Law Critique (2009) 20:147161 DOI 10.

1007/s10978-009-9045-2

Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics
Jessica Whyte

Published online: 28 March 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agambens account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agambens account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typied classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agambens rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendts belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics. Keywords Agamben Aristotle Human rights Life Metaphysics Modernity Politics Ranciere Sovereignty There is no return from the camps to classical politics (Giorgio Agamben).

J. Whyte (&) Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia e-mail: Jswhy1@student.monash.edu.au

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In the nal section of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben paints brief portraits of a number of lives, which, on the surface, appear to have little in common: at one extreme, the series includes the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, a person who had the power to decide whether millions lived or died; at the other extreme, it includes the Muselmannthat gure of the concentration camps who had so lost the will to live that he no longer belongs to the world of men in any way (Agamben 1998, p. 186). Alongside these starkly counter-posed lives from Second World War Europe, he discusses those of Wilson, a biochemist who, upon being diagnosed with leukemia, decided to turn his own body into an experimental laboratory, and of Karen Quinlan, whose life was sustained for years purely by articial technologies and by virtue of a legal decision that ensured the machines would not be switched off. The choice of this brief series of lives may seem extreme, if not arbitrary, Agamben (1998, p. 187) writes. And yet each of them, he argues, exemplies a collapse of the classical distinction between life and politicsa collapse whose extreme manifestation was in the Nazi state, where biology was immediately political and the question of raceor equality of stock, as it was euphemistically referred tobecame the key political project. In Agambens view, however, the politicization of life extends far beyond the bounds of National Socialist Germany. The transformation of biological life into a political task, he argues, is the denitive event of modernity; the concentration camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet (Agamben 1998, p. 176). Given this claim, it is unsurprising that Agambens thought is often dismissed as overly pessimistic, especially as, in his view, the emancipatory resources of modern politics are, at best, impotent in challenging the growing indistinction of life and politics that he analyses. And yet, in a 2004 interview, Agamben responded to the charge of pessimism by quoting Karl Marx, who wrote in 1843, the desperate situation of the society in which I live lls me with hope. I share this vision, Agamben told his interviewers, hope is given to the hopeless. I dont see myself as pessimistic (Vacarme 2004, p. 123). In this paper, I will examine Agambens workin light of this phrase he borrows from Marxin order to elucidate the grounds for, and perhaps the limitations of, his hope. In doing so, I will argue that Agambens hope is intimately connected to his diagnosis of the desperate situation of contemporary biopolitics. To show this, I will focus on his understanding of human rights declarations, which he sees as simultaneously furthering the capture of life in the realm of sovereign power, and helping to overcome the separation of life and politics, thus creating the possibility for a new, non-juridical politics. Agamben is only one of a number of thinkers to have engaged critically with the human rights project in the past decade (Balibar 2007; Brown 2004; Douzinas 2000; Ranciere 2004; Zizek 2004). In an essay entitled Who is the Subject of Human Rights?, Jacques Ranciere suggests contemporary critiques of human rights occur in the context of the failure of liberal capitalism to produce the irrepressible movement towards a post-historical world that had been proclaimed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). The reality, Ranciere suggests, did not live up to the humanitarian rhetoric; In the following years, he writes, the new landscape of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism, became the stage of new outbursts of ethnic conicts and slaughters, religious

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fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic movements (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). In this context, human rights increasingly appeared as the rights of those who lived out their days in the dust of refugee camps, or of those who were forced to ee and found they had nowhere to go. Human rights, Ranciere suggests, began to appear as the rights of those who were unable to exercise rights of their own and thus needed someone else to exercise them on their behalf. In the subsequent legitimation of the discourse of humanitarian intervention, he sees the creation of nothing less than a right of invasion (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). This situation, Ranciere suggests, lead to a new suspicionthe suspicion that perhaps human rights were a mere abstraction, and the only meaningful rights were the rights attached to a national community (Ranciere 2004, p. 297). In Agambens work, this suspicion about the relation of human rights to the nation-state takes the form of a critical account of the ambiguous man/citizen link that underlies modern rights declarations. Rights, he argues, are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen (Agamben 1998, p. 297). While the nation-state is therefore founded on the ctional subsumption of man into the citizen, today we are witnessing the culmination of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. The contemporary bearer of human rights par excellence is the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who is now becoming more difcult to nd alive(Agamben 1998, p. 133). Human rights are the rights of those with no rights; of those Agamben refers to as bare life (Agamben 1998, p. 133). This initial similarity between Agambens work and Rancieres is not incidental. Indeed a number of common concerns typify the work of these thinkers, both of whom are attempting to theorize the condition of politics today, while critically drawing on the resources of classical political thought. This initial commonality, however, should not serve to obscure the major differences between them, which, I believe, can best be approached through a consideration of their respective accounts of human rights. In what follows, I will suggest that both Agamben and Ranciere are responding, in different ways to Hannah Arendts critique of human rights, which relies on her reassertion of the Aristotelian distinction between zoe, or natural life, and bios, a qualied form of life. In order to grasp fully Agambens critique of human rights, and to understand his lack of pessimism, it will therefore be helpful to situate his work in the context of this Aristotelian legacy. While space constraints prevent a full engagement with Rancieres theorization of the political here, Agambens work can be brought into relief through comparing his response to this Aristotelian legacy to Rancieres on two points: rstly, their respective accounts of the distinction between life and politics; and secondly, their differing accounts of the political subject. In attempting to understand the situation of human rights today, both Agamben and Ranciere turn to Arendts inuential essay from the Origins of Totalitarianism, The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man (Arendt 1976). Here, Arendt argues that the mass refugee ows following the First World War called into question the utility of human rights, by creating a section of humanity stripped of all political status; the conception of human rights based on the assumed existence of human being as such, she writes, broke down at the very moment that

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those who professed to believe in it were for the rst time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specic relationshipsexcept that they were still human (Arendt 1976, p. 299). From her examination of the situation of these refugees, Arendt, as Etienne Balibar points out, developed a radical critique of the supposed anthropological foundation of human rights (Balibar 2007, p. 728). If destruction of civil rights also destroys human rights, Balibar explains, this is because the latter are based on the former, and not the reverse (Balibar 2007, p. 732). Thus, what Arendt refers to as the right to have rights cannot be derived from any essential quality of the human, any inalienable inherence of rights in the human person, but is premised upon the existence of a community of political actors who grant each other such rights. Abstracted from such a political community, the supposedly inalienable, universal human rights, Arendt concluded, are simply the rights of those who have no rights. As both Balibar and Ranciere highlight, Arendts dismissal of the efcacy of human rights lead her to a paradoxical form of institutionalism (Balibar 2007; Ranciere 2004), which shares elements of Edmund Burkes conservative critique of natural rightsas expressed in his preference for his rights of an Englishman (Agamben 1998, p. 127). This preference for the rights of the citizen is premised on the rigid division of mans private life in the home (oikos) and his public life in the statea division, Arendt suggests, upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic (Arendt 1958, p. 28). That is, Arendts dismissal of human rights and her valorization of the rights that are granted through participation in the political sphere is premised on a narrow conception of the political, from which social questions, including poverty, labour and reproduction are excluded in the name of freedom. Thus, as Ranciere highlights, Arendts critique of rights rested on the assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very beginning by the pity of the revolutionaries for the poor people (Ranciere 2004, p. 298). Indeed, it was this distinction between the political as the realm of freedom and the social as that of necessity that lead Arendt, in her book on the French and American revolutions, to suggest that it was the entry of the poor, with their social demands, into the French revolution that prevented it from establishing a realm of freedom, and that ultimately precipitated the terror (Arendt 1990). In the politicization of questions of poverty, labour, and reproductionand in the valorization of natural life at the foundation of rights declarationsArendt saw a blurring of the distinction between political and natural life, the impingement of necessity on freedom, and, ultimately, the eclipse of politics. In a similar diagnostic vein, Agamben argues that the decisive fact of modernity is the breakdown of the distinction between mere life (zen) and the good life (eu zen) that had dened politics for the Greeks. From Aristotle onwards, Agamben argues, the political realm has been predicated on a caesura that divides the human into a political and a natural life, and isolates what he refers to as bare life (Agamben 1998). The caesura Agamben identies was predicated on a conception of the life lived in the polis as a particular form of life, from which the maintenance of natural life was decisively excluded. To understand this separation better, we should examine a passage from The Politics that takes on a decisive importance in Agambens work. Aristotle writes:

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The good life is indeed the chief end of the state both corporately and individually, but men form and continue to maintain this kind of association for the sake of life itself. Perhaps we may say that there is an element of value even in mere living, provided that life is not excessively beset by troubles. Certainly most men, in their desire to keep alive, are prepared to face a great deal of suffering, nding in life itself a certain comfort, and a feeling that it is good to be alive (Aristotle 1942, p. 114). Here, we see the clear distinction Aristotle developed between the pre-political fact of life itself, and the good life. While Aristotle suggests that men initially form states for the sake of mere life, this form of association is driven by biological necessity and, far from being specically human, is shared by citizens, barbarians, slaves, women and animals. Once men become self-sufcient, however, enabling a certain number to free themselves from material concerns and live freely in the polis, what started as a means to secure life itselfis now in a position to secure the good life (Aristotle 1942, p. 28). In contrast to that simple fact of life that men share with all living beings, the good life is the specic end of man as the living being with logos. In Aristotles Politics, political life is not simply different from the life lived in the home by degrees, but is different in kind.1 In stark contrast to the latter, the life lived in the polis was a particular form of life, from which the mere maintenance of biological life was decisively excluded. This exclusion of biological life was necessary, Aristotle believed, to create a realm of freedom. While the free pursuit of the good life in the polis presupposed material self-sufciency and the reproduction of the lives of citizens, this reproduction was not considered political. As Arendt points out, revealing the Aristotelian foundations of her own account of politics, the good life was good to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labour and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process (Arendt 1958, p. 37). One consequence of this was that those whose lives were taken up with working to provide for material necessities were not considered t to be citizens. In his Politics, Aristotle remarks that if a state existed merely to provide a living, it might be made up of slaves or animals, and that is impossible, because slaves and animals are not free agents and do not participate in well-being (Aristotle 1942, p. 119). Slaves and animals (and women), in Aristotles view, were not able to participate in the good life, but were simply instruments for providing some with the sufcient quality of life it presupposes. Where Agamben differs from both Aristotle and Arendt is that, for him, zoe, or natural life, is not a pre-existing natural substrate but the product of a separation. Further, zoe, in his account, was not simply excluded from the polis, but was captured and politicized through this constitutive exclusion, and thus, has the
1

Much of the rst book of Aristotles Politics, which deals with the differences between the political sphere and the household, can be seen as a critique of Plato. This is implied in Aristotles comment, It is an error to suppose that the relationships between statesman and state, between king and subjects, between householder and household, between master and slaves, are all the same (Aristotle 1942, p. 25). It is because Aristotle separated political life from life in the home more emphatically than did Plato that Agamben often refers to the caesura between life and politics as stemming from Aristotle.

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peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men (Agamben 1998, p. 7). Agamben uses the term ban, borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy, to signify the exposure through which life is at once excluded from the political community and captured in the realm of sovereign power. In his essay Abandoned Being, Nancy highlights the double meaning of the term banthe one who is banned is both abandoned, or banished, and held in a ban (Nancy 1993). The one who is banned is therefore not simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside become indistinguishable (Agamben 1998, p. 29). This ability to hold life in a ban by abandoning it is, for Agamben, the originary political relation. Agamben uses the term inclusive exclusion to dene this limit relation, in which people are included in the political community purely by virtue of their exclusionan exclusion which leaves them utterly exposed to sovereign violence. The sovereign ban is the limit form of relation, but at this limit it remains a relation between the sovereign and that bare life that it includes only by excluding. Because zoe, in this account, is not merely excluded from the polis, but is captured within it, Agamben can argue that life is originarily included in the realm of a politics that is therefore biopolitics from the beginning. The life that is caught in the sovereign ban is, in Agambens terminology, bare lifea life that is politicized through the fact of its exclusion. This bare life is neither simply natural life nor political life but is the threshold of articulation that enables the passage from one to the other. Bare life, Agamben argues, is the sole referent of sovereign power.

For the Sake of LifeBare Life in Modernity In stark contrast to this classical model, modern democracy, Agamben argues, presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe (Agamben 1998, p. 9). This means politics ceases to be a specic activitythe pursuit of the good lifeand comes to be conceived as existing for the sake of life itself, for the protection of natural life. The decisive fact of modernity, in Agambens account, is therefore the breakdown of the distinction between life (zen) and the good life (eu zen), and between bios and zoe. In The Human Condition, Arendt suggests that, the disappearance of the gulf the ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and rise into the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon (Arendt 1958, p. 33). In Agambens view, the disappearance of this gulf fundamentally transforms the status of all of those separations through which the ancients understood the specicity of political life. In modernity, Agamben writes, bare lifewhich had originally been situated in a relation of abandonment at the margins of the polisgradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction (Agamben 1998, p. 9). This transition, through which bare life appears as the modern political subject, is, in Agambens view, a product of those declarations of rights, which, he argues, enabled the transition from divine to national sovereignty. The nation-state, Agamben argues, is founded on a unity of birth-territory-order, and human rights

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declarationswhich locate sovereignty in the natural life of a peopleare the originary gure for the inscription of natural life in the politicaljuridical order of the nation-state (Agamben 2000, p. 20). This location of sovereignty in the nation, Agamben argues, is only enabled by a ction by which birth is automatically nation, and as such, becomes a political category. It is because rights declarations are predicated on the creation of bare life, that is, because they politicize the fact of birth, that Agamben sees them as double edgedboth bearers of liberties and vehicles for the increasing inscription of life in the realm of a state that now nds its rationale in precisely that which the ancients had excluded as unpolitical: natural life, mans biological vulnerability. While Aristotle had seen natural life as outside the concern of politics, in modernity, the split between life and politics begins to heal, but only at the cost of tying life to the sovereignty of the state, and transforming politics into a means for the protection of biological lifea shift whose extreme manifestation we see in todays legitimation of state militarism through human rights discourses.

An Ontological Trap? Ranciere on Agamben Up to this point, Agambens understanding of modernity sounds very much like Arendtsand indeed the equation of the two thinkers is central to Rancieres critique of Agamben. This critique has two key elements: rstly, Ranciere argues that Agambens account of human rights is predicated on the same separation of life and politics that underpinned Arendts suspicions about such rights; secondly, he argues that Agambens position leads to an ontological trap, in which every possibility for political contestation is foreclosed in advance (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). Following Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek frames this critique in the following terms: Agambens (and Foucaults) understanding of contemporary biopolitics as the culmination of Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of ontological trap in which concentration camp appears as ontological destiny (Zizek 2004, p. 15). I would like to consider each of these arguments in turn, and suggest that it is because Ranciere misreads Agambens approach to the separation of life and politics, that he is unable to grasp fully why Agamben sees the need to situate contemporary political problems on the terrain of ontology. According to Ranciere, Agamben, like Arendt, situates those who have only human rights in a sphere of exceptiona sphere that can no longer be understood as a space of political dissensus, and which therefore exemplies Agambens depoliticizing approach (Ranciere 2004, p. 298). What Ranciere terms dissensus (or at other points, dis-agreement) consists in an attempt to open rights declarations to a process of political contestation, to make the gap between their universal claims and particular application the space in which politics operates (Ranciere 1998). Ranciere has elsewhere referred to this strategy as verifying equality; Taking something which is usually dismissed as a groundless claim, he argues, it transforms it into its oppositeinto a grounds for a claim, into a sphere open for dispute (Ranciere 1994, p. 47). Rather than simply pointing to this gap in order to unveil the universal claims of human rights discourses, Ranciere sees formal

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equality as carrying a material weight that opens a space for substantive claims: if all are equal, then why not women too? If freedom from arbitrary imprisonment is an inalienable human right, why then should immigrants be detained? Following Ranciere, Zizek suggests that the properly cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality should be resisted (Zizek 2004, p. 22). Thus, in opposition to both Arendt, and to the Marxian characterization of a split between formal equality and substantive inequality, Ranciere challenges the view that human rights are simply the rights of those with no rights. Rather, he argues, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). By this, he means that those who are deprived of rightsthe immigrant, the woman, the workersimultaneously have these rights to the extent that they seize the rights that are inscribed as supposedly belonging to them, and use them as the basis for a political contestation (Ranciere 2004, p. 303). The subject of human rights that the title of Rancieres essay asks after is therefore not a pre-existing anthropological subject but the subject of a particular political dissensus. Relying on Aristotles description of the demos as those who had no part in anything (in Ranciere 1998, p. 9), Ranciere argues that the political subject in any situation is not a pre-existing collectivity or social group but a surplus name, a part of those who have no part that disrupts every attempt to order consensually the community (Ranciere 1998, p. 14). Political predicates, Ranciere argues, are always open predicates, in the sense that their use opens a dispute about what they entail, and whom they include. This means that political claims consist precisely in subjecting the border of the political, the border that pertains to separate politics from life, to dispute (Ranciere 2004, p. 303). Politics, Ranciere argues, is the conguration of its proper place, a place that is never demarcated in advance (Ranciere 2004, p. 303). This means that political subjects, on Rancieres account, do more than contrast the supposed universality of rights to the reality of their particular application; they put together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not. They put together a relation of inclusion and a relation of exclusion (Ranciere 2004, p. 304). It is on the question of the political subject that Ranciere critiques Agamben who, he argues, collapses the space of politics into a pure power relation between sovereignty and bare life. Ranciere traces this depoliticizing gesture to Agambens relation to Arendt, writing: Agambens view of the camp as the nomos of modernity may seem very far from Arendts view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ultimate consequence of Arendts archipolitical position, of her attempt to preserve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous actors (Ranciere 2004, p. 301). In Agambens state of exception, Ranciere argues, there is no space for contesting the borders of the political, and thus no politics at all. The will to preserve the realm of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish in the sheer relation of state power and

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individual life, he writes. Politics thus is equated with power, a power that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which only a God is likely to save us (Ranciere 2004, p. 301302). Here, Ranciere is clearly evoking Martin Heidegger, in order implicitly to challenge Agambens desire to rethink politics in ontological terms. Before examining Agambens critique of metaphysics, however, I would like to spell out what I see as Rancieres misreading of Agamben on the relation of life and politics, which, Ranciere argues, relies on the Arendtian opposition of two lives (Ranciere 2004, p. 298). Throughout his essay, Ranciere consistently equates Agambens understanding of rights with Arendts institutionalist argumentan argument, Ranciere writes, that Agamben basically endorses (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). As we have seen, there are clear similarities between Agambens understanding of human rights, and modernity, and Arendts view of the relation that binds the Rights of Man to the modern nation state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former (Agamben 2000, p. 19). And yet, while both thinkers share a diagnosis of modernity as typied by the blurring of life and politics and the increasing orientation of the state to the apolitical reproduction of life, Agambens response to this is directly counterposed to Arendts. In fact, Agambens belief that politics was originarily biopolitics means he could not be further from the Arendtian will to preserve the realm of pure politics of which Ranciere accuses him (Ranciere 2004, p. 302). The realm of pure politics, for Agamben, always presupposed the abandonment of bare life. Thus, in the modern collapse of the separation of life and politics that Arendt bemoans, he sees the condition of possibility of what he terms a completely new politics (Agamben 1998, p. 10). Agambens rejection of any project that aims to premise politics on its renewed separation from natural life could not be more explicit: I would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and political body, of zoe and bios, for any reason, he writes in Means Without Ends. It is here that I must nd my space once againhere or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me (Agamben 2000, p. 139). So what is this politics? According to Ranciere, Agambens polarity of sovereign power and bare life collapses all dissensus and, as it were, all politics: That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny, Ranciere argues Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap (Ranciere 2004, p. 301). Here it is worth noting that Agamben makes a similar point himself, in even more radical terms; In Homo Sacer he writes: Until a completely new politicsthat is a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare lifeis at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it (Agamben 1998, p. 10). Thus, Ranciere is partly correct: Agamben does indeed see our time as one in which (what Ranciere understands as) dissensus would be already captured in the relation between sovereign power and bare life.

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In The Time that Remains, Agamben briey considers Rancieres position that the people, or the political subject, is always the part of those with no part, the supernumerary part that is the bearer of a wrong, and thus disrupts every attempt to produce an orderly count of the political situation by opening this space to a dispute. Everything, Agamben suggests, depends on how we understand wrong and dispute. If democratic dispute is understood for what it truly is, that is, the possibility of stasis or of civil war, he writes, then the point is pertinent. If, however, following what Ranciere seems to think, the wrong for whom the people are a cipher is not absolute (as it still was in Marx) but, by denition, can be processed (Ranciere [1999, p. 39]) then the line between democracy and its consensual, or postdemocratic, counterfeit (which Ranciere goes so far as to overtly critique) tends to dissolve (Agamben 2005, p. 8). Here then, we have two claims, two accusations: on the one hand, Ranciere argues that Agambens dismissal of human rights is predicated on an elitist conception of pure politics which denies any possibility of political contestation, and leaves us trapped in an ontological destiny from which only a god can save us; on the other, Agamben suggests that Rancieres assertion of politics as the sphere of dispute over who and what is included in the political cannot be distinguished from the reign of a consensual ethics that both thinkers see as underlying the move towards a bloody militarism shrouded as humanitarian intervention. In the following section, I will turn to the terrain of ontology, in order to demonstrate why Agamben believes it is only here that we can break free of sovereign power, and avoid the complicity with the humanitarian state of which he implicitly accuses Ranciere.

Being Alive In De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle sets out to determine what it means to say that somethingwhether a plant, an animal or a humanis alive; For living beings, he writes, Being is life (in Agamben 1999a, p. 147). To this end, he establishes a series of divisions in the continuum of life, between what he terms nutritive, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive and intellectual life (Aristotle 1986, p. 210). While some of these are shared by only some living beings, and some only by the human, nutritive life, is present in others, and is primary, and is that most general power of the soul by which life is present in anything (Aristotle 1986, p. 54). In Aristotles isolation of nutritive life as the basic presupposition of all forms of life, Agamben sees the decisive moment in which, bare life as such was identied in the history of Western philosophy, a moment which he therefore identies as the metaphysical foundation of modern biopolitics (Agamben 1999b, p. 230). Aristotles isolation of the general presupposition of nutritive life, Agamben suggests, served to mark divisions in the humanbetween vegetative and relational life, animal and humanwhich were then expressed in the political realm in the form of those distinctions between zoe and bios, and mere life (zen) and that good life (eu zen) that

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play a central role in Aristotles determination of the telos of politics and the work of man. It is this process of division that underlies Aristotles conception of the human as a living being with logos. Agambens account of metaphysics therefore consists in problematizing precisely this notion of human life, or logos, as an additional capacity, which he sees as implying a caesura thatbefore being expressed in the separation of oikos and polisruns through the human. Reecting on Aristotles argument that the animal voice expresses only pleasure or pain, while human speech expresses the just and the unjust, Agamben locates this caesura in the human in the passage from the animal phone to human language. The living being has logos, he writes in Homo Sacer, by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, in it (Agamben 1998, p. 8). No longer the animal phone, which must be excluded to enable human language, but not yet language, what is captured in the passage to language is a removed voice, or as Agamben terms it, a Voiceby which he refers to the taking place of language that occurs in a no mans land between sound and signication (Agamben 1991, p. 33). This metaphysical denition of the human is therefore achieved through the same ban structure that we have already identied: like political life, the fully human lifelife according to logosis achieved only through the separation and abandonment of bare life. This metaphysical denition of the human is intimately entwined with the question of politics. In isolating bare life, Agamben suggests, Aristotle is aiming to discover what is proper to man qua man, and whether man qua man has a work. From the isolation of a specic work of manwhich Aristotle sees as a particular form of life: life according to logosAristotle derives the end of politics. Politics, thus enables man to actualize the rational capacity Aristotle had isolated as denitive of human life, and to live according to what is proper to him; the polis is the place in which the metaphysical determination of man as a living being with logos is actualized. The political, as the work of man as man, Agamben argues, is drawn out of the living being through the exclusionas unpoliticalof a part of its vital activity (Agamben 2007, p. 6). Both politics and metaphysics, Agamben argues, are founded on the exclusion of that life that men share with other living beings. Thus, in contrast to humanismor what he refers to as the anthropological machine, which sees man as a conjunction of these elementsAgamben suggests that we should rather concern ourselves with their separation: It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what waywithin manhas man been separated from non-man, he writes, than it is to take positions on the so-called great issues, on human rights and values (Agamben 2004, p. 16). If, despite this suggestion, Agamben is indeed interested in the issue of human rights, his own position is informed by the view that any analysis of rights declarations must concern itself with precisely this mystery of separationwhich, in his view, is the basic presupposition of sovereignty and of every division and every articulation between life and politics (Agamben 2004, p. 16). Political power as we know it, he writes, always founds itselfin the last instanceon the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life (Agamben 2000, p. 4). And yet, while the contemporary indistinction of life and politics does indeed seem a desperate

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situation, if Agamben is lled with hope, this is because in the unity of politics and life expressed in human rights declarationsin a life that has no need to take on other values in order to become politicalhe sees the possibility of what he calls a form-of-lifea life that cannot be separated from its form, and for which what is at stake in the ways of living is living itself (Agamben 2000, p. 3).

Remnant In explaining his lack of pessimism, Agamben argues that contemporary events are producing not only a new gure of domination but also a new gure of the subject, which arises out of the forms of desubjectivation most commonly associated with the collapse of the border of life and politics. Desubjectivation does not only have a dark side. It is not simply the destruction of all subjectivity. Agamben writes. There is also this other pole, more fecund and poetic, where the subject is only the subject of its own desubjectivation (Vacarme 2004, p. 124). This subject would be without substantive identity, and would therefore be unable to be represented by a state, claim juridical rights, or form the basis for an exclusive community (Agamben 2005, p. 52). Agambens rejection of identity and his articulation of a non-juridical politics is premised on the view that any politics that presupposes a substantive subject leads to bloody forms of exclusion and to that capture of natural life that, he argues, is the originary act of sovereign power. In contrast, a subject that was only the subject of its own desubjectivation would be a life that would utterly escape the hold of sovereignty. Rather than having a natural life lived in the home and a political life lived in the state, this life would be an inseparable unity of life and politicswhat Agamben terms a form-of-lifein which life was exhausted in its ways of living. If todays desperate situation lls him with hope, this is because just as Marx saw the ravages of capitalism as producing the circumstances which made communism possibleAgamben sees todays indistinction of life and politics as creating the possibility, for the rst time in history, of a new non-juridical politics, and of the inauguration of a form-of-life, or, as he puts it more simply elsewhere, a happy life (Agamben 2000, p. 3). In The Time that Remains, Agamben suggests his conception of the subject as the subject of its own desubjectivation permits more than one analogy with the Marxian proletariat (Agamben 2005, p. 31). In contrast to the working class as a sociological category, Agamben sees the proletariat as a non-substantive subject that must negate itself (as proletariat) in order to liberate itself and all of humanity. In a discussion of messianism and revolution, Agamben argues that the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat is not a new factical vocation but the nullication, or hollowing out, of every vocation. The proletariat thus lays bare the contingency of every factical vocationthe split between the private individual and her social positionwhile enabling the un-working of this separation. Thus, in Agambens view, the fact that the proletariat ends up over time being identied with a determinate social classthe working class that claims prerogatives and rights for itselfis the worst misunderstanding of Marxian thought (Agamben 2005, p. 31). Like Agamben, Ranciere challenges every conception of politics

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predicated on the social being of a pre-constituted social group. What Agamben refers to as the remnant, however, is not simply the part with no part that opens the community to dispute, but that which can never coincide with itself, and which reveals the arbitrary nature of every social position (Agamben 2005, p. 57). The remnant is therefore not the object of liberation but its instrument. The remnant can never be liberated as such but, through its own auto-suppression, makes liberation possible. It can never be included in the political as it attests to the reliance of every relation of inclusion and exclusion, and every separation between life and politics, on the workings of the sovereign ban. Thus the remnant testies to the wrong at the heart of every order of inclusion and, as the bearer of this absolute wrong, it cannot claim particular rights for itself. The remnant, as Marx said of the proletariat, has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it (in Agamben 2005, p. 31). The remnant, Agamben argues, is the only real political subjecta non-substantial subject that is always the subject of its own desubjectivation (Agamben 2005, p. 57). Agamben therefore offers an account in which the separation of life and politics that has characterized Western politics since Aristotle is predicated on the absolute wrong of the sovereign ban. This means that any politics that is unable to overcome this separation will be unable to overcome the bloody mystication of a new planetary order (Agamben 1998, p. 12). If every relation of inclusion always implies an inclusive exclusion, or abandonment, then the only politics capable of overcoming this separation would be one that contested not merely specic exclusions, but the very constitution of the political sphere through the inclusive-exclusion of bare life. Such a challenge, in Agambens view, must also overcome the metaphysical determination of the human, which is the ontological basis of both the separation of life and politics and the abandonment of bare life. If Agamben is not pessimistic, this is because in the collapse of the border of politics and life, which so distressed Arendt, he sees the condition of possibility of this new politics, in which it would no longer be possible to isolate a bare life. Where Rancieres critique is pertinent, however, is in his argument that Agambens critique depopulates the political stage of its actors. While Marxs hope, in the face of the desperate situation of early capitalism, was, at least in part, generated by his belief that capitalism creates its own gravediggers, in Agambens work these gravediggers are missing; in the place of political actors, struggling collectively against the system of which they are a product, Agambens work is populated by gures whose lives border on death and whose extreme manifestations are the Muselmann of the Nazi camps, and the neomort who survives merely by virtue of articial respiratory technologies. In the absence of any discussion of other political possibilities, and in the subsumption of the logic of politics to the logic of the sovereign ban, Agamben offers little on what would make the difference between a form-of-life and life in the camp, between a collective form of desubjectivation reminiscent of the original vocation assigned to the Marxian proletariat and an individual form of hopeless desubjectivation imposed by sovereign power. To say this is not to ask Agamben to provide a programme towards an ideal end statea demand that would be contrary to his entire project, which aims to think a politics of

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pure means, in which political action could not be instrumentalized in the name of a state that would be actualized in the future. My point, rather, is that anyone interested in immanent social transformation must be interested in political struggles and concrete acts of resistance if they are not to fall into a teleological and deterministic understanding of such transformationas indeed was the fate of Marxism in its social democratic and Stalinist forms, both of which forgot that Marxs optimism about capitalism was an optimism about its capacity to create the forms of political agency that could abolish it. While political practice that takes the form of rights claims ultimately presupposes the state and the relation of sovereignty and bare life, there are, even in the midst of our desperate situation, forms of political practice and experiments in the possible that seek to trace paths out of this relation. If we are to avoid an optimism sustained through teleological certainty, which pervaded so much of the Marxist traditionif we are not, in Marxs words, to go on hoping merely out of stupidityit is towards such experiments that we should direct our attention (Marx 1843).

References
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Vacarme, 2004. I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am An Interview with Giorgio Agamben. Rethinking Marxism 16: 2. Zizek, Slavoj. 2004. Against human rights, libcom.org, http://libcom.org/library/against-humanrights-zizek.

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