Life and Political Life

Giorgio Agamben opens his 1995 Homo Sacer with a discussion of the origins of “biopolitics” (Foucault’s term). According to Foucault’s account, Aristotle’s politics instituted a basic distinction between life per se and the good life, which is “politically qualified life.” Life per se takes place in the household, and consists of reproduction, labor, and subsistence. The good life, the political life, is within the purview of the city.

Modernity, Foucault suggests, erased or blurred this distinction: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.” Modern states make a people’s health and reproduction political issues: “What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.” Modern politics thus institutes biopolitics.

Foucault pursued his account of modern politics in a fresh way, abandoning “the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on the juridico-institutional models” and replacing it with “an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life.” Foucault thus focused, on the one hand, on the actual political techniques deployed by the state to control subjects (police, prisons, etc), and, on the other hand, the “technologies of the self” that simultaneously bound the individual to an identity and to an external power. Agamben finds unclarity in Foucault’s account of how the techniques of individualization and the actual exercise of totalizing power come together. He wants to offer a clearer view of how the juridico-institutional aspects of political life and the “biopolitical” side.

He suggests that the roots of biopolitics are found at the beginning of the Western tradition of political theory, in Aristotle. The opposition of life and good life, of “bare life” and “politically qualified life” is not merely an opposition; it is at the same time an admission that bare life is implied in the political realm. There cannot be an absolute exclusion of bare life from political life. Western politics is constituted “through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life.”

Agamben sees a parallel with Aristotle’s account of the relation between voice and language: “Among living beings,” Aristotle writes, “only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their nature has developed to the point of having the sensations of pain and pleasure and of signifying the two). But language [logos] is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city.” He interprets this as implying that “the living being has logos by taking away and conserving his own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it.” Thus, language and politics are both founded on originary exclusions (sacrifices), which are also inclusions. As a result, Agamben argues that “politics . . . appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized. In the ‘politicization’ of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence ?Ethe humanity of living man is decided.”

Foucault is wrong, he argues, to suggest that biopolitics is uniquely modern. Rather, the biopolitical impulse is there from the beginning, in the exclusion/inclusion of bios, bare life. What is unique to modernity is the extent of the biopolitical: “the realm of bare life ?Ewhich is originally situated at the margins of the political order ?Egradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.”

Agamben’s book looks to be a stimulating account of modern politics – drawing on anthropological and theological sources in addition to classic political resources.