Agamben on Democracy

The more recent issue of Theory & Event begins with an “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy” by Giorgio Agamben. It is a nice illustration of why it is that I find his work so frustrating. It has a disarming conceptual clarity that eventually reveals itself to be at once politically useless and even counter-productive. The short note begins by asserting that there is an obvious distinction in use of the word ‘democracy,’ so that it refers “to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates power's form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise.” This in turn reflects a fundamental distinction between what Agamben eventually consents to call constituent power and constituted power. This he arrives at through first Aristotle’s politeiai (constitution) and politeuma (government), and then Rousseau’s general will or legislative power and government or executive power. The problem, of course, is the articulation of the two sides together, or, rather, keeping then just the right distance apart. This is the task of the kyrion, or the sovereign. Then we have the following paragraphs:

If today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been progressively emptied of any sense, it may be that Western democracies are paying the price for a philosophical legacy they have assumed without reservations. The misunderstanding that consists in conceiving of government as a simple executive power is one of the errors most fraught with consequences in the history of Western politics. It succeeded in ensuring that the political reflection of modernity got lost behind empty abstractions like the Law, the general will and popular sovereignty, while leaving without response the problem which is from every point of view decisive: that of government and its articulation with the sovereign…

The Western political system results from the knotting together of two heterogeneous elements, which legitimate one another and which give one another mutual consistency: a politico-juridical rationality and an economico-governmental rationality, a "form of constitution" and a "form of government." Why is the politeia caught in this ambiguity? What grants the sovereign (the kyrion) the power to ensure and to guarantee their legitimate union? Is it not a question of a fiction designed to conceal the fact that the centre of the machine is empty, that between the two elements and the two rationalities there is no possible articulation? And that it is from their disarticulation that it is a question of making that ungovernable emerge, which is at once the source and the vanishing point of every politics?

Brown v Agamben

V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this.

Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity.

One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.”

There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct. Finally, there is the added question of Agamben. I again agree, but would like to ask how far Brown’s critique can be extended. I have read Homo Sacer, and various political-theory mobilizations of Agamben, and find the whole thing, to say the least, confused, distasteful, and not a useful way to think about politics. There are issues of disciplinary division of labor here—Brown correctly points to the differing imperatives and skill-sets of literary scholars and historians approaching this material—and perhaps one answer is that Agamben is useful for what literary scholars do, and not for what historians do. This is never a very satisfying conclusion, and all the less so in a world of perfectly transparent (but still foreboding) disciplinary fortifications. I had thought that Agamben was increasingly becoming a reference-point among historians and theorists—perhaps I can interpret Brown’s intervention as a sign that I was mistaken? I suppose there is a deep divide here, between, we might say, those who think that we humans speak language, and those who think that it speaks us. Maybe this is too much a 1975-vintage way of seeing things, or at least of expressing them, but it does seem to me that the fundamental difference between Brown and Baucom, for instance, is there. They look at the same thing, and the one sees the struggle for communities, fragile and fleeting, but real; the other sees the de-realizing force of commodity fetishism and in a tone of high moralism allows a-historical discourse to disintegrate human being.

Homo Sacer

I looked at my (temporarily much reduced) bookshelf while I was finishing Ellen Wood’s book, and decided that the best thing to read next was Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I have resisted reading Agamben. In a question and answer period after a lecture early last year, a grad student asked the professor, who was in the English department, something about what he was reading and thinking with these days. He said something like, “I’m reading, really seriously, Agamben.” A room full of heads bobbed up and down reverentially. At that moment I decided not to read Agamben. But I keep running across him, and have now accumulated enough context that he has come to seem interesting.

The category of the political is certainly mentioned often enough in Homo Sacer, as, in connection with the idea of sovereignty, it can hardly fail to be. Agamben’s basically ontological point of view, however, means that I have very little to grasp onto when thinking about what he means by it. Certainly he is miles from Wood, who is happy to regard politics as a space of civic equality. Similarly, echoes of Rancière’s distinction between politics and police appear at certain moments, though it seems to me likely that Agamben would, in Rancière’s terms, find only police and no politics in the modern world.

Agamben presents himself as bringing together, so to speak, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (it seems to me that what is happening here is really adding the latter to the former, rather than combining). Although I am not now in a position to say firmly what politics is for Agamben, it is unsurprising, given this description of his project, that analyses of power and sovereignty would occlude or explode the political as a category.

I will not say very much about this book now. I read it quickly, though with pleasure. It does seem to me that Agamben consistently ignores the meaning of half of his central formulation. Homo sacer is one who can be killed, but not sacrificed. In the ancient context, it seems that the most important part of this formula is sacrificial—homo sacer is not buried with funeral rites. In the modern period, more important is that homo sacer may be killed, but not murdered. Are we to understand that the juridical order has simply replaced the religious one in an unproblematic way? Agamben objects to the Victorian doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred, which he says arose at just the moment when sacredness no longer made sense to Europeans (that is, when the decisively became secular—but can this claim really be accepted?), and that it consequently infected much thinking on the subject, especially Bataille. I confess that on first reading I do not quite understand how it is that this objection—which seems to me valid—hooks into the rest of the argument, and in particular what kind of sacredness is supposed to have replaced it? Is Agamben arguing that the State (and, therefore, everyone within it, inasmuch as they are understood to partake in bare life) has indeed, in the figure of the sovereign, claimed the title of sacred? This seems to me to be dismissing anthropological investigation into the idea of the sacred very quickly. Moreover, the biopolitical imperative, and its articulation into juridical orders, does not, it seems to me, ‘cover’ the sacred in the contemporary world.

These comments are inadequate. To finish, I will make again the objection that I usually make to this kind of Heideggerianism. Agamben does not seem to need very much evidence about “today” in order to construct an ontology for it different from some supposed and unitary past (under which, none the less, today’s ontology flowed “like a river” (121)). Although I can read and enjoy this kind of talk, it seems to me that in order to render it useful, not to say meaningful, it must be handled carefully.