I do is interpreted as criminal even if it was interpreted as legal last time. The mundane example here is a speeding ticket, where one cop might decide that going 12 over is legal, and the next time the cop might decide it is illegal. The importance is that the machines produce their own justifications in these zones of indecision as if by fiat. Therefore, we all potentially can be seen as killable, we all exist within the nomos of the camp. This is what is meant by bare life-- life that is fundamentally confused between bios and zoe. [1]

Judith Butler's work on precarious life is very different from Agamben's work on bare life. First of all, there are not these monolithic metaphysical machines populating the work of Butler. Partially this is because Butler is far more interested in the nuances of how certain lives are considered livable and mournable than Agamben is. For Agamben, we all live in the nomos of the camp, and therefore you see Agamben taking up the idea of the archeologist from Foucault, and not the genealogist. To take up the mundane example from before of speeding, you would not see in Agamben any detailed discussions of the types of car your drive, or your race, or the part of town you are in as mattering for how the cop determines to pull you over or not. His metaphysical machines never seem weighted down by history, and their decisions never seem overdetermined by identity. For Butler, the frames by which we determine what gets to count as human, what gets to count as livable life, are all explored with a remarkable specificity. Gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc. all seem to play key roles in figuring out the protocols by which we determine which lives we mourn, and which lives we don't mourn.
The more important distinction, however, is that Butler does not seem to believe in bare life. As she has argued, the tasks you do to reproduce your biological existence (eating and finding food, creating shelter, etc) are all politically and culturally relevant. These are never the tasks of zoe, or of mere existence. This is why Butler talks of the bios of the non-human animal, an insight that I doubt you would ever see from Agamben. Thus, for Butler precariousness is not a condition to be overcome or critiqued, in the way that bare life would be for Agamben, rather precariousness becomes a place to think and organize from. Agamben is never a thinker of vulnerability as enabling, as productive. So, precariousness is not an ahistorical and legal condition, and it is actually something foundational to ontology, ethics, and sociality as such.



[1] I have so far treated Agamben's earlier work in Homo Sacer and State of Exception as being consistent with his later work in The Kingdom and the Glory. I have done so for some conceptual ease. However, these various works exist in some tension. Peter Gratton makes this argument frequently on his blog, and will be part of his chapter on Agamben in his The State of Sovereignty (SUNY Sometime).

Disciplinary power, still a problem

Deleuze got it wrong. In his "Postscript on Control Societies," Deleuze speaks about the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies:

But discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind. We're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement-- prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. (Negotiations, p. 178)

However, there has been no generalized breakdown of sites of confinement and spaces of enclosure. Quite the opposite, we have seen a generalized expansion of sites of confinement. If we take prisons as a privileged example of a site of confinement (and there is good reason to do so), we can see both an extensive and intensive expansion. Extensive in the most obvious way, we have far more people in prison now then we use to. To give a few numbers, in the late 1960s we had slightly over 200 hundred thousand people locked up. Now, we have around 2.5 million people locked up in jails and prisons (this does not include all sorts of other forms of being locked up, like INS detention centers or juvenile detention facilities). Not only do we have have so many people locked up, but we also see an extensive international expansion of prisons, with many countries joining in on trying to lock up more of their populations and some countries opening up their first prisons in recent times (I suggest Julia Sudbury's edited volume Global Lockdown for more on this last issue). But we have also seen an intensive expansion in prisons. We see this in the rise of supermax prisons (also called control units, administrative units, special housing units, etc). In these units inmates are actively lockdown 23 hours a day, allowed out of their cells for one hour period. During this time, they are never allowed to talk to anyone. Cameras are turned on 24 hours a day, as are lights. The walls and plumbing are sound proofed so that zero communications are allowed, and food is given through a slot in the door.

Now, I recognize that Deleuze in his essay is not indicating that prisons or disciplinary power are disappearing, but rather transforming. Moreover, there are many things in this classic essay that I found useful, for example the change of the logic of power from analog to digital. And in this sense, I understand that the opening line of this post is obviously provocative, but provocation is necessary on this point. Too often we see people proceed as if disciplinary power is no longer a present and driving concern, that rather we need to understand how CCTV in London has made it so that we are all prisoners now, or something of the sort. However, those of us that live in the free world, aka are not incarcerated, sometimes greatly misunderstand the importance of sites of confinement in perpetuating the present order (in the same way that some people believe that primitive accumulation is a sin of the past rather than an ongoing process of capitalism).

Along this chain of thought, we have Mike Konczal's excellent post "Is economic freedom another way of saying we need to build more prisons?". Konczal, taking the libertarian CATO Institutes ranking of countries based on their economic freedoms, finds that countries with high levels of economic freedoms correlate with high levels of imprisonments (this is true even if we control for certain outliers, like the US). Now, obviously correlation doesn't imply causation, but that also doesn't mean these are two unrelated data sets. Konczal goes through several interesting possible answers for this correlation, but from a foucauldian perspective there is another explanation, which is that neoliberalism needs and shares the logic of the prison population. This argument ties together Foucault's book Discipline and Punish to his lectures on The Birth of Bio-politics. Economic freedoms, rather than generalizing freedoms to the rest of society, are built upon a militarized and repressive policing apparatus. Perhaps it is time to give up Deleuze's term of a control society, and rather take up Foucault's term of a normalizing society. As he explains in "Society Must Be Defended":

In more general terms still, we can say that there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. The normalizing society is therefore not, a sort of generalized disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions have swarmed and finally taken over everything-- that, I think, is no more than a first and inadequate interpretation of a normalizing society. The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation. To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and the technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between the body and the population. (pp. 252-253)

So, it isn't that the technologies and formations of power haven't changed, but rather that whatever these new diagrams of power that exist, they are able to exist because of an extensive and intensive expansion of sites of confinement.

The normalizing society, especially as it is tied to contemporary models of neoliberalism, should be read against (or at least in tension) with Agamben. As Mignolo has noted, bare life is a legalistic category, whereas disposable life is an economic category. Therefore, in Agamben's work we find a series of fascination over various legal lacunas, the nazi lagers, human experimentation, the comatose patient and the issue of brain death, Guantanamo bay. And yet, the concept of disciplinary power is not mentioned in Agamben's work, and something like the site of the prison is not thought through in his work. Maybe it is because the prisoners in Gitmo exist in a legal limbo, whereas inmates in an American prison have a clear legal standing. However, something like the concept of disposable populations would find prisons to be a necessary problem to be thought and understood.

Consider this post a reminder that disciplinary power hasn't gone away, and that the problems and issues raised by that concept have only increased since Foucault's Disipline and Punish. We need to keep such issues at the forefront of our political thinking and work.

Mignolo on Bare Life

The PIC Conference went incredibly well, and hopefully I will talk about it in more detail in a future post.

However, I wanted to share an insight that I thought was certainly provocative, and probably correct. Walter Mignolo was the keynote, and during the the Q&A of his talk, he explained that there was a difference between the decolonial conception of disposable life (población chatarra) and the Agamben notion of bare life. Specifically, bare life is a legal concept, and comes particularly from the crisis of the nazi concentration camps, while disposable life is an economic concept that comes from the transatlantic slave trade. If you were an enslaved person in the middle passage, and you got sick, you were simply thrown over board.

I think that is an interesting, and even useful, distinction.

Deleuze and Agamben

I was recently rereading the chapter "geophilosophy" from Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (the epigraph of this blog comes from that chapter). What struck me so strongly this time is how so much of this chapter resonates with Agamben's later work Homo Sacer (do I even need to point out that What is Philosophy? was published a mere four years before Homo Sacer?).

Probably the most notably and theoretical commonality between these two texts is Deleuze and Guattari's notion of zones of indiscernibility [zones d'indiscernibilite] with Agameben's notion of zones of indifference ([zona d'indifferenza] which Heller-Roazen translates as zones of indetermination). For Deleuze and Guattari, the term doesn't just appear in that chapter, but throughout the book (with occasional variations on the term). Indeed, the first time the term is introduced in the book, Deleuze and Guattari write, "These zones, thresholds[.]". That by itself would be a striking relationship. However, also in the chapter of geophilosophy Deleuze and Guattari turn briefly to the question of the camp, and in so doing turn to the work of Primo Levi, wherein they specifically bring up the gray zone. Also, in that chapter, you can see a sustained critique of the notion of human rights. This strange relationship of a zone of indiscernibility/indifference, is just a jumping off point.

We probably all know of the two most sustained engagements with Deleuze's thought in the work of Agamben. In the essay "Absolute Immanence" Agamben deals directly with Deleuze's thought (and anyone interested in exploring more on the relationship of bare life and the animal in Agamben's work should also turn to this essay). The other place is on Agamben's truly stunning essay "Bartleby, or On Contingency" which was published originally along with the Italian translation of Deleuze's "Bartleby, or The Formula." This latter essay by Agamben deals with Deleuze's work only tangentially, which seems to be the most common way that Agamben seems to ever deal with Deleuze.

This tangential way can perhaps be seen in two of the essays contained within the recent translation What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. In "The Friend" Agamben writes in the opening paragraph:

It is certainly with a somewhat archaizing intent, then, that a contemporary philosopher-- when posing the extreme question "What is philosophy?"-- was able to write that this is a question to be discussed entre amis, between friends.

This philosopher was clearly Deleuze and Guattari (I never know what to about the turning of these plural thinkers into simply Deleuze, it always seems absurd to me). Perhaps even more oblique is the reference in "What is an Appuratus?". The title of that essay is, first of all, the same as a title of an essay by Deleuze on Foucault. Moreover, we see that strange sort of reference again in the second sentence of the essay, "As a philosopher for whom I have the greatest respect once said, terminology is the poetic moment of thought." This is also a clear reference to Deleuze, who made this claim in one way or another in several places. Including, again with Guattari in What is Philosophy?, "In each case there must be a strange necessity for these words and for their choice, like an element of style." And in this essay, which takes its name from Deleuze, and who is reference in the opening lines, is never mentioned.

Right now, I don't really have a point I am trying to make. Just some reflections.

My post on Calarco's Agamben chapter

My post over at The Inhumanities on Calarco's chapter about Agamben is up. Check it out.

Comments closed here, to encourage comments over there.

Miéville, Negri, Agamben: A brief note

As many people have pointed out, one of the ways by which we can understand the differences of Negri and Agamben is based upon their different understandings of potentiality. Negri is based upon his reading of Spinoza, and Agamben is based upon his reading of Aristotle. I don't have enough time to go into these readings, and the consquential distinctions in their philosophical projects. I just wanted to give a brief note on a way to conceptualize these distinctions in the first two bas-lag novels by China Mieville.

In Perdido Street Station, a significant plot device is dedicated to the development of a crisis engine, something that would us to tap into crisis energy. Crisis energy is perpetual motion. Crisis energy takes the decisive moment that something changes, and uses that feed into more and more power for that change. Crisis energy is a part of being, by the very nature of being you are already in crisis, just waiting to tap into it to do anything. This seems close to the understanding of potentia by Negri. Power that comes from living being that allows one to constantly change, morph, become something else entirely. We don't know what crisis can do.

In The Scar, a different type of power is sought after, the power of the possible. The power of the possible sword, or the possible letter. The explaination of the possible is given with the possible sword. Uther Doul carries with him a strang piece of technology, called a possible sword. When turned on, it doesn't just hit the target he actually hits, it hits all possible targets to a certain degree. The more possible, the more they are hit. The power of the sword isn't to become something else (a la crises) but to be or not to be whatever it possibly could be.

Now, maybe crisis energy and the possible sword are bad examples. However, the way Mieville describes the tension between the two is a great description of the tension between the two politics of Negri and Agamben.

From The Scar:

[H]is conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastnass, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.
[...]
In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Issac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what was and what was not were allowed to coexist, the very tension -- the crisis at the center of existence -- must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was? (p. 396).

Help on Bare Life

I am currently finishing up part two of Animal, All Too Animal (which will be a three part series), and the series is written partially as a way to explain Agamben's notion of bare life, which is frequently misunderstood. But also as a way of challenging those who find in Agamben's notion of bare life something emancipatory for animals. On this second front, I was curious if I could get some help. I am looking for citations of authors who have argued that bare life is something helpful to identify with for animals.

So far, on that score, I have Rosi Braidotti's Transpositions. Wadiwel's rather originary essay, "Cows and Sovereignty," and Andrew Benjamin's "Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals". What am I missing?

Animal, all too Animal: On Bare Life, part I

(Scu note: I know I have comments to answer here and over at The Inhumanities. I will try to get to them tomorrow. I am on semi-vacation for the weekend, and wrote this away from the computer. Also, I didn't finish it, so part II should be done before the long weekend is over, too).

I. Introduction.

Over at J Rodolfo’s blog Posthumanities and Peter Gratton’s blog Philosophy in a Time of Error, a small but interesting discussion has been going on concerning the canonical status of Agamben’s The Open within critical animal studies (Can CAS already have a canon? I guess if we can have debates over it, it can). You can check out the discussion here, here, and here. In it, Gratton claims:

But on Agamben, his whole approach to animality is still always defined in its relation the human. I’ll expand on this at some point, but identifying animality with bare life (nuda vita) does not sound pregnant with possibilities for post-humanistic discourse.

This is what I was trying to get to awhile back with this post on bare life not being animal life.
Now, I haven’t known exactly how to respond because I am slated to do the Agamben chapter on Calarco’s book over at The Inhumanities. I think I will treat this post as prelude (concerning Calarco’s interest in Agamben doesn’t particularly reside in the concept of bare life). I find myself disagreeing with Gratton that Agamben is not useful for those of us, scholars and activists, who find it necessary to produce thought capable of responding to the present catastrophe of the treatment of other animals. But I agree that Agamben remains trapped within his anthropocentrism. As usual, the only to move is through immanent critique, a reading that seeks to produce an Agamben beyond Agamben. In particular the strongest elements of Agamben’s anthropocentrism remain in his interconnected thoughts of language and bare life. Due to certain time constraints, we will have to bracket his discussion of language (though one hopes to come back). In what follows, though, I hope to sketch out the problems with bare life from the perspectives of critical animal studies.

II. Heidegger

The first way to gloss bare life is through Heidegger. Let’s turn to Being and Time, and the essential existential analytic about death.

Furthermore, it was evident in our characterization of the transition from Da-sein to no-longer-being-there as no-longer-being-in-the-world that the going-out-of-the-world of Da-sein in the sense of dying must be distinguished from a going-out-of-the-world of what is merely living [Nur-lebenden]. The ending of what is merely living we formulate terminologically as perishing. The distinction can become visible only by distinguishing the ending characteristic of Da-sein from the ending of a living thing. [1]

In this we see a constant trope, those who are merely living are not able to die (sterben), they are only able to perish (verenden). Death, authentic death, is preserved for the human. Nur and bloß are pet words and term of art in the work of Heidegger, as Garham Harman has shown. And while they occur throughout Heidegger's work, they appear again and again in Heidegger's frequent attempts to show how animals exist in ontological poverty in relationship to humans. [2] The disjunction between death and perishing, with its automantic relation to other animals, is not just a feature of early Heidegger, but also late Heidegger. We can move from Being and Time to Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lectures, “Einblick in das was ist.” (most of which remains, strangely, untranslated). For those of us that continue to see the question of the “fabrication of corpses” bound up with the question of the animal, these lectures are impossible to ignore.[3]
Heidegger wonders in these lectures if those who die in mass deaths, actually die. He knows they can unkommen, he knows they can werden umgelegt, and he knows they can werden liquidiert. But none of these terms, often considered synonymous with death, answers the question, “Sterben Sie?”[4] Indeed, for Heidegger the victims of mass death cannot die, just like the merely living. He makes this fairly explicit in the lectures. Claiming, “They become pieces of stock in the reserve of the fabrication of corpses. [5] In the earlier lecture, Das Ge-Stell, during a discussion of turning all beings into reserves of stock, Heidegger remarks that it would be odd to refer to a living being as piece of something, except of course we might talk of cattle as being pieces of stock.[6] This connection between the perishing of the merely living (cattle, for example) and the inability of dying of those victims of mass death means that Agamben’s reading of these lectures in Remnants of Auschwitz are fundamentally incorrect. Remember, in that text Agamben advances the argument that Heidegger’s lecture mirrors the point made by Primo Levi, that the victims of Auschwitz experience a death that one hesitates to call a death.[7] Rather, we find that Heidegger’s philosophy obscures mass death. [8]

III. Benjamin

The second gloss of bare life is to be found in Walter Benjamin’s “Fate and Character” and expanded to the realm of concept in “Critique of Violence.” This is even Leland de la Durayante’s argument in Giorgio Agamben for taking the side of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translation of nuda vita to mean bare life, rather than Cesare Casarino’s translation of naked life.[9] Nuda vita here is already a translation, a translation of Benjamin’s bloß leben. Let us now turn to Benjamin’s understanding of that concept in his “Critique of Violence.”
The term bloß leben appears relatively late in the essay, but emerges at the crucial moment by which Benjamin is trying to distinguish between mythic violence and divine violence. After Benjamin has distinguished between the bloody, lawmaking violence of mythic violence and the bloodless, lawdestroying violence of divine violence, we are introduced to our present term. It is necessary to quote at length:

For blood is the symbol of mere life. The dissolution of legal violence stems (as cannot be shown in detail here) from the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that “expiates” the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law. For with mere life, the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythic violence is bloodly power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it. [10]

Mere life is thoroughly connected to natural life, to the life of one who can bleed and be injured. It is bound up with the guilt one experiences by having a body. Divine violence may destroy the law, but is necessary by exceeding our animal, all too animal selves. Just a little farther down, Benjamin makes this clear. Benjamin argues against those who argue for the sanctity of life, if “existence is to mean nothing other than mere life.” [11] The argument only comes to have any meaning if

"existence" … means the irreducible, total condition that is ‘man.’ … Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him … there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of animals and plants? And even if these were sacred, they could not be so by virtue only of being alive, of being in life. [12]

In this Benjamin completely rejects the capacity for suffering and joy to ground an ethics and politics. The threat of such an movement based on shared vulnerability is highlighted by his immediate response, wondering what could possibly distinguish the human from animals. I may disagree about his thoughts on vulnerability, but I agree that it is not enough to base liberation on something that can be termed a mere or bare life.



[1] See Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh’s translation (translation modified, though), p. 224. Also, see the original, pp. 240-241.

[2] While the full scholarly reading of Heidegger's use of 'mere' in relationship to the lives, qualities, and capacities of other animals remains to be written, Stuart Elden has an excellent overview of the numerous places that Heidegger defines the human by showing the 'poverty' of the animal. See, Heidegger's Animals. Continental Philosophy Review. 2006;39:273-91. As Elden shows in great detail, this move by Heidegger far exceeds the usual citations in Introduction of Metaphysics and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

[3] Heidegger will use the term Fabrikation von Leichen twice in these lectures, pages 27 and 56. “Bremer und Freiburger Vortrage,” in GA vol. 79. It is also interesting to note in that animal slaughters in France are as likely to use the phrase “faire la bête” (doing the animal) as they are “Tuer la bête” (killing the animal). However, the word faire carries with it also meanings of producing, making, fabricating.

[4] ibid. p. 56.

[5]. Ibid. Sie werden Bestandstücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen.

[6] ibid. pp. 36-37.

[7] Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 74-76.

[8] My argument in many ways mirrors Todd Samuel Presner’s argument that Heidegger is unable to think the Holocaust. See his Mobile Modernity, pp. 205-232. While I am in strong agreement with Presner’s argument, my advancement is that we are unable to understand Heidegger’s disjunction between death and perishing unless we understand Heidegger’s disavowal of the animal. It is because the animal remains in a place of privitation for Heidegger that he cannot think the human victims who are killed ‘like animals.’

[9] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, pp. 202-205.

[10] Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Selected Writings: Volume I, p. 250.

[11] ibid. p. 251.

[12] ibid.

The Camp as the Nomos of the Earth.

I frequently want to write reviews of the books I have read on my blog, but almost never do. This post began as a much overdue review of Reviel Netz's book Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. This is simply the best book I've read in a long time (and like most of you, I read a lot of books in a short time). But as I read the book, and as I was trying to think how to review the book, I kept asking the same question: Why isn't this what Agamben wrote instead of Homo Sacer? Answering this question is fairly short, when I figured it out, but framing the question is slightly longer.

Netz's book (which I have to thank my brother for suggesting) is without a doubt a labor of love. He is a historian, trained in the classics, who writes about Archimedes. I don't think Archimedes was mentioned once in Barbed Wire. Barbed Wire's form is fairly simple, in a way. It is designed to give us a history (one might say a non-anthropocentric materialist genealogy, but Netz certainly would never say a phrase like that!) of barbed wire through its major historical usages: the American midwest, military applications during WWI, and the concentration camp. In this form, it resembles Olivier Razac's much shorter, Barbed Wire: A Political History. More overly, the book is concerned with a typology of control. Anything that moves is an actor in Netz's history, and anything that causes friction, changes motion, or stops motion is also an actor. This is, in short, what Netz refers to as ecology. This is what allows Netz to say that "Marxism was lacking not merely in the understanding of agriculture but in the understanding of ecology and therefore of history itself" (p. 180). Netz obviously means something strange both by the term ecology (usually not understand as history) and history (usually not understood as ecology). Netz work demands this thought of ecology and history together.
Netz's history of barbed wire is therefore firmly non-anthropocentric, being as concerned as about animals as about humans. And his understanding of interactions taking into account the possibility of interactions completely outside of the human sphere. It is also an amazing genealogy of the concentration camp (the camp being the not just the end of the book, but the fulfillment of the argument of the book). In exploring the camp Netz spends time looking at the materials used to make camps, the colonial history of the camp, the history of the prisoner of war camp and the 'enemy civilian' camp, the Gulag. The interactions of things like railroads, barbed wire fencing, machine guns, tractors and tanks, and more. Several diagrams of various Nazi death camps and gulags and early american midwest farms were supplied. And though Netz never mentions Agamben (and quite possibly might not have read Homo Sacer), in some ways his book is proving the argument that in modernity the camp is the nomos of the earth. Nomos here means something quite closer to what Schmitt means by the term then how it was ever deployed by Agamben: nomos as the concrete spatial organization of society. In Netz, we have a material understanding of how "[i]n the premodern world, control reached to points and to lines connecting them; there simply was not enough prevention of motion to go around to cover an entire plane and bring it all under control. In the modern world, this changed, and the typology was inverted: control reached everywhere, and only isolated points were left for motion, that is, not controlled from a center" (pp. 229-230, italics in original). In Agamben, we are given nothing like this. In reading Homo Sacer one would almost feel as if the Lager appeared out of nowhere (or if appeared out of anywhere, out of Roman jurisprudence and Greek etymologies). How, in Agamben, can the Lager both the most important and central reality of the present global catastrophe and at the same time have the reality of the Lager almost never talked about? This is what I meant by my question earlier, that started this post.
This post, in many ways inverts the popular criticism against Agamben's treatment of the camp. In you have read Durantaye's excellent book Giorgio Agamben (another book I have been meaning to write a review of) then you are well aware that the common criticism is that Agamben abstracts from the camp too much. He doesn't spend enough time following the specific lives of those in the camp. The camp is treated, in Agamben's terminology, as a paradigm (like the panopticon in a paradigm for Foucault). This leads Durantaye's claim that the English translation of Homo Sacer has the perfect cover, a diagram of Auschwitz. I would disagree, because a diagram of Auschwitz matters not at all for Agamben. It is not that a history of the Lager is never done, but rather that the history remains an intellectual history. It remains a history of law, theology, and philosophy. Agamben is concerned, not with a Schmittian notion of nomos as spatial organization, but with the camp as a paradigm of the legal and ontological present moment.

Bare life isn't animal life

I almost feel like I post on Agamben, and Agambenian themes, too much. Oh well.

Bare life is not animal life. I don't mean that Agamben feels this is true, I am unsure in my readings of him on this stance on this issue (my guess is that he will agree with that statement). Many commentators have assumed that bare life is the same thing as bare life. I can understand the confusion. Bios is opposed to zoe, and zoe is often understood as animal life. Furthermore, what does a human have left after all the things that makes that being a human have been stripped from them? One might thing the answer to that is simply its animality. Indeed, there seems to be a confusion here between the animal and the biological. That confusion needs to be resisted.

Let us take the paradigmatic example of bare life in Agamben, the musselman. By all descriptions, the musselman barely reacts when attacked, has little understanding of the world around him/herself, stumbles around like the living dead. Animals don't act that way. They react when attacked, they experience pleasures and joy, they have complex social interactions, in short, animals have a whole series of capacities that make them who they are outside of a mere, biological existence. Animal life is not bare life, unless it is made into bare life. Take the example of tail docking. Pigs in factory farms are lined up in rows, with no room to move side to side or turn around. The pigs become so stressed they start suckling and biting the tails of the pigs in front of them. Normally, the pigs would fight off the biting pig, but they have become so depressed in a factory farm they don't fight off the other pig. Infections are common, so the factory farm has started cutting off part of the tails of pigs, so the pain is so much it produces responses from the pig. This is just one of countless examples by which animal life is reduced to bare life. But, for us to understand that, we have to first realize that animal life is not the same thing as bare life.

Durantaye's Agamben and animal rights

Leland de la Durantaye's new book, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction finally arrived on my doorstep yesterday. My first feeling upon getting the book is, "Damn! This book is huge." In a purely physical sense, coming in at 389 pages before notes, coming in at 463 with notes, bibliography, and index.

After flipping through this book for a while, my second reaction is, "Damn! This book is huge." And this time I meant it in philosophical sense. This book is likely to be the book by which all other analysis of Agamben is likely to judged for some time coming.
Damn.

One of the things this book contains is an highly revised version of Durantaye's review of The Open, the original version can be seen here(.pdf). In the revised edition, Durantaye advances the following argument: "In this light [That being how The Open functions in the economy of Agamben's writing, very similar to my own arguments on the matter], to read Agamben in the context of debates about animal rights is, though illuminating for those debates, somewhat misleading as a frame through which to understand The Open. For Agamben, the point is not to locate a continuity or an interruption in the line of evolution, not to align himself with those advocates of continuity like Aristotle or those who see a fundamental break between man and animal like Descartes and Heidegger, and not to bring about a more just treatment of animals, but instead to glimpse a new and different paradigm for human life" (p. 333).

Now, I agree that Agamben still has strong levels of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism in his philosophy. It is also true that the concept of the anthropological machine has been 'illuminating' for anyone advancing a critique of humanism. However, this is where my agreement with Durantaye must diverge. His argument above seems to indicate that while Agamben can be illuminating for us, but that when we utilize Agamben's work in ways that are anti-human exceptionalist, we are being misleading. I think Durantaye is missing the point on this one. The 'illuminating' doesn't have to be a one way street on this one. Indeed, most of us would contend that the critiques of humanism advanced by the poststructuralist tradition is only able to reach its radical and liberatory potential if are able to remove the vestiges of anthropocentrism contained within that tradition. What we are not advancing is a new and improved humanism, and if you are not concerned about bringing about a more just treatment of animals, that is all you have. It may be misleading to say that Agamben cares about animals, but our utilizations of Agamben are not to imply that, it is rather meant to advance a reading of Agamben that manages to radicalize his own critique.

As a sort of footnote, I find Durantaye's use of the term "animal rights" in this case to be rather unnuanced. He specifically footnotes the work of Matthew Calarco as someone who has sought to read Agamben through this "animal rights" lens, but clearly anyone who has read Calarco is aware of the amount of time and attention spent distancing his work from the concept of rights.

A question on Agamben

Has Agamben ever explained his use of the hebrew aleph as an indicator for his thresholds? And if he hasn't, do we know anyone who has written about it?

My guess is that it is related to the role of the aleph as a glottal stop in Hebrew. But I have no real clue.

A new Agamben book

As many of you know, I keep an updated thread over at cross-x where I post about new interesting books coming out.
Recently I have been wanting two books by Agamben to come into english translation. The first is, of course, Il Regno E La Gloria (The Kingdom and the Glory), which is the newest installment of the homo sacer series. But the other book I've been wanting to come out is Agamben's version of Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif (What is an apparatus. To be honest, I don't know what the italian title of this book is). For a couple of reasons, (1) is that this a title of one of Deleuze's great essays on Foucault, and (2) that I believe the thought of the machine is central to all of Agamben's political concepts.

Well, it seems that Stanford University Press will be releasing an english translation of What is an Apparatus and other essays in April.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Apparatus-Other-Essays-Meridian/dp/0804762309/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227719598&sr=1-15

Happy days.

The Origin of the Camp in Agamben

Why is that Agamben, obsessed with history and genealogy, doesn't ever bother do the history of the camp. He cites the origin, either the colonialism of the British during the Boer War or colonialism of the Spanish in Cuba. But he does nothing to develop this history of the camp as rooted in colonialism.

Why?

Eurocentrism might be the right answer, I am trying to find a more complex answer, if one exists.

a very rough draft of a conference paper

This is a rough draft of a paper I am presenting in like a week. Any and all comments are encouraged. Remember this is very rough, full citations and all that is not in yet.


[I]t will eventually be necessary to reconsider the history of this law and to understand that although animals cannot be placed under concepts like citizen […], they are not for all that without a “right.”
- Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow…

I’d like to begin with a thought of digestion, for that is exactly what is at stake in this paper. I’d like to hear the word in its etymological valences, as that which is rooted in separating and arranging. At the same time that digestion is a method of separating and taking apart, it is also a process of assimilation, of how you take something in. Digestion is both separation and assimilation, and it is there that this paper you are about to take in takes place. I begin this way with every thought to the more physical digestion we will be taking place after this panel.
So digestion is a relationship, is a process that can only be conceived as a relationship of the most fundamental sort, what we take into ourselves, and also what we separate from ourselves. And these things are one and the same. So digestion isn’t just about assimilation, but also is about disavowal. I want us to look at this relation of disavowal to a particular place, to the disavowal that Derrida claimed to be the most fundamental disavowal of all. What I want to pay attention to is the disavowal of the animal inside of us, a phrase I want us to hear in its double meaning: Both the animal flesh that many of us digest, but also our very beings as animals.[1]
This relationship of disavowal to animals is, first of all, and most primary, organized by the ways in which we kill animals. I want to make this clear, the primary and fundamental way we relate to animals is the ways in which we kill them. In order to highlight this point, let me briefly cite some statistics that begin The Animal Studies Group’s Killing Animals. Over one billion animals are killed for leather worldwide every year. We kill animals for science and medicine, for recreation such as hunting and blood sports like dog fighting, for cosmetics, for fertilizer, for pet foods, and for jewelry and other forms of decoration. And none of that counts our indirect ways of killing animals by destroying their habitats, leaving out poisons, hitting them with cars, and killing them while harvesting crops. However, by far the most common way we directly kill animals is in the ways we consume them. ). For example, in the US, 45 millions turkeys are killed for thanksgiving, 6 billion broiler chickens are raised and killed every year, a hog sticker could cut as many as 1,100 throats an hour. I don’t know how to highlight for you that to kill animals is at least our most frequent if not also our most fundamental relationship. I also don’t know how to properly draw your attention to the horrors of particular kinds of relationships, of factory farms for example. Except maybe to let it go on without saying, knowing perfectly well that everyone here knows that factory farms are horrors and that our primary relationship to animals are death and disavowal.
Death and disavowal. This applies to the other animal inside of us as well, the animal that we are. Derrida, in discussions of the animal, referred to remarks made by Adorno about Kant, specifically that the animal in an idealist system plays the same role as the Jew in the fascist system.[2] Or as Adorno put it even more forcefully elsewhere, “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”[3] Now, I don’t want you take Adorno to mean that somehow our current treatment of animals is ethically analogous to Auschwitz, this isn’t simply PETA’s old ad campaign of a Holocaust on your plate. Rather Adorno is making a different, more subtle and more convincing argument, about what allows fascism and Auschwitz to exist in the first place. It is because we hate, or to use Adorno’s word “insult”, the animal in ourselves and others that we, we as a society, are able to control and to kill. It isn’t enough to turn certain others into animals in our discourses, but we have take these others; these racialized, colonized, others; and make the animal we see in them an object of experimentation, an object of administration, and an object of slaughter. In order to prove this claim, I wish I could spend more time with story and story of the ways that we have first had to see the animal in those others before we could colonize, enslave, and/or kill the other. Hopefully two quick examples might suffice (recognizing the perpetual insufficiency to any number of examples at proving a point).
The first is brief note left to us from a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, Zalman Gradowski, “Forget your wife and children, your friends and acquaintances, forget the world you came from. Imagine that what you are seeing are not people, but despicable animals, animals which must be eliminated, for if not – your eyes will grow dim.”[4] Also, consider George Carrington, who recorded his travels in Northern Queensland, remark in 1871 that the Aborigine “has come to be considered in the light of a troublesome wild animal, to be shot and hunted down, whenever seen in open country.”[5] Surely, this last comment calls us to remember that Aristotle understood war to be an extension of hunting. As Aristotle claims in his Politics, “The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just.”[6] For Aristotle we should hunt down wild beasts, and that logic extends to humans that refuse to be governed. Indeed, Carrington explains that this logic undergrids violence of British colonialism. It is here, in this double disavowal and death of the animal inside of us, that the lynchpin that holds the biopolitical and the thantopolitical together exists.
That last sentence begs a simple question: What do I mean by it? Indeed, biopolitics has come to be one of those words that seems to have lost specific meaning through a proliferation of often contradictory use, much like the words modernity and postmodernity. And yet, I, and it seems those on this panel, insist upon this word, and the thought of this word. So let us take a moment to hear this word, biopolitical.
Often accredited to Foucault, the word biopolitics was actually coined by the Swede, Rudolf Kjellén, in his 1916 book The State as Form of Life (Staten som Lifsform).[7] This is the same man that coined the term geopolitics. Kjellén's was one of the more prominent thinkers of a group of German language political theorists; including Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Haushofer, Karl Binding, Eberhard Dennert, and Edward Hahn. What ties these theorists together is first a belief in the organicist nature of the state (the state was a living entity for these thinkers) and the belief in lebensraum (living space). The term lebensraum, originally coined by biologist would get one of its most sustained treatments under Ratzel, who argued that the German people (the Volk) needed a living space. To acquire this living space the German state needed to be responsible for expansion, and also for cutting away the parasitic parts inside the state. Lebensraum is cited by Hitler directly in Mein Kampf, and forms the basis of much of National Socialism. Within this notion of Lebensraum we see the connection between Nazi's imperial ambition tied to its internal fascisms. Indeed, Lebensraum is a borderline concept, bringing inside and outside into a zone of indetermination. Kjellén radicalizes all of this, bringing geopolitics as being on the same level and totally co-terminus with ethnopolitics. One cannot have a geopolitical vision that is not simultaneously a vision of a particular people. Combined with the thoughts of the other thinkers mentioned earlier, the state, as a form of life, must protect itself. It must cut away the diseased parts, it must exterminate the parasites, it must do all these actions to guarantee its health as a state and the health of its people. This was biopolitics for Kjellén. And you can see this thought in Goebbels diary entry that stated: “We travel through the ghetto. We get out and observe everything in detail. It’s indescribable. These are not human beings any more, they are animals. Therefore, we have not a humanitarian task to perform, but a surgical one. One must cut here, in a radical way. Otherwise, one day, Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.”[8] So when I use the word biopolitics, I always want you to hear it in relation to these fundamental categories of fascism, racism, imperialism, and colonialism.
When Foucault introduced the term to a different set of readers in the 1970s, it was used to describe a period of a new category of power, of the binding together bio-power and anatamo-power. Biopolitics stitched together the disciplinary power over the individual body to a broader governmentality of the life and health of the population. If earlier versions of power rooted in sovereignty had the power to let live or make dead, than biopower’s supplement had the power to make live and let die. This concept of biopolitics would be picked up by many diverse thinkers, particularly several major Italian philosophers including Negri, Esposito, and Virno. And most influentially, at least in the Anglo-phone world, was the encounter of the concept of biopolitics with the work of Giorgio Agamben.
The term biopolitics emerges in Agamben’s work when it begins to take on a specifically political orientation with the Homo Sacer series and the works surrounding those books. The concept of biopolitics takes on a decidedly ontological character under Agamben, and is rooted in the political and legal thought of the Greeks and Romans through the present moment. Furthermore, biopolitics comes to be understood as nothing less than the relationship between two Aristotelian Greek terms, bios and zoe. Both are Greek words for life, preserved in such terms today as biology and zoo, zoe refers to unqualified life. The life held in common between the gods, humans, and animals. Bios, however, is qualified life, life that refers to only humans, specifically to the qualities of life that makes someone specifically human in the first place. There exists a zone of indistinction between bios and zoe, a fundamentally empty and kenomatic space, that allows us to constantly redraw the line between what counts as zoe and what counts as bios, between what counts as discardable life and what counts as life worth living. The metaphysical operator that constantly draws and redraws these lines is termed the anthropological machine. As Agamben put it, this machine “functions by excluding as not […] human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman in the human[.]”[9] It is here, in this play of bios and zoe, that I wish to bring up the question of human rights.
Agamben entitles one of the chapters of Homo Sacer “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” obviously mirroring the title of the Hannah Arendt chapter much of his commentary is devoted to, her title being “The Decline of the Nation-State and End of the Rights of Man.” Agamben is positing the strong relationship, indeed as he describes it a “secret solidarity”[10] , between the violence of the biopolitical on one hand, and the existence of the rights of man on the other. Agamben sees from the beginning, from the very title of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the entanglement of biopolitics and rights. The title itself seems to say a declaration of the rights of zoe and bios, and does the term Man subsume citizen, or the other way around? What is the relationship between man and citizen, and do we not find in this relationship those who are bearers of rights, and those who are not? Moreover, as soon as there was a declaration of rights, immediately there were commentaries and debates about who to include in the rights, and who to exclude: Were women bearers of rights? Children? Foreigners? This concept, of a bearer of rights known as a citizen becomes something completely different from the concept of a subject to sovereignty. If you were born in the lands of a sovereign, you were a subject. If you came into the lands of the sovereign you were a subject. All were subjects, and subjects equally. The concept of the citizen introduces entirely new questions, with entirely new logics: Who counts as a citizen? And if you don’t count as a citizen, what rights, if any, do we have to show you? We know introduce a logic of inclusive exclusion: What parts of the people are not really parts of the people? What parts of Man are not really men? These are the questions that are specific to the nation-state. Nation itself comes from nascere, meaning to be born. So from birth you are now immediately summoned into a biopolitical order, and these questions of the nation-state concern exactly the same sort of questions the Nazis were interested in. The Nazi slogan, Blut und Boden (blood and soil), is really just the apotheoses of the questions of the nation-state. We can see here in America that these questions are still very much a part of our culture in our recent presidential election. You cannot be President, that is to say the executive with the power to execute in both senses of the term, unless you are a naturally-born citizen. What does that mean? That means you have to be a citizen of either blood or soil. Therefore, the very concept of rights, including human rights, immediately, from birth, draws us into the logics of biopolitics. Those of us who wish to fight sovereign violence are implicated in this arcane pact if we insist upon the rhetoric and logic of rights to resist that violence. But what if there isn’t just a secret solidarity that Agamben proposes, but a secret genealogy of rights that stands to radically oppose the anthropological machine upon which the biopolitical is carried out? I speak here, of course, of animal rights.
There exists a wide-spread mistaken notion, even among otherwise brilliant scholars that I respect a lot, that animal rights represent merely an extension of human rights towards animals. For example, Rosi Braidotti’s opposition to animal rights is based almost entirely on here belief that rights are the domain of humanity, so demands for animal rights really are nothing more than a becoming-human.[11] This is, however, incorrect. Not only were their several French revolutionaries that also fought for animal rights, but also several prominent advocates for human rights, like Thomas Paine, who were advocates for animal rights and welfare.[12] However, it goes farther than that, and I’d like to turn towards Hannah Arendt’s “The Decline of the Nation-State and the Ends of the Rights of Man” in her Origins of Totalitarianism that we mentioned earlier. In her discussion of why a more generalized human rights were unable to supported before WWII, she makes this claim: "Even worse was that all societies formed for the protection of the Rights of Man, all attempts to arrive at a new bill of human rights were sponsored by marginal figures-- by a few international jurists without political experience or professional philanthropists supported by uncertain sentiments of professional idealists. The groups they formed, the declarations they issued, showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. No statesman, no political figure of any importance could possibly take them seriously[.]"[13] And that seems, on the whole, to be a true statement. Many of the groups that supported human rights, especially those that fought for the rights of children, were originally groups organized around fighting for animals. Here in the United States, for example, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Towards Animals. He also was the first person to prosecute a case of child abuse, and founded the societies for the prevention of cruelty towards children, the first such societies here in the US. And we could go on and on, seeing similar histories of the Royal SPCA, of Dutch animal rights groups, and more. A full scholarly history awaits to be written fully connecting the ways in which animal rights groups and human rights groups have cross-created each other. But from a philosophical and political stand-point, some conclusions can be drawn.
That animal rights groups would support human rights, particularly those humans like children who are most excluded from the political order, makes sense. Animal rights already represents a valorization of zoe, a refusal to insult the animal, even the animal inside of us. Animal rights doesn’t just stop there, but radically brings into question all the assumptions of duties, obligations, and citizenship that normally come with rights. Derrida has repeatedly recognized that the notion of animal rights would force us to rethink those categories of duties and obligations that since Kant has come with the notion of rights.[14] If we are to keep human rights, we must see them, if not as an extension, at least fundamentally rooted and co-evolved with animal rights. Human rights cannot become another category by which we get to define the human, and determine that those that violate human rights are now somehow outside of humanity. Rather, human rights must be seen as a continued affirmation of the zoe; as a refusal to continue to operate the anthropological machine. I cannot then affirm a certain set of declarations, however interesting, but rather the most minimal, and yet, most profound right. The same right that Hannah Arendt could bring herself to recognize, a right to have rights. It is only then, when all zoe has a right to have rights, that we can end this death and disavowal.

[1] I want to therefore distinguish myself from certain arguments for vegetarianism that takes as its foundation human exceptionalism.
[2] See specifically The Animal That Therefore I Am pp. 100-105. For other references to this passage from Adorno, also see “Fichus” in Paper Machine and “Violence Against Animals” in For What Tomorrow….
[3] As quoted in Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka. P. 53
[4] From Gradowski’s “Writings” in The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 175.
[5] Cited in Alison Palmer Colonial Genocide, p. 44
[6] Politics, book I, Ch. 8.
[7] Much of my understanding of the historical nature of the word biopolitics comes from Roberto Esposito’s Bios, see especially pp. 13-24
[8] Cited in Dan Stone’s “The Holocaust and ‘The Human’”, in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History,, p. 239
[9] Agamben, The Open, p. 37.
[10] Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 133.
[11] See Braidotti, Transposistions, particularly pp. 106-112.
[12]For at least some of this history, see Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution.
[13] Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 289, 1954 edition. Emphasis added.
[14] For one example, see the epigraph of this paper.

On Agamben's The Open and biopolitics

This wasn't a formal essay, but some notes for myself, so I didn't cite as I should have. There are a few quotations from Agamben not turned into real quotations, and I depended heavily on Matthew Calarco's essay "Jamming the Anthropological Machine" (thanks to Spurlock for being the first one to point this essay out to me). Anyway, here is the collection of thoughts.

I’ve given a lot of thought as to how to present The Open. I’ll begin with some background, then move to the middle of The Open, use the middle to bring in the first part of The Open, and then move on to the second part and the conclusion after that. (There really aren’t any “parts” per se, these are sort of random distinctions made by my readings).

The Background:
Let’s randomly, again, sort of divide up Agamben’s works as pre-homo sacer , homo sacer/Remnants of Aushwitz, and The Open and State of Exception. Again, this division only makes sense if you are trying to chart a particular thought in Agamben (like his notion of life), if you were trying to map other concepts of Agamben different groupings would make sense.
In the pre-homo sacer group (including Infancy and History, The Idea of Prose, Language and Death, and “Potentiality”) Agamben seemed very invested in both trying to de-struckt the metaphysics of humanism while at the same time entailing a stronger anthropological divide. Take for example the distinction between human in-fancy and animal codes, the relationship of language and death as creating a non-essentialist finitude that still essentially defines the human (specifically in contrast with animals), etc.
The homo sacer series marks a very different move for Agamben. What is of interest here for Agamben is the state’s ability to divide up bare life from political life, to cut the zoe out of bios. In general, to enter a field of inclusive exclusion that allows us to treat some humans as non-humans. To include some humans into a political operation (like the creation of the camps) while at the same time excluding from any claim to a political life, leaving them with nothing but bare life/zoe. This operation of inclusive exclusion at the level of life is what Agamben will term the biopolitical (of course this term, from Foucault, is used in a very different way than Foucault used the term). The other operation of inclusive exclusion in which the law is suspended in order to create the law, Agamben will term sovereign. Perhaps in this way we can view his books The Open (published in the Italian in 2002) and State of Exception (published in the Italian in 2003) as the extensions of the ideas of biopower and sovereign power, respectively, originally found in homo sacer. But this sort of leaves a question, is the model/method of sovereign power is the state of exception, what is the model/method of biopower?

(One last aside, I use The Open as a provisional answer to this work. Agamben has promised to add to the Homo Sacer series a book on biopolitics/ Forms of Life, which still has not been written).


The Middle, The Beginning, and the Conclusion.

Agamben introduces in the middle of The Open a concept of the anthropological machine. The anthropological machine refers to various scientific, ontological, and political considerations about creating a fundamental caesurae between the human and the animal. This machine has both a modern/post-darwinian manifestation, and also a pre-modern/pre-darwinian manifestation. The modern anthropological machine is concerned with demarcating exactly what is human by animalizing certain parts of human life in order to declare those parts of human life that cannot be animalized as the definition of the human. Leading up to this understanding of the modern anthropological machine Agamben goes through various sections on arguments between Bataille and Kojeve, paleontology, and Linnaeus’ efforts at taxonomy (a word that Agamben doesn’t really get into, but whose etymology is the nomos of the taxis [arrangement]. As they say, you can escape everything but death and taxis). The pre-modern form of the anthropological machine is the inverse of the modern form of the anthropological machine. The pre-modern form (from Aristotle on) in which forms of animal life are humanized. Thus we see discourses of the infant savage, the werewolf (a figure we saw more of in Homo Sacer), the barbarian/slave, women, etc. Regardless of we are talking about the modern or pre-modern form, the anthropological machine has similar political effects: It generates the ability to create a non-human human. A monstrosity that we are allowed to do anything to. Agamben suggests that:
“. . . it is enough to move our field of research ahead a few decades, and instead of this innocuous paleontological find we will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced within the man, or the néomort and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself.” (p. 37)
The second half of The Open has to do with a long reading of Heidegger’s understanding of the separation between the human and the animal. Most of this concentrates on Heidegger’s Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics. In short, Agamben traces Heidegger’s arguments about the animal as being poor in the world (and again, Agamben manages to both bring up the constant relations of the words Heidegger uses as being rooted in nehmen, but doesn’t then explore this connection to nomos. Weird miss again on the part of Agamben), and the human being world making. The human’s ability to be world-making has to do with the human’s ability to have access to the open. What is the open? In Agamben’s reading, we are all captivated by the world (both the animal and the human). However, humans have access to a profound boredom, which is the moment before captivation where we are able to know we are being captivated, this allows us (humans) the ability to therefore possible break from captivation, to apprehend the world as such. Profound boredom is, in Agamben’s reading, the Stimmung of Da-sein.
This reading still sets up a humanism, and therefore Agamben, as a conclusion, turns to another philosopher to think of a better relationship between the human and the animal. (I’ll give you exactly one guess to figure out who that other philosopher is).
In the conclusion Agamben becomes fascinated by two concepts of Benjamin: that of the “saved night” and “dialectic at a standstill.” The saved night refers to an understanding of the world, and all its inhabitants as fundamentally unsaveable, or irreparable in the language of Agamben. That is to say, that we therefore do not need a politics to change, shape, and control the world around us. This irreparability means that we can have a dialectic at a standstill. There are still distinctions between the human and the animal, but no longer a machine to create these differences and enforce them. That we can have a being outside of being, a suspension of suspension, a Shabbat of both animals and man, which will allow to simply leave animals alone.

This conclusion is vintage Agamben (including finding the limit of Heidegger's thought, and then parachuting Benjamin in at the end to set things right). Agamben describes the genealogy of a particular metaphysical machine (these machines are frequent in Agamben's Homo Sacer and beyond writings. A post should be given to finding and defining the machines in Agamben), it's function (all machines function is the same basic way, too, through a production of inclusive exclusions or exclusive inclusions), and then the solution is to render the working of the machine inoperative (though the word is strangely misspelled in both the English and Italian).