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Biopolitics K

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Shell

The project of modern politics is one that normalizes the state of the exception, which allows the juridico-political system to be transformed into a killing machine. Gregory 06 [Derek: PhD, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2006), pp. 405-427. Wiley].Second, Agamben argues that in the contemporary¶ world the state of exception has become the¶ rule. Writing while Hitler's armies

advanced on¶ Paris, Benjamin had warned that 'the "state of¶ emergency" in which we live is not the exception¶ but the rule', and Agamben endorses and enlarges¶ this claim. 7 Although he notes that concentration¶ camps first emerged in colonial spaces of exception¶ in Cuba and South Africa, he passes over these (and¶ the colonial architecture of power that produced¶ them) to focus on Nazi concentration camps and, in¶ particular Auschwitz. He treats the concentration¶ camp as 'the materialization of the state of exception',¶ 'the pure, absolute and impassable biopolitical¶ space in which juridical rule and bare life enter¶ into 'a threshold of indistinction', through which¶ 'law constantly passes over into fact and fact into¶ law, and in which the two planes become indistinguishable'.¶ Unlike Foucault, who identified the¶ Third Reich as a paroxysmal space in which sovereign¶ power and biopolitics

coincided, however,¶ Agamben insists that none of this is a rupture from¶ the project of modernity On the contrary his narrative¶ is teleological, and he

identifies the camp as¶ 'the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity',¶ and suggests that its operations have been¶ unfurled to such a degree that today, through the¶ multiplication of the camp as a carceral archipelago,¶ the state of exception has 'reached its maximum¶ worldwide deployment'. By this means that sovereign¶ power has produced both an intensification¶ and a proliferation of bare life. If this seems exorbitant,¶ Agamben is perfectly undeterred'. The normative¶ aspect of law can thus be obliterated and¶ contradicted with impunity, he continues, through¶ a constellation of

sovereign power and state violence¶ that nevertheless still claims to be applying¶ the law'. In such a circumstance he concludes, the¶ camp has become 'the new biopolitical nomos of¶ the planet' and 'the juridico-political system [has¶ transformed it self into a killing machine'.

Biopolitics dooms us to indistinction that allows fascism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the horrors of the concentration camp to be made real. Although not apparent, the creation of homo sacer through biopolitics is running a hidden course like a secret river through the democratic systemAgamben 1998 [Giorgio: Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 120-123.1.2 Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental charac ter of totalitarian states as a ‘‘politicization of life” and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third

estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization [totale Politisierung] of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was “more intensively state-oriented than any absolute monarchy”; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but also “after-work” [Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life: and, In National Socialist Germany, a wholly integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then been private. (Der okkasionelle Dezionismus, p. 33)The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt’s footsteps, seems to maintain);

before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his [their] life runs its

course in a hidden but continuous fashion . It is almost as if starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. “ The

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‘right’ to life,” writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “to one’s body’, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can, this ‘right’—which] the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power” (La vo/valonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century’s totalitarian stares were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies . In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes’ unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing”) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that

of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow , we shall try to show that certain events that are fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an incom prehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics and its eliminationof “life that is unworthy of being lived,” or the contemporary debate on the normative determination of

death criteria), acquire their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopolitics) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the camp—as the pure, absolute, and im passable biopolitcal space (insofar as

it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.

Our alternative is to embrace Whatever Being - we should disengage from traditional politics and using sovereign power to grant rights, instead, we should embrace the indistinguishable character of being. Caldwell 2004 [Anne, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville.] Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity Theory and Event 7:2. 48-53 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html]Can we imagine another form of humanity, and another form of power? The bio-sovereignty described by Agamben is so fluid as to appear irresistible. Yet Agamben never suggests this order is necessary. Bio-sovereignty results from a particular and contingent history, and it requires certain conditions. Sovereign power, as

Agamben describes it, finds its grounds in specific coordinates of life, which it then places in a relation of indeterminacy. What defies sovereign power is a life that cannot be reduced to those determinations: a life “that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. “ (2.3). In his earlier

Coming Community, Agamben describes this alternative life as “whatever being.”More recently he has used the term “forms-of-life.” These

concepts come from the figure Benjamin proposed as a counter to homo sacer: the “total condition that is ‘man’.” For Benjamin and Agamben, mere life is the life which unites law and life. That tie permits law, in its endless cycle of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power. The total condition that is [hu]man refers to an alternative life incapable of serving as the ground of law. Such a life would exist outside sovereignty. Agamben’s own concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also shaped by several particular dense thinkers, including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever being, in its relation to sovereign power. “Whatever being,” as described by

Agamben,lacks the features permitting the sovereign capture and regulation of life in our tradition. Sovereignty’s capture of life has been conditional upon the separation of natural and political life. That separation has permitted the emergence

of a sovereign power grounded in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value, and non-value of life (1998: 142). Since then, every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for “a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only ‘sacred life,’ and can as such be eliminated without punishment” (p. 139 ). This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty, but provides sites for its expansion . In recent decades,

factors that once might have been indifferent to sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as

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national status, economic status, color, race, sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations . From a liberal or cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a limit upon sovereignty.

Agamben’s analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer. Agamben’s alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9).As a result, whatever being is “reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) – and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself.” (0.1-1.2).Indifferent to any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification. Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of life is less post-metaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because its status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger’s Dasein. Dasein, as Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern – regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an “indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold” (Agamben 1998: 153).We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. “In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging”

(Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.

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L - Democracy

Modern democracy is the essence of biopolitics and is no different than totalitarianism Agamben 98 [Giorgio: philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona Italy, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998, p. 121-121] The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as with, here following in Schmitt’s footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. “The ‘right’ to life,” writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “ to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppres sions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of power” (La voIont~ p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century’s totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-com munist ruling classes’ unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing”) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.

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L – Political Process / Deliberation

The political process and deliberation are riddled with biopolitics – it’s the entire foundation that’s hidden in the political system Agamben 98 [Giorgio: philosopher and professor of aesthetics at University of Verona Italy, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998, p. 121-121] The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridical order II ordinamento Il solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries. At the same time, however, this ancient meaning of the term sacer presents us with the enigma of a figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West. The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zo~in rhepo/is—which is, in itself, absolutely ancient—nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually 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. At once exclud ing bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. ‘When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it. Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which State power makes [hu]man as a living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political

power. These processes—which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other—nevertheless con verge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.

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L-- Separation of Powers

Improving separation of powers makes surveillance and control easierBigo 06 Professor at King's College London Department of War studies & MCU Research Professor at Sciences-Po Paris(Didier, Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, ed. Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, p. 135, at Google books)Liberalism has tried to legitimate its own domination through the idea of the separation of powers by which power is supposed to limit itself, particularly in the dimension of checks and balances, with the effect that the population actively consents finally to be accomplices of its own domination and rely on "justice" and lawyers for its "freedom." Framed in that way, Liberalism is the contrary of Exceptionalism. Liberalism is seen as the opposite of a "sovereign" or "reason of the state" thinking. But between the definition of Exceptionalism as suspension of law or break in normality, there is room for other visions of Exceptionalism that combine exception both with liberalism and with the dispositif of technologies of control and surveillance which is routinized . Exception works hand in hand with Liberalism and gives the key to understanding its normal functioning, as soon as we avoid seeing exception as a matter of special laws only.

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L – Courts

The Court’s ability to interpret the meaning of the constitution is the essence of the state of exception – it places the Courts outside the law and able to suspend it.Arias 11 [Gonzalo, Dept of Philosophy, “The Autoimmunitarian Effects of Preventative States of Exception,” http://stockholm.sgir.eu/ uploads/ Gonzalo%20Velasco_The%20autoimmunitarian%20effects%20or%20preventive%20states%20of%20exception.pdf]In the legal tradition of the United States, it is the Supreme Court that, in the last instance, passes judgment on civil rights, through its interpretation of the text of the Constitution. Therefore, in practice, it is impossible to distinguish between a law and its interpretation: the law is its interpretation. We cannot analyze it in detail, but when this juridical context is accompanied by a regime in which the discourse of fear, safety, and precaution prevails, the interpretation of the limits of those due process rights that the 14th Amendment leaves unspecified may jeopardize the formal guarantee of those rights. The problem with this system is that the objective reference, the text of the Constitution, is what has to be interpreted. The role of the precedent, another one of the sources of law in common law systems, plays a small role in this logic (Posner, 2006, 28). And this is so not because the constitution was drafted under the security and risk conditions of the 18 th century (mainly violations of territorial borders and internal rebellions), but because the terrorist attacks constitute an absolutely new threat that invalidates the categories that had prevailed until this moment. Guaranteeing basic due process rights to a criminal is one of the pillars of political liberalism. Nevertheless, according to this point of view, a terrorist attack does not conform to the ordinary stipulations for ordinary crimes or war crimes. The mere reasoning by analogy with the precedent cannot give meaning to a radically unprecedented situation. In this specific moment, faced with the ambiguity of

the constitutional provisions, the Supreme Court Justices will proceed pragmatically by comparing the effects of their rulings. The guarantee of individual freedoms and national security shall have to be weighed in the balance 4

He Continues…To sum up, it has been demonstrated that this exception can be neither commissarial or constitutional, but it cannot be constituent either since it does not establish a new order. Like that defined in Political Theology I, this sovereignty we have before us, which is neither subject to constituted power nor a vehicle for constituent power, does not establish or preserve, it merely

suspends (Schmitt 2005). It is therefore a sovereignty that is neither subject to the law nor outside the law. Nor is it merely a question of the abovementioned dysfunction of the system, according to which the law would require an action outside the law in order to protect itself. Rather, the law would be totally subordinated to

this sovereignty beyond the law. Therefore, there would be no normative limitation to preventive reaction: from the standpoint of sovereignty beyond the law, any state is a state of emergency, every contingency a necessity that requires decisions for which the law does not count. Thus, we have gone from the prudently preventive mechanisms for the accommodation of exception in the texts of constitutions to the absolute reign of precaution as a paradigm for government. In this point, due to the lack of time, I must refer to the excelent work of Claudia Aradau, Rens van Munster Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede concerning precaution and risk as dispositives, more precisely, as the type of discourse regimes that establishes the conditions for this permanent state of necessity and for the appearance of this type of sovereignty as a reaction (Amoore, de Goede 2008). Likewise, I cannot attempt to deploy the connection between American exceptionalism and its universalization as a paradigm for government in the field of international relations. To that goal I would also like to refer either to the research of Miguel de Larrinaga (De Larrinaga 2008: 528) in which this logic of exception is translated to the international field through the “human security” dispositive and, as a consequence, the justification of international interventions that suspend the international law 8

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L – Security / Emergency

The camp is a creation that is justified by national security to serve as the ultimate form of biopoliticsPerera 2002 {Suvendrini, Professor in the School of Communicatio at Law Trobe University] “What is a Camp…?” Borderlands E-Journal, Volume 1 Number 1. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html.]In a series of far-reaching essays throughout the 1990s Giorgio Agamben theorises the emergence of the camp in Western modernity, identifying it as both 'the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West' (1998:181) and 'an event which decisively signals the political space of modernity itself' (1997:113). In Agamben's thinking the concentration camp is constitutive of contemporary life in the west. Examining the juridical and political structure of the camp 'will lead us to regard the camp, not as an historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past ... but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living' (1997: 106). 9. In a key essay, 'The camp as nomos of the modern' , Agamben locates the origins of the twentieth-century European concentration camp in Spanish campos de concentraciones in Cuba and British camps for Afrikaner prisoners in the Boer War. In this genealogy the initial characteristics of the camp are colonial war, with an implicit racial/ethnic difference in the interned population, and the invocation of a 'state of exception' based on considerations of 'national security' rather than criminal behaviour on the part of those imprisoned. The camp claims its justification in this concern for 'national security', a concern that allowed the first German camps to be founded not by the Nazi regime, but by a Social-Democratic government declaring 'a state of siege or of exception and a corresponding suspension of the articles of the German constitution that guaranteed personal liberties' (1997: 107). “The birth of the camp in our time appears as an event which decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state (which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the

State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation) enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. If the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements of land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced ... in the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth which thus becomes nation) within two of them. Something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or rather the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine.” (Agamben 1997: 113-4)

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L – National Security

Democratic politics always resides in the state of emergency – the affirmative’s claims to “solve” eminent disasters only reifies sovereign control and reproduces a world civil warAgamben 2001 (Giorgio, prof of Aethetics. Sept. 20. “On Security and Terror” European Grad. School. Translated By Soeneke Zehle http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-on-security-and-terror.html]The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents, but that the search for security leads to a world civil war which makes all civil coexistence impossible. In the new situation created by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states it becomes clear that security finds its end in globalization: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is in truth the worst of all disorders. But there is another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measure of security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run they are irreconcilable with democracy. Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as basic principle of state politics. European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical general use of this figure of though. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves: but maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, not merely towards their control. On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction and not to limits itself to attempts to control them once they have already occurred.

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L - Rights

Legislating rights allows the state to politicize life – this emerging biopolitics is the foundation of giving and taking rights at any momentAgamben 1998 [Giorgio, Prof. of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 127-128.]Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints concerning the link between the rights of [hu]man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has therefore not been followed up. In the period after the Second World War, both the instrumental emphasis on the rights of [hu]man and the rapid growth of declarations and agreements on the part of international organizations have ultimately made any authentic understanding of the

historical significance of the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without much success) to respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider them according no their real historical function in the modern nation-stare. Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state . The same bare life that in

the ancien régime was politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (an least apparently) clearly distinguished as zoe from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the stare’s legit imacy and sovereignty. A simple examination of the text of the Declaration 1789 shows than it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights. “[hu]Men,” the first article declares, “are born and remain free and equal in rights” (from this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is no he found in La Fayette’s project elaborated in July 1789: “Every [hu]man is born with inalienable and

indefeasible rights”). At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are “preserved” (according to the second article: “The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of [hu]man”). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the nation (accord ing to the third article: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation”) precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the very heart of the political community’. The nation—the term derives etymologically from nascere (to he born)—thus closes the open circle of [hu]man’s birth.

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L – WOT / Terrorism

The “war on terrorism” allows the sovereign to produce enemies as shadow creatures who lack humanity. This diminishes human rights and creates modern colonialism.Gregory 06 [Derek: PhD, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2006), pp. 405-427. Wiley].Two conclusions follow from this rough outline¶ that bear directly on the production of 'Guantanamo'.¶ First, by implication, the space of normative¶ regulation was produced by European states asserting¶ their sovereignty over the world beyond¶ the line and co-producing through those assertions a vast colonial space of exception. But its 'topographies¶ of cruelty', as Achille Mbembe calls them,¶ cannot be reduced to and hence derived from a¶ space of absolute lawlessness. 25 Colonial wars¶ were raw, ruthless, feral; but the violence of colonialism¶ was not confined to warfare. The law was¶ intimately involved in the modalities of colonial¶ violence, and international law bears the marks of¶ those colonial predations;

its locus is drawn not¶ only through relations of sovereign states, therefore,¶ but also through what Peter Fitzpatrick calls¶ 'the colonial domination of people burdened by¶ racial difference'. 26 This is not a peculiarity of international law, which shares in a generalized

gallery¶ of imaginative geographies where the other is¶ marked as irredeemably other, and this cultural¶ carapace is extremely important. The juridical and¶ the cultural operate together, and the racializations¶ that they jointly license have been given a¶ particular force by President Bush's declaration of¶ the 'war on terror' as a war of 'Civilization'¶ against the barbarians at the gates (and within the¶ walls). This invocation of an indivisible global¶ civilization works to make the exception - understood¶ as a zone of indistinction between the law¶ and its suspension - invisible by conjuring a¶ shape-shifting, nomadic enemy who inhabits the¶ shadows beyond the human. This is a strategy that¶ does not so much sense the presence of the

enemy,¶ the midnight scurrying in the skirting-board as¶ produce the enemy through the classifications of¶ its own unnatural history. Schmitt himself warned¶ that to confiscate the word 'humanity' and mobilize¶ it to wage war would mean 'denying the enemy¶ the quality of being human and declaring him¶ to be an outlaw of humanity'. By this means, he¶ continued, war can 'be driven to the most extreme¶ inhumanity'. In short, 'to fight in the name of humanity¶ does not eliminate enmity', as Andrew¶ Norris observes: 'it only makes one's enemy the¶ representative or embodiment of the inhuman'.2 7¶ These reductions, given form through both the law¶ and its suspension, reactivate a colonial past in a¶ colonial present:¶ These fine ethnic distinctions effectively revive¶ a colonial economy in which infra humanity,¶ measured against the benchmark of healthier¶ imperial standards, diminishes human¶ rights and can defer human recognition. The¶ native, the enemy, the prisoner and all the other¶ shadowy 'third things' lodged between animal¶ and human can only be held accountable under special emergency rules and fierce martial¶ laws. Their lowly status underscores the fact¶ that they cannot be reciprocally endowed with¶ the same vital humanity enjoyed by their well heeled captors, conquerors judges, executioners¶ and other racial betters. 28

13


Impacts

14


! – Fascism, Genocide, Totalitarianism

Biopolitics dooms us to indistinction that allows fascism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the horrors of the concentration camp to be made real. Although not apparent, the creation of homo sacer through biopolitics is running a hidden course like a secret river through the democratic systemAgamben 1998 [Giorgio, Prof. of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 120-123.1.2 Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental charac ter of totalitarian states as a ‘‘politicization of life” and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: Since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization [totale Politisierung] of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was “more intensively state-oriented than any absolute monarchy”; in fascist Italy, a corporate state normatively regulating not only national work, but also “after-work” [Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life: and, In National Socialist Germany, a wholly integrated state, which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until then been private. (Der okkasionelle Dezionismus, p. 33)The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt’s footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his [their] life runs its course in a hidden but continuous

fashion . It is almost as if starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. “ The ‘right’ to life,” writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “to one’s body’, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can,

this ‘right’—which] the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power” (La vo/valonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century’s totalitarian stares were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies . In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The ex-communist ruling classes’ unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing”) and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.

Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that

of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. In the pages that follow , we shall try to show that certain events that are fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an incom prehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics and its eliminationof “life that is unworthy of being lived,” or the contemporary debate on the normative determination of

death criteria), acquire their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopolitics) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the camp—as the pure, absolute, and im passable biopolitcal space (insofar as

it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.

15


! – Bare life = Violence and Exclusion.

Bare life is relegated to zones of violence, excluded from the political sphere, which risks relegating the decision of life and death to the sovereignGregory 06 [Derek: PhD, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2006), pp. 405-427. Wiley].First, Agamben argues that homo sacer emerges¶ at the point where sovereign power suspends the¶ law, whose absence thus falls over a zone not merely¶ of exclusion but of abandonment The production¶ of such a space - the state of exception - is central¶

to Agamben's account of modem biopolitics.¶ This space is produced through a speech-act, or¶ more accurately a decision in the sense of 'a cut in¶ life', that is at once performative and paradoxical.¶ It is performative because it draws a boundary between¶ politically qualified life and merely existent¶ life exposed and abandoned to violence:' bare life'.¶ 'However sacred man is,' Benjamin wrote in his¶ Critique of Violence, 'there is no sacredness in his¶ condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by¶ his fellow men'. 4 If this remark is read as bodily¶ life made vulnerable to injury (through a sovereign¶ decision) then it becomes clear that bare life is at¶ once 'immediately politicized but nevertheless excluded¶ from the polis'. 5 The cut that severs bare life¶ from politically qualified life is paradoxical however,¶ and

all forms of life are thereby made precarious,¶ because the boundary it enacts is mobile, oscillating:¶ in a word (Agamben's

word) indistinct.¶ This is necessary not a contingent condition, moreover,¶ and crucially affects both time and space.¶ First, the exception implies a non-linear temporality:¶ 'The exception does not subtract itself from the¶ rule; rather the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to¶ the exception and, maintaining it self in relation to¶ the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule'. Second,¶ the exception - literally that which is 'taken¶ outside' - is effected through a distinctive spatiality.¶ For the exception 'cannot be included in the¶ whole of which it is a member and cannot be a¶ member of the whole in which it is always already¶

included'. The mapping of such a space requires a¶ topology, Agamben concludes, because only a¶ twisted cartography of power is capable of folding¶ such propriety in to such perversity

16


! – Genocide

When politics and life become one, then all life becomes controllable by the sovereign exception. This justifies genocide to maintain “the body of the people”Agamben 1998 [Giorgio, Prof. of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 147-148. ]4.2. A few years earlier, Verschuer had published a booklet in which National Socialist ideology finds what may well he its most rigorous biopolitical formulation: “ ‘The new State knows no other task than the fulfillment of the conditions necessary for the preser vation of the people.’ These words of the Führer mean that every political act of the National Socialist state serves the life of the people. . . . We know today that the life of the people is only secured if the racial traits and hereditary health of the body of the people [Volkskorper] are preserved” (Rassenhygiene p. 5). The link between politics and life instituted by these words is not (as is maintained by a common and completely inadequate interpretation of racism) a merely instrumental relationship, as if racewere a simple natural given that had merely to be safeguarded. The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately political and the political is as such immediately the biological given .

“Politics,” Verschuer writes, “that is, giving form to the life of the people [Politik,das heifbt die Gestaltung des Lebens des Volks]” (Rnenhygiene p. 8). The life that, with the declarations of rights, became the ground of sovereignty now becomes the subject-object of state politics (which therefore appears more and more in the form of “police”). But only a state essentially founded on the very life of the nation could identify its own principal vocation as the formation and care of the “body of the people.” Hence the seeming contradiction according to which a natural given tends to present itself as a political task. “Biological heredity” Verschuer continues, “is certainly a destiny, and accordingly, we prove ourselves masters of this destiny insofar as we take biological heredity to be the task that has been assigned to us and which we must fulfill.” The paradox of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transforma tion of natural heredity into a political task. The totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of lift and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible If Nazism still appears to us as an enigma, and if its affinity with Stalinism (on which Hannah Arendt so much insisted) is still unexplained, this is because we have failed to situate the totalitarian phenomenon in its entirety in the horizon of biopolitics. When life and politics— originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception

that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.

17


! – Mass Violence

The impact is massive violence—sovereign power causes the evils they hope to prevent.Prozorov 9 [Sergie: Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski “The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”, February 15th, International Studies Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html]Agamben’s radicalization of Schmitt’s ‘politicization’ of Hobbes’s concept of the state of nature carries important consequences for the reappraisal of the very logic of sovereignty in the contemporary ‘generalized’ state of exception. If, as the facile reading goes, Hobbes’s sovereign saves us from the war of all against all in the state of nature and protects us by preventing any relapse into that state in the present, then, as William Rasch notes, ‘the political, however temporary and flawed it may be, is cherished because it establishes the hope of civil peace. [The] principle of sovereignty is consequently seen as a necessarily imperfect but nevertheless still necessary solution to a perpetual problem.’ (Rasch 2007, 102. Emphasis original.) Recalling Schmitt’s argument in the Concept of the Political (1976, 58-68), Rasch claims that every political theory that is grounded in a ‘pessimistic’ philosophical anthropology is founded on this construction of the state of nature as spatially exterior and temporally anterior to the political order, which is then envisioned in terms of a civilizing ‘denaturation’ of the human condition (Rasch 2007, 102-108). Indeed, if the ‘natural’ condition of humanity is war, then the formation of a political order, in which the powers of war are restricted to the sovereign, is clearly preferable to the situation, in which these powers are equally shared by the members of the (pre-)political community. If propensity to violence is an ineradicable feature of the human condition, then there is little point in attempting to eliminate this violence altogether. Instead, the task is to contain and minimize its effects, which is precisely the promise of the political order, grounded in the incorporation of the state of nature within the nomos that renders its manifestations exceptional and restricted to the sovereign. However, if we concur with Agamben that ‘the problem that Hobbes thinks he solves is in reality the product of the political space he creates’ (Rasch 2007, 102. Emphasis original), then the line of reasoning, espoused by the philosophers of the political, becomes incongruous if not outright obscene: ‘[t]his toleration of the political can be nothing but a fatalistic acquiescence in the creation of the social nightmare called the state of nature.’ (Ibid., 102-103) If the state of nature is the product of the political, then the flaws and imperfections of the political, including the periodic or perpetual relapses into the state of exception, can by definition no longer be justified as ‘lesser evils’ in comparison with the ‘return’ to the state of nature, since they are nothing but this return itself. Agamben’s critique of the philosophy of the political from Hobbes to

Schmitt may thus be summed up in the claim that the ‘lesser evil’ of sovereignty is nothing less than Absolute Evil, since it is able to present itself as the Good despite being the origin of the very evil it struggles against.

18


! – Extinction

This distinguishing of what life is and is not relevant to the political realm is the biopolitical dream- it makes massacres vital and wars and extreme racism possible through the constant defining and redefining of the world of life, literally caring to death populations to preserve an outmoded form of governanceDillon 05 [Michael, professor of politics at the university of Lancaster, “Cared To Death: The Biopoliticised Time Of Your Life,” Foucault Studies, Number 2, May, 2005, pg. 44]In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life, ‘care for all living’ threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of modernity is reached

when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio) political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does teach us how to punish and who to kill.26 Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of life’s very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous war. Here, also, is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: “So you can understand the importance – I almost said the vital importance – of racism to such an exercise of power.”28 In racism, Foucault insists: “We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work.”29 But: “The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power.”30 In thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben. Emphasising care for all living - the promotion,

protection and investment of the life of individuals and populations – elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agamben’s bare life contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death. Something also happens to the theos as ‘care of all living’ is propelled by its vocation to distribute mortality and death, newly inscribed, across the terrain of value that it remorselessly constructs for life. This re-marking of theos nonetheless also marks a kind of threshold effect or phase change. Thriving on correction and death, albeit biopolitically transfiguring them in the process through the micro-practices of its continuously changing technologies of care, biopolitics effects some curious transformation of that vexed issue of transcendence for which the theos of onto-theology once stood. As if the exclusive emphasis on life should exclude the question of the not life, of the other of life and of the beyond of living, biopolitics nonetheless finds itself ensnared at every level in precisely these issues. New, biopoliticised, vocabularies emerge to address them. Note, for example, the proliferation of ethics committees in relation to genetic science and the allied recruitment of philosophy into the task of forming a new molecular clerisy for the liturgical governance of i

19


Alternatives

20


Alt – Be Barelife

The alternative is to assume the role of bare life. Sharing the space of Otherness creates a space of no Otherness… no inside or outside. By sharing the risks of bare life, we renounce the sovereign power in favor of vulnerability that refuses to produce new targets of sovereign violence Eisenstein 2003 [Paul, Assistant Professor of English at Otterbein College] Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representatio and the Hegelian Subject. Pg. 191-192.]At the time of this writing, thirteen months removed from the Le Monde headline referred to above, one can lament—and of course protest- America's own seeming unwillingness to advance the cause of universality, to see its own particularity as universal in the Hegelian sense. Indeed, today's revaluation of unilateralism and the doctrine of preemption seem to be aimed at the securing of America's insuperable particularity .

And the results are hardly surprising: is it any wonder that those around the globe are no longer these days feeling very American? To gain a glimpse of how universality might be sustained without disintegrating into the struggle to preserve particularity, we might consider a more local example—the response of the neighborhood in Newton Township, Pennsylvania, in December 1996, to the fact that a house displaying a Hanukkah menorah in its window was vandalized. By the next evening, all eighteen homes on the same street and adjoining cul-de-sac displayed lit menorahs in their window. The following evening, homes on nearby streets were doing the same, and even more individuals, according to The New York Times, would have participated had not local stores run out of menorahs.6 Eclipsing the historicist-inflected imperative to respect the specificity of different cultural/religious traditions, the families in this neighborhood acted instead to expose the universality of the particular. Their strategy is akin to Levi's: to render the equivocal nature of the Other's "truth" in an arbitrary act of "becoming Jews"—an act whose very arbitrariness only enhances its claim to literal truth. Here, we see universality that does not aim to secure an inviolable sense of community (as this township had sought to

do through bicycle decorating contests for children on Memorial Day, monthly teas for mothers with small children at home, annual parties, etc.), but rather a community opened up to a more unsymbolizable exemplar of otherness—in this case, the possibility of attack. In The

New York Times article concerning the events in Newton Township, the rationale behind this mass action is clearly articulated in terms of the group's desire to make the risk of attack universal. What the events in Newton Township exemplify is a kind of universalization in the direction of vulnerability. The decision to become Jews and to put menorahs in their windows, which might be seen as appropriative or as a failure to maintain critical distance, was driven by the desire to make more targets available for whoever had attacked the first home. Here, in a nutshell, lies the political import of a post-Holocaust ethics of witnessing grounded in the embrace of universality. Let us imagine once again a Europe at the point of Nazism's rise and recognize mat many in our present historical moment remain seduced by the notion of the (particular) Other's truth. What might have been averted if "ordinary Germans" had become Jews, if there had been too many Jews? What violence might be averted today if universalization becomes the cornerstone of ethics? Regarding each and every Other's particular "truth" as universal—as all of ours as well—makes more and more targets available. And with more and more targets the possibility of no more targets"

21


Alt – Whatever Being

Our alternative is to embrace Whatever Being - we should disengage from traditional politics and using sovereign power to grant rights, instead, we should embrace the indistinguishable character of being. Caldwell 2004 [Anne, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville.] Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity Theory and Event 7:2. 48-53 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html]Can we imagine another form of humanity, and another form of power? The bio-sovereignty described by Agamben is so fluid as to appear irresistible. Yet Agamben never suggests this order is necessary. Bio-sovereignty results from a particular and contingent history, and it requires certain conditions. Sovereign power, as

Agamben describes it, finds its grounds in specific coordinates of life, which it then places in a relation of indeterminacy. What defies sovereign power is a life that cannot be reduced to those determinations: a life “that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. “ (2.3). In his earlier

Coming Community, Agamben describes this alternative life as “whatever being.”More recently he has used the term “forms-of-life.” These

concepts come from the figure Benjamin proposed as a counter to homo sacer: the “total condition that is ‘man’.” For Benjamin and Agamben, mere life is the life which unites law and life. That tie permits law, in its endless cycle of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power. The total condition that is [hu]man refers to an alternative life incapable of serving as the ground of law. Such a life would exist outside sovereignty. Agamben’s own concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also shaped by several particular dense thinkers, including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever being, in its relation to sovereign power. “Whatever being,” as described by

Agamben,lacks the features permitting the sovereign capture and regulation of life in our tradition. Sovereignty’s capture of life has been conditional upon the separation of natural and political life. That separation has permitted the emergence

of a sovereign power grounded in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value, and non-value of life (1998: 142). Since then, every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for “a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only ‘sacred life,’ and can as such be eliminated without punishment” (p. 139 ). This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty, but provides sites for its expansion . In recent decades,

factors that once might have been indifferent to sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as national status, economic status, color, race, sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations . From a liberal or cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a limit upon sovereignty.

Agamben’s analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer. Agamben’s alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9).As a result, whatever being is “reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) – and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself.” (0.1-1.2).Indifferent to any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification. Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of life is less post-metaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because its status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger’s Dasein. Dasein, as Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern – regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an “indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold” (Agamben 1998: 153).We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use

22

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to classify and value life. “In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging”

(Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.

It is impossible to embrace singularity without becoming whatever being – our common nature does not allow for singularityAgamben 1993 [Giorgio, Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of Verona] The Coming Community. Pg 17-19.]WHATEVER is the matheme of singularity, without which it is impossible to conceive either being or the individuation of singularity. How the Scholastics posed the problem of the principium individuationis is well known. Against Saint Thomas, who sought the place of individuation in matter, Duns Scotus conceived individuation as an addition to nature or common form (for example, humanity)—an addition not of another form or essence or property, but of an ultima realitas, of an "utmostness" of the form itself. Singularity adds nothing to the common form, if not a "haecceity" (as Etienne Gilson says: here we do not have individuation in virtue of the form,¶ but individuation of the form). But for this reason, according to Duns Scomust in itself be neither particular nor universal, neither one nor multiple, but such that it "does not scorn being posed with a whatever singular unity." The limit of Duns Scotus is that he seems to conceive common nature as an anterior reality, which has the property of being indifferent to whatever singularity, and to which singularity adds only haecceity. Accordingly, he leaves unthought precisely that quodlibet that is inseparable from singularity and, without recognizing it, makes indifference the real root of individuation. But "quodlibetality" is not indifference; nor is it a predicate of singularity that expresses its dependence on common nature. What then is the relationship between quodlibetality and indifference? How can we understand the indifference of the common human form with respect to singular humans? And what is the haecceity that constitutes the being of the singular? We know that Guillaume de Champeaux, Peter Abelard's teacher, affirmed that "the idea is present in single individuals non essentialiter, sed indifferenter." And Duns Scotus added that there is no difference of essence between common nature and haecceity. This means that the idea and common nature do not constitute the essence of singularity, that singularity is, in this sense, absolutely inessential, and that, consequently, the criterion of its difference should be sought elsewhere than in an essence or a concept. The relationship between the common and the singular can thus no longer be conceived as the persistence of an identical essence in single individuals, and therefore the very problem of individuation risks appearing as a pseudoproblem. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than the way Spinoza conceives of the common. All bodies, he says, have it in common to express the divine attribute of extension (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 13,

Lemma 2). And yet what is common cannot in any case constitute the essence of the single case (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 37). Decisive here is the idea of an inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence. Taking-place, the communication of singularities in the attribute of extension, does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence. Whatever is constituted not by the indifference of common nature with respect to singularities, but by the indifference of the common and the proper, of the genus and the species, of the essential and the accidental. Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities, makes them lovable (quodlibetable). Just as the right human word is neither the appropriation of what is common (language) nor the communication of what is proper, so too the human face is neither the individuation of a generic fades nor the universalization of singular traits: It is whatever face, in which what belongs to common nature and what is proper are absolutely indifferent.

We should destroy the walls of exclusion (just-unjust) to create a community of simply the whatever where each person represents its own singularity, rather than being in comparison to anotherAgamben 1993 [Giorgio, Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of Verona] The Coming Community. Pg 23-25.]ACCORDING TO the Talmud, two places are reserved for each person, one in Eden and the other in Gehenna. The just person, after being found in- nocent, receives a place in Eden plus that of a neighbor who was damned. The unjust person, after being judged guilty, receives a place in hell plus that of a neighbor who was saved. Thus the Bible says of the just, "In their land they receive double," and of the unjust, "Destroy them with a double destruction." In the topology of this Haggadah of the Talmud, the essential element is not so much the cartographic distinction between Eden and Gehenna, but rather the adjacent place that each person inevitably receives. At the point when one reaches one's final state and fulfills one's own destiny, one finds oneself for that very reason in the place of the neighbor. What is most proper to every creature is thus its substitutability, its being in any case in the place of the other. Toward the end of his life the great Arabist Louis Massignon, who in his youth had daringly converted to Catholicism in the land of Islam, founded a community called Badaliya, a name deriving from the Arabic term for "substitution." The members took a vow to live substituting themselves for someone else, that is, to be Christians in the place of others. This substitution can be understood in two ways. The first conceives of the fall or sin of the other only

23


as the opportunity for one's own salvation: A loss is compensated for by an election, a fall by an ascent, according to an economy of compensation that is hardly edifying. (In this sense, Badaliya would be nothing but a belated ransom paid for Massignon's homosexual friend who committed suicide in prison in Valencia in 1921, and from whom he had had to distance himself at the time of his conversion. But there is also another interpretation of Badaliya. According to Massignon, in fact, substituting oneself for another does not mean compensating for what the other lacks, nor correcting his or her errors, but exiling oneself to the other as he or she is in order to offer Christ hospitality in the other's own soul, in the other's own taking-place. This substitution no longer knows a place of its own, but the taking-place of every single being is always already common—an empty space offered to the one, irrevocable hospitality The destruction of the wall dividing Eden from Gehenna is thus the secret intention that animates Badaliya. In this community there is no place that is not vicarious, and Eden and Gehenna are only the names of this reciprocal substitution. Against the hypocritical fiction of the unsubstitutability of the individual, which in our culture serves only to guarantee its universal representability, Badaliya presents an unconditioned substitutability, without either representation or possible description—an absolutely unrepresentable community. In this way, the multiple common place, which the Talmud presents as the place of the neighbor that each person inevitably receives, is nothing but the coming to itself of each singularity, its being whatever—in other words, such as it is. Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space. The term "ease" in fact designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation . The Provencal poets (whose songs first introduce the term into Romance languages in the form aizi, aizimen) make ease

a terminus technicus in their poetics, designating the very place of love. Or better, it designates not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of taking-place in a whatever singularity. In this sense, ease names perfectly that "free use of the proper" that, according to an expression of Friedrich Holderlin's, is "the most difficult task." "Mout mi semblatz de bel aizin." This is the greeting that, in Jaufre Rudel's song, the lovers exchange when they meet.

24


A2:

25


A2: Perm

The affirmative’s defense of sovereignty makes liberation impossible – their “lesser evil” logic culminates in absolute evil. Prozorov 9 [Sergie: Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski “The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”, February 15th, International Studies Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html]In order to understand this claim let us consider Agamben’s criticism of Schmitt’s use of the notion of the katechon in his defense of state sovereignty. In Schmitt’s political theology, sovereign power is analogous to the figure of the katechon in the Catholic tradition, the force that delays the advent of the Antichrist, which in turn would eventually lead to the messianic redemption (Schmitt

2003, 59-60). It is as this delaying force, as opposed to a direct agent of the Good, that the state must be appreciated . In contrast, Agamben’s interpretation of the famous passage in St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the katechon asserts that rather than grounding something like a Christian ‘doctrine of State power’ (Agamben 2005b, 109), this passage harbours no positive valuation of the katechon whatsoever. Instead, the katechon (every form of constituted power) merely conceals the ‘absence of law’ that already characterizes the messianic present and thus does nothing other than defer or ‘hold back’ the moment of the messianic suspension of the law (see ibid., 95-107). Instead, in the Pauline messianic logic the semblance of the law, maintained by the katechon, must be stripped off and all power revealed as the ‘absolute outlaw’ (Agamben 2005b, 111). As Agamben (2005b, 110) claims, ‘every theory of the State, including Hobbes’s – which thinks of it as a power to block or delay catastrophe – can be taken as a secularization of this [traditional] interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2.’ Indeed, in the Schmittian reading, which characterizes most contemporary political theories, including those extremely hostile to Schmitt, the secularized katechon is legitimized as the only force that wards off the Antichrist [the anomie of the state of nature] and thus the end of the social order as we know it. On the contrary, Agamben’s reading of Paul posits the katechon as an obstacle to the advent of the messianic kingdom and thus accuses the proponents of the ‘Christian doctrine of state power’ of a thinly disguised nihilism. ‘[T]he katechon is the force – the Roman Empire as well as every constituted authority – that clashes with and hides katargesis, the state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic, and in this sense delays unveiling the ‘mystery of lawlessness’.’ (Agamben 2005b, 111)¶ It is as if the erstwhile champions of a Christian doctrine of power have forgotten their creed and embraced the imperfection of humanity as ‘all there is’. Their valorization of the katechon obscures a simple question: ‘if we longed for parousia, should we not be impatient with the interference of the katechon?’ (Rasch 2007, 106) This, as Agamben shows, is precisely Paul’s attitude, which is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the philosophers of the political, for whom the katechon has assumed an autonomous value:¶ What if, after two thousand years and untold promises, we have lost our faith in the parousia and grown weary of waiting for the arrival of divine violence? Then would not delaying the Antichrist be what we should hope for? [...] The katechon, as a figure for the political, rejects the promise of the parousia and protects the community from the dangerous illusions of both ultimate perfection and absolute evil. (Rasch 2007, 107)¶ In Rasch’s view, what the defenders of the katechon fear is not so much the Antichrist but the Messiah himself, who, moreover, might well appear to them indistinct from the Antichrist: both are ‘figures who promise us perfection, figures who offer us redemption and bestow upon us the guilt of failing perfection or rejecting their offer.’ (Ibid., 107) There is certainly a certain irony in the ‘Christian doctrine of state power’ ultimately coming down to the apostasy of any recognizable Christianity in vision of an exhausted humanity that can no longer distinguish between the Antichrist and the Messiah. However, Agamben’s reading of Paul leads us to a different case of indistinction. If the katechon conceals that all power is ‘absolute outlaw’ and thereby defers the reappropriation of this anomie by the messianic community, then would it be too much to suggest that the katechon is the Antichrist, who perpetuates its reign by concealing the fact of its long having arrived? Absolute Evil would thus attain domination precisely by pretending, as a ‘lesser evil’, to ward off its own advent. By converting the seekers of redemption into the guardians of its perpetual inaccessibility, the katechon ensures the survival of greater evil in the guise of the lesser one. Thus,

Agamben argues that ‘[it] is possible to conceive of katechon and anomos [Antichrist] not as two separate figures, but as one single power before and after the final unveiling. Profane power is the semblance that covers up the substantial lawlessness of messianic time.’ (2005b, 111) As Rasch sums up Agamben’s claim about the insidious manner of the self-perpetuation of sovereign power,

‘embracing the political is equivalent to building concentration camps while awaiting the Antichrist’ (Rasch 2007, 106).¶ The

relation to the katechon indicates nothing less than one’s stand on the possibility of the transcendence of the political. While for the Schmittian orientation the political is ‘all there is’ and its disappearance is only thinkable as the self-destruction of humanity (cf.

Laclau 2007, 20-22), Agamben’s messianic approach welcomes the demise of the katechon as the condition of possibility of life beyond sovereignty that remains concealed ‘only until the person now holding it back gets out of the way’ (2

Thessalonians 2, 7; cited in Agamben 2005b, 110). In Walter Benjamin’s messianic politics (1986), this demise of the sovereign takes the form of ‘divine violence’ that is neither law-preserving nor law-making and transforms the ‘fictive’ state of exception, inscribed within the legal order, into a ‘real state of exception’ that has severed all links to the law and the state form. Agamben’s work from his earliest writings onwards may be viewed as an engagement with this admittedly arcane and disconcerting idea of divine violence: ‘Only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of the law (even that of the empty form of law’s being in force

26


without significance) will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban.’ (Agamben 1998, 59. See also Mills 2004; Kaufman 2008) Prior to addressing the specific features of Agamben’s post-sovereign politics, let us consider this idea of a politics freed from every ban in relation to the figure of state of nature.

Negative actions by the state do not resolve the state of exception—their attempt to “solve” bare life by reigning in government only reentrenches sovereign power.Prozorov 9 [Sergie: Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski “The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”, February 15th, International Studies Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html]On the other hand, neither is it a question of returning to a pre-political state of nature, not yet contaminated by the sovereign exception. If the state of nature were temporally antecedent to sovereignty, then it could at least be envisioned, in a naturalist or essentialist gesture, as a site of possible redemption. However, there is no passage back from bios to zoe and any attempt at such passage only throws us back into the state of exception and the production of bare life, which, contrary to numerous misreadings, is not identical to zoe but is rather a destroyed or degraded bios, from which all positive determinations

have been subtracted (see Ziarek 2008; Ojakangas 2008; Mills 2004, 2005). ‘There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine.’ (Agamben 2005a, 88) Bare life has nothing natural about it; instead it is nothing but a degraded life, a life reduced to survival (Agamben 1999b, 132-35). If bare life were identical to zoe qua natural life, then Agamben’s critical project would be reduced to a banal affirmation of bios over zoe, political life vs. animal existence, which would simply reproduce the constitutive opposition of the Western ontopolitical tradition rather than transcend it as Agamben certainly attempts to do. In contrast to such simplifications, Agamben asserts that the human being is constitutively separated from its natural or animal existence by

virtue of its subjectification in language. In his early book Infancy and History (2007a, 50-70), he argues, following Benveniste, that the entrance of the human being into language necessarily traverses the stage of the ‘expropriation’ of all its pre-linguistic experience as a living being so that any subjectification in language always correlates with a correlate desubjectification (see also 1999b, 115-123). Similarly, Agamben’s inquiry into the event of language in Language and Death (1991), which, as Mika Ojakangas (2008) aptly demonstrates, is structurally homologous to the theory of the state of exception in Homo Sacer, treats human speech as conditioned by the ‘removal’ of natural or animal ‘voice’ (phone) that makes possible the passage to logos. In exactly the same manner, the political existence of humanity is from the outset accompanied by the ‘removal’ or crossing out of zoe, whose inclusive exclusion as a negative foundation of the political order makes impossible any ‘return to nature’, other than in the obscene and degrading manner practiced in the concentration camps and other loci of the state of exception.

One invocation of the state of exception leads to an endless cycle of interventionIbur 9 [Aaron M.: Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center “Humanitarian Intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, and Abuse of the Law: The Internationalization of States of Exception,” February 15-18, All Academic]Theoretically, the invocation of the state of exception may have been justified for the actual continued existence of the state. Yet, because the executive can decide when and where to claim the exception, it may often be enacted in cases short of emergency. Thus, the exceptional becomes increasingly permanent and normal as there is no legal way to overturn it; the emergency becomes the perpetual state of affairs. The decree, issued by a body of the constitutional order, the executive,

thus is law even though law was created by its own suspension. With this power to decide on the state of exception, the executive becomes dictatorial, or according to Schmitt's conception, the sovereign itself. However, Agamben’s work on this subject differs from some earlier statements on the exception. Whereas Rossiter (2002) and Schmitt (2006) describe the suspension of the legal order as an act of “constitutional dictatorship” or as a temporary deviance from the normal operation of the juridical apparatus to ensure the long term survival of this very order, Agamben argues that the exception itself, in its very nature, prevents a return to the old ‘normal’ and thus, ushers in a new one. If this is the case, any hope of restoring the constitution,

as previously understood, is lost. Therefore, the power to suspend the law permanently threatens all legal norms deeply held or otherwise, making any legal system with an executive body inherently unstable.

27


A2: State Good

Their authors have it backwards – the state of nature is produced, not replaced, by sovereign authority.Prozorov 9 [Sergie: Professor of Political Science at the University of Helenski, “The Appropriation of Abandonment: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Nature and the Political”, February 15th, International Studies Association, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p313215_index.html) In contrast to Hobbes’s mythologization of the state of nature, Agamben’s goal is to restore the state of nature to its status of the product of sovereign power, a contingency that is an effect of sovereign decision as opposed to a contingency that calls for sovereign decision. Thus, what Agamben does is not dehistoricise Hobbes’s state of nature, but rather restore reality to this ahistorical figure by dismantling the spatiotemporal distinction between the state of nature and the Commonwealth and recasting the state of nature as a ‘principle internal to the City’. ‘The political does not replace nature; it creates it. The state from which Hobbes’s sovereign rescues us is the state into which Agamben’s sovereign plunges us.’ (Rasch 2007, 101) The state of nature is constituted by the sovereign decision that, by treating the civil state as dissolved, suspends the operation of its internal laws and norms that define it as bios and thereby reduces the existence of its population to ‘bare life’, which differs from the natural zoe that human beings have irrevocably left behind precisely because it only

comes into existence by being stripped of all positive attributes of its bios (Cf. Agamben 1998, 181. See also Mills 2005, 219; Ziarek 2008, 90). In this condition, the Covenant is treated as void and the subject is simultaneously abandoned by the sovereign, i.e. left without his protection, and abandoned to the sovereign’s unlimited exercise of violence. Homo sacer is thus in a strict sense the remnant not of the state of nature but of the covenant that is no longer in force by the decision of the sovereign. Rather than being ‘pre-juridical’, the state of nature is then graspable as an instance of the non-juridical within the juridical, a constitutive outside of a juridical order or its inherent transgression (see Ojakangas 2004, 23-29; Rasch 2000). In Foucault’s terms (2003, 93), instead of being spatially and temporally transcended in the establishment of the Commonwealth, the state of nature remains a ‘permanent backdrop’ of every constituted authority . Let us now address the way in which this anomic backdrop enters and survives in the nomos of the Commonwealth.

The state isn’t the problem in this context – the production of bare life is. Dillon and Reid 01 [Professor and PhD Student IR – University of Lancaster 2001 Millennium 30.1]Although Foucault did not use the term governance he explored similar practices under the terms governmentality and this biopower, he also noted, has its own ‘biohistory’.23 Its early modern expression arose in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe but its antecedents were to be found in the pastoral power of the Christian Church.24 In the eighteenth century, it became intimately related both to liberal opposition to ‘police’, or ‘policy’, and to the advent of a novel understanding of ‘society’ as a ‘complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of disturbance’.25 Liberal forms of biopower thus entered early modern discourse on the problems of government in the form of a critique of rival cameralist and mercantilist solutions to the problematic of government. The Liberal problematisation of government was distinguished by its concern with striking the balance between governing too much and governing too little as well as with governing through encouraging the autonomous existence and selfregulating freedoms of populations . It was also concerned to keep its own regimes of governance under continuous and critical review.26 Whereas sovereign power is distinguished by its reliance on instituting the law and threatening death, for Foucault,27 governmentality or, as we will now refer to it, governance, operates on populations and seeks to promote life by commanding detailed knowledge of it. It thus establishes what he called ‘the biopolitics of the population’.28 In the biopolitical discourse of global liberal ‘governance without government’, the term governance does not refer to seizing or ruling the State according to some legitimating principle, such as that of representative and accountable

government. Biopolitical governance is less concerned with States and non-governmental organisations as pre-formed political subjects, than it is concerned with the detailed knowledgeable strategies and tactics that effect the constitution of life and the regulation of the affairs of populations, no matter how these are specified. It is also concerned with the discursive economies of power/knowledge through which people in their individual and collective behaviour are analysed and subject to selfregulatory freedoms and methods of control .29

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A2: No Impact

The liberal lens of the affirmative blinds them to understanding the full extent of sovereign powerNorris 2k [Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania [Andrew “Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead” Diacritics, Vol 30, No 4, Winter 04, pp. 38-58, Published by the John Hopkins University Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566307]Agamben brings this out nicely in a discussion of Bruno Bettelheim's argument that the Muselmann has passed beyond the limit of the human and the moral by renouncing his freedom and by losing sight of the limit beyond which his life would have to be sacrificed in defense of that freedom. For Bettelheim, regardless of the conditions, a human being can

avoid becoming a Muselmann by "accepting death as a human being." But Agamben argues that "Simply to deny the Muselmann's humanity would be to accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture." The Muselmann "does not merely embody a moral death," rather he "is the site of an experiment in which morality and humanity are called into question," he is "a limit figure of a special kind, in which not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning." To acknowledge the Muselmann's compromised humanity, Bettelheim's limit of the human is denied; to avoid the

moral barbarism of an imagined confrontation with a Muselmann in which one judges his "character and habits," one renounces ethical terminology. With the Muselmann we find the limit of limits: clear boundaries can no longer be drawn here [Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 56, 63].26 ¶ The point is not that the liberal refusal to consider the camp as threshold rules out a solution to this dilemma from the start. The very idea of a solution here seems offensive. The point is rather that the liberal response can make no sense of its own confusion. The camp is simply evil and incomprehensible. The person condemned to a camp is neither capable of morality nor incapable of it. As for the difficult questions this emerging limit of the moral might raise, they too are set aside in favor of a respectful silence.27 In contrast, Agamben's conception of the

threshold at least promises to more precisely delineate these confusions: the camp both is and is not a legal, political, and moral space. Hence, we should hardly be surprised to find ourselves torn, wanting both to affirm and to deny that these categories apply here. ¶ Finally, the liberal strategy reveals its limitations when we recognize that the notion of the threshold is in fact expanding into areas where we will not have the luxury of refusing to consider the inner logic of phenomena we should like to reject as evil and incomprehensible. What, for instance, are we to do when we are dealing with agents or things that have not already been recognized as the bearers of rights? Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option. We must decide whether a neomort-a body whose only signs of life are that it is "warm, pulsating, and urinating"-is in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing. In such cases, "life and death [cease to be] properly scientific concepts [and become] political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision" [Homo Sacer 164]. Ironically, such decisions are increasingly made by scientists, and not by politicians: "In the biopolitical horizon [orizzonte biopolitico] that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move into the no-man's-land [terra di nessuno] into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate" [159]. These are still marginal figures in our current political life. But if Agamben is right, the concept of the margin is itself being swept away. It is this that leads him to conclude that the camp is the as-yet-unrecognized paradigm of the modern. As the logic of the sovereign exception comes unraveled (or is realized- this paradox being a necessary function of that logic), and the impossibility of categori- cally distinguishing between exception and rule is made manifest, the distinction between bare life and political life is hopelessly confused. "When life and politics-originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's land of the state of exception that is inhabited [abita] by bare life [la nuda vita]-begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception" [148].28 [End page 52] In the end, the attempt to resist this through the assertion of human rights ignores the connection between the humanism that undergirds the concept of rights and the events that seem to conflict with it. Agamben's argument is not that Aristotle's or Locke's reflections on politics carry with them an implicit commitment to the substantive racist policies of National Socialism; nor does he claim that they "caused" the Holocaust (a term to which he objects [114]). What he does argue is that there is a deep affinity between such contemporary horrors and the tradition of political philosophy to which we might turn in an effort to understand and combat such phenomena. The practical implication would not be that there is no difference between Aristotle or Hitler, but that Aristotle will not provide a stable point from which to critique those who follow after him, or from which to construct an alternative.29 There is no Archimedean point outside biopolitics. Politics is always a matter of the body, and "The 'body' is always already a biopolitical body" [187].

29


A2: Biopower Inev

Each individual resistance to opposing sovereignty establishes the base for emancipatory politicsHardt and Dumm 00 [Michael and Thomas: Professor in the Literature Program and Romance Studies Department at Duke University, Professor at Amherst College. "Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire,” Harvard University Press, 2000, Theory & Event, Volume 4, Issue 3, Project Muse]TD: How are people to be convinced that the relevant opposition is to sovereignty, though? That is, to put it maybe too simplistically, beyond the call for the end of

big government, a call which has its ironies, through what communicative means do you see the constituent power of the multitude realizing itself against the nation-state? MH: It is not a matter of convincing anyone to oppose sovereignty. It is natural to refuse authority and the refusal of authority is going on every day at all levels of society. And all of the various

forms of modern and contemporary liberatory politics are at base a refusal of servitude, a refusal to accept as natural our subordination to rulers. I see the opposition to sovereignty as a way to name the generality of all these activities.

30


AFF

31


Perm

Perm: Do the plan and break down the relationship between bios and zoe. Sovereignty must be used strategically – critique can be simultaneousLombardi 96 [Mark Owen, Associate Political Science Prof @ Tampa, Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty, p 161]

Sovereignty is in our collective minds. What we look at, the way we look at it and what we expect to see must be altered. This is the call for international scholars and actors. The assumptions of the paradigm will dictate the solution and approaches considered. Yet, a mere call to change this structure of the system does little except activate reactionary impulses and intellectual retrenchment. Questioning the very precepts of sovereignty, as has been done in many instances, does not in and of itself address the problems and issues so critical to transnational relations. That is why theoretical changes and paradigm shifts must be coterminous with applicative studies. One does not and should not precede the other. We cannot wait until we have a neat self-contained and accurate theory of transnational relations before we launch into studies of Third-World issues and problem-solving. If we wait we will never address the latter and arguably most important issue-area: the welfare and quality of life for the human race.

32


Alt Fails

Agamben offers no realistic alternative that has the potential to be successful against the sovereign Babias 7 [Marius: Director of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein “Zones of Indiferrence,” Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-11-15-babias-en.html]What are the consequences now of the “state of exception” having become a long-term provisional measure that threatens democracy or of the emotionalisation of politics by means of “populism” as a social “state of nature”? How can the “public sphere” be separated from the ideological clinch of the “community”, to be recharged with resistance and made capable of conflict management? The “war on terror” appears to be ringing in a long “state of exception” in the early twenty-first

century; the major cities of Western democracies are turning into temporary high-security zones for survival. Political analysts predict a period of increasing military actions over the next thirty years; future forms of domination will not, however, be based exclusively on military power and economic strength but increasingly on cultural soft power . The wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq that appear to be territorially limited, as well as the conflicts in Kashmir and the Caucasus, will extend to the Western democracies in the form of terrorist attacks; the world finds itself in a state of war, even if for now there will be no open military actions on western soil in the near future, at least in the form of soldiers standing eye to eye. The “state of exception” has been institutionalised in Colombia, Chiapas, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Angola, Congo and Turkey. In the former Yugoslavia the normal state of affairs has turned from war to conflicts between warlords, in which political and military aspects, as well as mafia-like and entrepreneurial ones, have come together. The European military presence in the Balkans ensures that the “state of exception” will become the rule, which benefits above all the hegemonic ambitions of the leading European states, Germany and France. The controversial discussion of recent years about the basic conflict between politics and morality, which briefly threatened the material interests and cultural-ideological hegemonic ambitions of the elites, has since died down; instead, the politics of security have been promoted to the central focus of action in the democracies. The conservative zeitgeist – shocked by the world bestseller Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, which inspired again the worldwide

movement of the critics of globalisation – longs for a biopolitical order for the world that Agamben’s political conception of the “state of exception” provides by asserting the primacy of a “sovereign” philosophy for politics . Whether referring to refugee camps in Australia, sans papiers in France, the torture of immigrants on the borders of the European Union or the torture of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners, Agamben’s analyses may comprehend the increasing loss of rights and degradation of human beings today, but he refrains from a call for resistance and rebellion, and seems to argue for the irreversible historical necessity of injustice and oppression. The difference between “law” and “justice”, however, remains, now as ever, the basis for a political critique of violence. Continuing to recognise this difference is synonymous with a battle against injustice and oppression.

Agamben’s alternative is de-politicizing – his thesis neglects another form of bare life that leaves them trapped within the sovereign’s control foreverProtevi 6 [John: Professor of French Studies at Louisiana State University, “The Terri Schiavo Case: Biopolitics and Biopower: Agamben and Foucault”, March 7th, 6th Annual Foucault Circle Conference, JSTOR]My second point in criticism of Agamben is that it’s not just judgments as to braindeath authorizing organ harvesting or inferior quality of life authorizing euthanasia that concerns us in biopower (again, any such judgment in this case was Terri's own,

and so it was a matter of assisted suicide rather than euthanasia), but also the construction of an inescapable State interest in fostering the life of the favored group, those graced with an implicit politicizing predication. While it is true that the politicizing predication is

part of Agamben's conceptual system, virtually all of his analyses in Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz concern the way in which bare life is exposed, excluded from law, threatened, while bios, politically-informed life, is protected . But in the Schiavo case we are concerned not with exclusion of zoe, but with its inclusion, with a bare life that the law holds close. A total sphere of protected bare life, a biosphere, into which the out-group cannot penetrate – its bare life is exposed via a de-politicizing predication – and from which the in-group can never escape . Again, the relative neglect of the notion of trapped bare life is not so much a conceptual problem for Agamben as it is a matter of emphasis. The limits that exclude the out-group – that create exposed bare life – are currently formed by the state of exception regarding the "enemy combatants" (so that the Guantanamo camp is the state of exception become rule, the spatialization of the state of exception), while the limits of the in-group – trapped bare life – are formed by the two versions of “Terri’s Law.” (Technically speaking, these were not sovereign decisions, as they were laws, but the federal version could have provoked a constitutional crisis regarding federalism, just as the state version impacted

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Florida's doctrine of separation of powers.) More precisely, the bodies of those in the out-group are excluded from the protection of law so that the bare life inherent therein is exposed, while the bodies of those in the in-group are subjected to the most intense medical interventions.

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A2: Whatever Being

Agamben does not extrapolate enough on his concept of “whatever being” for it to be seriously engagedDaly 2004 [Frances, Professor at the Australian National University “The non-citizen and the concept of ‘human rights’”. Volume 3 Number 1. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm. ]What it is that we might want a human potentiality to mean is, of course, a complex, difficult and open-ended issue. But it is important for us to ask whether a human potentiality must start from emptiness. Agamben repeatedly refers to the need to begin from a place of 'amorphousness' and 'inactuality', assuming that there is something that will necessarily follow from the simple fact of human existence – but why should we assume this? What might constitute or form this potentiality is surely concerned with what is latent but as yet unrealized. For Agamben, there is nothing latent that is not already tainted by a sense of a task that must be done (Agamben, 1993: 43). There is no ability to achieve any displacement with what is present within values of community and justice, there is only an immobilizing nothingness that assumes a false essence, vocation or destiny. If the 'whatever' being that he contends is indeed emerging, and it possesses, as he argues, "an original relation to desire", it is worthwhile asking what this desire is for (Agamben, 1993: 10). If it is simply life itself, then it is not clear why this should be devoid of any content. Any process of emptying out, of erasing and abolishing, such as that which Agamben attempts, is done for a reason - it involves critique and rejection, on the basis, necessarily, that something else is preferable. But Agamben provides us with very little of what is needed to understand how we might engage with this option.

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Rights Discourse Good

The rejection of rights is a strategic loss for present political struggles – Agamben’s totalizing form of critical theory increases oppression.Deranty 4 [Jean-Philippe: Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia) “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal, Volume 3, Number 1, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm]11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth

probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth’s reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.

The struggle for equality through rights is vital – we should rethink rights without undermining political strugglesDeranty 4 [Jean-Philippe: Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia), “Agamben’s challenge to normative theories of modern rights,” borderlands e-journal, Volume 3, Number 1, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm]47. If, with Rancière, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancière 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to a tension inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion. 48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is

quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault

1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. 49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agamben’s reduction of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel’s

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modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegel’s claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat.

Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989). 50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance.52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.

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State Good

If we reject the state’s protection of rights, our lives will become unrepresented and will not solve the external problems of the stateDaly 2004 [Frances, Professor at the Australian National University “The non-citizen and the concept of ‘human rights’”. Volume 3 Number 1. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm.]Agamben wants to draw attention to the role human rights play in the inscription of the human being or naked life in the political-juridical order of the State. Naked human life, he argues, becomes the foundation of the sovereignty of the State. And yet, if we see the value of the concept of rights of the human being persisting today, it is precisely in its ability to challenge the idea that human rights are merely an internal matter for each State. For Agamben, sovereignty, nation and human rights all make up the fiction that values are eternalized, when in reality rights are attributed only to the extent to which they constitute "the immediately vanishing presupposition" of the citizen (Agamben, 2000: 20-21). I

would argue, however, that if we disassemble this particular discourse, we can identify in Agamben's objection to the concept of rights the conceptual construction of an externalization of the State and rights that necessarily makes all life or practice incommensurable and unrepresentable. This abstraction of the State emerges in formulaic and straightforwardly structuralist fashion, and does so in such a way that a rigid opposition between rights and 'the happy life' is the inevitable result. Thus we are presented with the State – that which wants to regulate disorder – and the law – that

which regulates and prevents to produce order – as external, unmediated abstractions that are assumed to compel a fearful and largely compliant society to assent to their methods of discipline. Any transformative or subversive practice must, according to this logic, fall outside the concept of right or justice (Agamben, 1993: 40). There is no sense that types of conflict and refusal play a part in and against the State and law. The State is merely referred to as a blind and selfish bureaucratic machine ( Agamben, 1995: 116) rather than as a range of processes in which people engage and live out modes of being and in which conformism, cynicism, opportunism and degrees of acquiescence currently appear to prevail.

Rights from the state should still be used to detect unsatisfied persons – our human capabilities allow our relation to the state to avoid a static totality of the state of exceptionDaly 2004 [Frances, Professor at the Australian National University “The non-citizen and the concept of ‘human rights’”. Volume 3 Number 1. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm.]The problem would appear to be that not only are we no clearer as to the actual problems involved in such values, but we are also left without a basis for the critique of the intention of right. And, not surprisingly, we are also without any basis for considering the productive content of these values. Legal positivism assumes or sets out the basis for rights within a normative framework of the State that merely takes for granted judicial postulates of the inalienability of rights, the basis of rights in property and assumptions that people are in fundamental accord on matters of right. It is unable to imagine a realm of freedom against the State. But within rights, I would argue, we can detect unsatisfied demands that have nothing to do with essentialist assumptions about 'man' or 'citizen'. These demands are concerned with an understanding of human freedom in relation to values of solidarity, justice and the overcoming of alienation; they are historical and contingent, shifting and alive, and are not about a fixed, static, generic essence of the person, or some ahistorical or superhistorical immutable totality. What it is to be human is open and changeable, although not without determinations, commonalities and shared properties that can emerge at various times. Simply because we would want to challenge a distorted, limited or perhaps unappealing view of what it is to be human, does not mean that we are unable to say anything about what it is to be a creative, suffering, desiring being. Somewhat strangely, Agamben's argument is ultimately more concerned with the problem of contradictions within the theory and practice of rights and with attendant illusions that arise from these contradictions than with a critique of content or with an examination of a new potentiality that might emerge out of what he takes to be our present vacuousness. Such contradictions and illusions certainly do exist in relation to right, although as far as attitudes to the law are concerned I believe that a Slöterdijkean 'cynical reason' probably more accurately describes the matter.

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http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm

http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm


No Link / No Impact

The liberal order that the affirmative engages in already acknowledges the paradox between the norm and exception and doesn’t link to your impactsHussain and Ptacek 2k [Nasser and Melissa: Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst University “Review: Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred” Publiched by Blackwell Publishing, Law & Society Review, Vol 34, No 2, pp. 495-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091]Here once again we are forced to question Agamben's teleological mode of thought. Is this sovereign power represented in the concentration camps really a constitutive feature of sover-

eignty tout court? Even limiting ouselves to the remarks above, we can imagine a liberal critique of this position that asks from where come the limitations that Agamben concedes previous Weimar governments had observed. Surely, one does not have to accept in its entirety a normative liberal conception of sovereign power in order to appreciate that the demand for a factual ac- counting for the decision on the exception, and institutional checks upon the totalization of the space of exception, can nonetheless-at least in certain instances-be effective. Indeed, one could go further and suggest that a liberal theory of sovereign power understands full well the paradoxical relation between law and fact, norm and exception; and, precisely in light of such an understanding constructs an institutional system that cannot resolve the paradox but nonetheless attempts to prevent it from reaching an intensified and catastrophic conclusion. Given that Agamben is a nuanced and fair-minded thinker, one must wonder about why he largely ignores such a system. We think that one possible answer is that, just as for Agamben the source of the problem is not the institutional operation of sovereign power, but its object-bare life-so too the solution is not a proliferation of institutional safeguards but a rethinking of that mode of being. In this regard, we find his concluding musings on Heidig- ger to be suggestive.

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091


No Impact

No impact – the state has an obligation to prevent death – the sovereignty of the state is self limited [gitmo specific] Ellermann 9 [Professor of Political Science at the University of British Colombia, Faculty Associate at the Centre for European Studies, and Faculty Associate at the Centre for International Relations [Antje, “Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception” Presentation at the European Union Studies Association meeting in LA, April 2009, http://www.unc.edu/euce/eusa2009/papers/ellermann_02G.pdf]Yet, looking at the coercive acts performed by liberal states against homo sacer, it is evident that, even in the state of exception, state power is not free of constraint. As Christian Joppke has argued in the context of judicial constraints on immigration control, the sovereignty of liberal states is “self-limited” (1998). Most fundamentally, liberal states are bound by the duty to preserve life. Michel Foucault captured the life-preserving quality of contemporary state regulation in the concept of “biopower” which he contrasts with traditional modes of power that were based on the threat of death (1976). Thus, even when confronted with the depoliticized life of homo sacer – a life stripped of all membership rights – the sovereign is not free to act on the individual’s body as he pleases. Human rights norms such as the right to life and the prohibition of torture constrain the sovereign’s scope of action over those within his[/her] custody. While the state may be deprive the individual of physical freedom, it may not deprive her[/his] of food and basic shelter nor may the state violate her[/his] physical integrity. The power of these fundamental norms are

apparent even in situations where they are violated, as is evident in the U.S. government’s treatment of detainees in

Guantanamo Bay. Responding to international concerns about the Administration’s decision to force-feed hunger [End Page 10] strikers in violation of

international law, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs William Winkenwerder responded: “There is a moral question. Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life? … The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person’s life.” (The New York Times February 9, 2006)Thus, when violating medical ethics and engaging in what the Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers condemns as “inhuman and degrading treatment” (Article 21), the American state sought to justify its coercive interventions by pointing to its moral obligation to preserve life. In doing so, the Administration inadvertently recognized a limit to state action. While the treatment of “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo Bay presents us with the outer confines of

sovereign power, the limits of state coercion become even more apparent when we examine contexts where

sovereignty hinges upon the willingness of homo sacer to cooperate with the sovereign. Whether officers seek to determine a deportee’s nationality or elicit a confession from a criminal suspect, the state’s use of physical coercion is limited by liberal norms, statutes, and conventions.

Whereas the use of torture to elicit confessions was once widespread and widely condoned, under the influence of

liberalism it lost its status as a legitimate form of state violence. More recently, research on policing practices has shown a gradual

evolution of information gathering techniques from relying on direct coercion to resting on manipulation and deception instead (Leo 1992).

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Cede the Political

Engaging in the alternative abandons Western metaphysics and forecloses the possibility for research beyond modern politics, science and philosophy. Hussain and Ptacek 2k [Nasser and Melissa: Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst University “Review: Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred” Publiched by Blackwell Publishing, Law & Society Review, Vol 34, No 2, pp. 495-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091]What are we to make of such a possibility? Agamben has in mind a politics that would begin from the indistinguishability today of life and law, of zoe and bios, and from the impossibility of returning to a time when any such distinction could be maintained, to a time, that is, when bare life could be "separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights" (p. 134). This new politics would be a politics without relation, for, as we recall, it is as relation that the politics of the West (or the West as politics) are (or is) destined to exhaustion in the ever-present potentiality of (bio)politics for totalitarianism. For all that, though, this "new politics" and the promises it enfolds remains obscure. There is in this regard something disap- pointing about the final paragraph of Homo Sacer, in which, after the frequently brilliant exegesis that led up to it, Agamben concludes that just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be over- come in a passage to a new body-a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body-in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe... . Today bios lies in zoe exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies (liegt) in existence. Yet how can a bios be only its own zoe, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence. First, however, it will be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like bare life to be conceived within these disciplines, and how the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture without risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe. (p. 188)

We only need to maintain distinguishability – engaging in the alt destroys the political sphereHussain and Ptacek 2k [Nasser and Melissa: Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst University “Review: Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred” Publiched by Blackwell Publishing, Law & Society Review, Vol 34, No 2, pp. 495-515. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091]If we accept Agamben's general thesis, however, we must ask what consequences necessarily flow from it: "When life and politics-originally divided, and linked together by means of the no- man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life-begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception" (1998:148). The issue is whether or not it is possible to deny that questions of law are becoming indistinguishable from questions of fact, that death (as in the case of the "overcomatose" patient) is becoming indistinguishable from life, and so o n. If, in fact, it is not possible to deny this, the issue becomes whether or not we can maintain that this indistinguishability has less to do with the blurring of previously dis-tinguishable objects (and with what specifically these objects are) and more with a general inability to delimit clear boundaries that attends the modern "condition." In other words, a liberal critique such as we have just discussed would demand simply that distinguishability be maintained-if necessary, reestablished-as the sufficient response to the situation Agamben describes. At its most basic level, beyond being directed against Agamben's understanding of potentiality, this criticism asks how the constitution of the political realm could operate otherwise than either through the separation of bare life at the margins of the polis as the condition of any political life as such, or through the placing of life as such at the center of the political sphere as the bearer of politically meaningful characteristics. Yet another version of this same question would ask if the citizen is really a fiction, as Agamben asserts (1998:131), or rather a precarious reality that grants (even if the fiction, perhaps necessarily, describes this as a preservation of) our "natural" rights. Nonetheless, if we follow Agamben, we are confronted with (ourselves as) "a new living dead man, a new sacred man" (p. 131). This is the logical and seemingly unstoppable logic of democratization.

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A2: Terrorists are homo sacer

No link – terrorists are not homo sacer – they can mount legal challenges against the stateRogers 08 [Nicole: PhD, a Lecturer in law at the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University, Lismore, Law Text Culture, “Terrorist v Sovereign: Legal performances in a state of exception,” Lexis)Agamben asserts that 'we are all virtually homines sacri' (1998: 115), but it is easier to discern the characteristics of homo sacer in a more discrete group: the individuals accused of terrorist offences or suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activities. These individuals, stripped of basic rights, surveilled by the state, subjected to house arrest or even more extreme forms of violent detention by the state, can be readily identified as the contemporary incarnation of homo sacer. However, since such individuals are able to mount legal challenges against these forms of surveillance and control by the state, they do not share the central defining characteristic of homo sacer: that of being outside the law.

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