Agamben K—Aff Ans

Impact

Representation Good

Representations of suffering test the limits of biopower by bearing responsibility to naked life. This breaks through the imperfection of language demanding solidarity beyond identity or universality.Athanasiou ’03 (Athena – prof of social anthropology University of Thessaly, Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology,“Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1, p. 127-128)

My theme here is the political engagement with the technoperformativity of biopolitics in the age of genocide and in light of what Giorgio Agamben has called the Nomos of modernity—the concentration camp and its spectral echoes in Europe and the Balkans. Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology will provide the basis on which to address and develop my questions: What happens to the language of representation when it encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken, abandoned, dismembered human corporeality onto the body of the text? How does unrepresentability organize the representable? I attempt to trace the technoperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits, designated as they are by the palpable and yet ineffable—at once all too represented and radically unrepresentable—corporeality of deported, tortured, raped, violated, detained, dismembered, quarantined, annihilated, and surviving bodies.It is on the ethicopolitical force of such engagement that rests the responsibility to face up to the exigency of thinking and responding, even if there can be no question of knowing what it means, even if onecannot sense what it would be like to suffer the pain of the marked Other as s/he stands before the totalizing nomos of the power over naked life and living death, before biopolitical sovereignty and its demand for a uniform and [End Page 127] unified body politic. This actof responding, mediated as it may be by the unfixable semantic and performative forces of language, exceeds the formal structure of mere naming or re-membering. It even exceeds bearing witness. It is, above all, a movement of imagining the necessary possibility of shifting, evading, or disrupting this limitation, this irreparable limit to othering the self and selfing the other; a movement of reckoning with the radical incalculability of the possibility of perverting the

limits of this impasse, even though—or rather, because—there can be noquestion of fully overcoming it; and even though—or rather, because—language will always fail us.

Death Bad Death is no longer a political event --- it’s merely a biological cessation of life --- aff outweighs Hall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death,Power, and the Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 19)//roetlin

Death, in modernity, according to Foucault, is no longer a visible manifestation of power, “it is the end of life , the term, the limit, or the endof power too. Death is outside the power relationship,” he claimed, “[it] is beyond the reach of power, [for] power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms” (Foucault 2003c, 247-8). As exemplified by Damien’s execution, death in a society based upon sovereign power was the most public, the most obvious, and the most spectacular manifestation of sovereign authority. Even if one did not die by execution, death still had everything to do with power, as it was ultimately the manner in which one sovereign (the king) was relieved by another (god) (Foucault 1978, 138). In contrast, Foucault maintained, modern death is now “the moment when the individual escapes power,” the most secret and private aspect of existence (2003c, 248).

A2 Genocide Agamben is nothing more than an opportunist --- he preys on such terrible and sensitive issues as the holocaust in his attempt to aestheticize politics Durantaye, 5/21/2009 – Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University (Leland de la, “Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction”, Stanford University Press, p. 12-13)//roetlin

One response to the challenge of defining Agamben’s idea of politics, and the concomitant problem of relating his early work on art to his later work on politics, hasbeen to diagnose what a number of commentators have called an “aestheticization” of politics in his writing. J.M. Bernstein (2004) has called Agamben’s approach in Remnants of Auschwitz an “aestheticization of [the concentration camp prisoner’s] fate for the sake of a metaphysics of language” (14). A similar indictment is to be found in Mesnard and Kahan who find that Agamben’s ethical and political reflections in that work stem from “an aesthetic position” (Mesnard and Kahan 2001, 126). The charges levelled by Bernstein, Mesnard, and Kahanare the most scathing that can be made, tantamount as they are to accusing Agamben of callous opportunism in his discussion of the most sensitive and painful of matters. Whether those charges of are justified is something that we will look at in depth in Chapter Seven. For the moment, it is important to take note of this idea of an aestheticization of politics–as well as that this is not the only key in which it has been advanced. Benjamin Morgan (2007) has argued that Agamben’s conceptions of the relations of means to ends and law to violence are fundamentally shaped by Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement and thereby that his idea of politics is one whose model is to be found in an idea of art. On a related note Arne de Boever (2006) has concluded that “Agamben’s thought is crucially a literary-political thought. It is a literary thought that, in its political force, cannot be articulated within the limits of political science. Thus, it oscillates between the literary and the political and demands to be studied comparatively, across the disciplines” (159; italics in original). Whether or not De Boever is right in this claim, it should not be mistaken for a solution to the problem.

Surveillance Bad

Surveillance Bad Biopolitically violent electronic surveillance and information collecting systems are at the forefront of the move from Athens to AuschwitzAgamben, 1/10/2004 – professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris (Giorgio, “No to Bio-Political Tattooing”, published in Le Monde, a French evening newspaper)//roetlin

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had alwaysbeen properly considered inhumane and exceptional . Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels. All the same, it wouldn’t be possible to cross certainthresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalisation of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques. Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us : they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry. What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal"bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrollment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body’s biological life. These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny. Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, tothe point that it’s humanity itself that has become the dangerous class. Some years ago, I had written that the West’s political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to

Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish. I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state’s gears and mechanisms. That’s why we must oppose it .

Biopolitical control has become the primary function of the state --- surveillance plays a crucial role in forcing bare life upon the populace and sustaining the state’s ability toregulate your life --- this normalizes the state of exceptionDouglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 33-34 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlinThis type of structure, which allows for an unseen seer to watch over individuals occupying a given territory, is nothing new – in fact, such surveillance structures have been recorded from as far back as the Early Bronze Age (3000-2650 BC) (ibid, 78-85).However, these earlier surveillance systems were used in order to guard aterritory against an attack, as with the lookout towers constructed at the top of castles. What distinguishes the Roman work camp from other ancient surveillance mechanisms is the way in which it is integrated into, andin many ways the precondition for, the political structure that creates the camp. The encampment of rebellious Jews characterizes the state of emergency, in which ‘normal’ law is suspended in order to use any means necessary to protect the interest of the sovereign. Thus, the Jews in the camp must be removed from the political realm and treated as bare life that must be constantly monitored and exposed to the potentiality of violence . As we shall see, this camp serves a paradigmatic example of affects of surveillance, insofar as it is the amalgamation of the state of exception, bare life, violence, law, biopolitics, territory, and governmentality; not to mention that evidence of surveillance and campstructures that existed thousands of years ago demonstrates that none of these concepts are new and modern phenomena. Governmentality is able to function as the control of the population and the creation of bare life because it employs surveillance as a crucial tactic in the management of life – this is

clearly presented in the Roman camp example. However, although many of the concepts and techniques we see at work in the camp are not fundamentally different today, not everything has remained the same. The importance of a juridical-political system that acts according to the state of exception, or suspension of the law, is evident in the emergence of recent totalitarian and ‘democratic’ permanent states of emergency ; for example, the UK and the US have normalised the exception through the passing of ‘laws’ (Terrorism Act, Patriot Act, etc.) that essentially nullify the application of normal laws protecting human rights, while still holding them technically ‘in force’. We see also that these ‘exceptional’ laws go hand in hand with increased surveillance, both of which are tactics that establish control of the population . Yet what remains to be analysed is the relation(s) between surveillance, territory, and the state of exception – how does surveillance allow for the rise of the state of exception and the camp? And, more broadly, how are all there concepts integrated in an art of government? Surveillance must be regarded as the point at which the camp and the bare of the state of exception intersect in the governmental control of the population. Defining the Terms: Foucault and Agamben Although Michel Foucault wrote a book (Discipline and Punish) that dealt extensively with one method of surveillance, the panoptic, his more useful contribution to the theory of surveillance comes from his study of ‘governmentality’, or the ‘art’ of governing. In the course of his 1970s lectures at the College de France, Foucault underwent a significant shift in the emphasis of his theory, moving from the powerterritory relationship of sovereignty to the politico-economic governmentality of population; the concept of sovereignty concerned with maintaining power and territory is a dated pre-modern concept, and what needs to be analysed now is the governing of a population though various circulatory (that is, relational) mechanisms: “it is not expanse of land that contributes to the greatness of the state, but fertility and the number of men” (Fleuryquoted in Foucault 2007, 323). In other words, what is emerging in Foucault’s writings, beginningwith The History of Sexuality Vol 1, is the concept of biopolitics: “the management of life rather than the menace of death” (Foucault 1990, 143). Broadly, what is taking place in Foucault’s works and lectures in the mid to late 1970s is his description of the differences (nottransitions) between “sovereignty, discipline, and governmental Surveillance & Society 6(1) 33 Douglas: Disappearing Citizenship management” (Foucault 2007, 107). The essential goal ofsovereignty is to maintain power, which is achieved when laws are obeyed and the divine right of the throne is reaffirmed. ‘Power’ is the essential defining component of sovereignty, while ‘government’ is more or less just an administrative component within the sovereign state – a component that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was the private management (government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth, and goods of his wife andchildren, while the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance in striving for “the good life”. The rise of government in the sixteenth century is marked by this family government model being “applied to the state as a whole” (ibid, 93), as well as by the rise of “mercantilism” - the former not realizing its full scope and application until the eighteenth century and the latter being a stage of rasion d’état between sovereignty and governmentality. However, when the art of governing becomes the predominant

‘goal’ of the state in the eighteenth century, the family is relegatedto the position of an “instrument” and population emerges as the “maintarget” (ibid, 108) of the government (territory is the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself according to its territory, while government defines itselfin term of its population). With population as the central concern for government, other institutions and sites - such as territory, the family, security (military), police, and discipline - all become “elements” or “instruments” in themanagement of the population – these biopolitical tactics are what primarily distinguish governmentality from sovereignty.

O/W the Link We are core of the topic --- surveillance occurs at the intersection of bare life and the state of exceptionDouglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 35-36 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlinBare Life and the State of Exception This conception of biopolitics as an ancient and founding notion of sovereignty needs to be distinguished from what Agamben terms “bare life” or “homo sacer” (life that may be killed but not sacrificed). Biopolitical life, as mentioned above, is still within the juridical-political realm, but bare life is that which is banished from the polis. It is not pure political life as such, but a life that exists at the threshold between zoe and bios. Bare life is the indistinguishability between natural life and political life – a life that exists neither for the sake of politics nor for the sake of life: “ bare life…dwells in the no-man’s- land between the home and the city” (Agamben 1998, 90). It is a life that is banished from politics – outside of law – but included in its exclusion – still within the ‘force of law’: The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational [i.e. bare life]. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. (ibid, 110) How is this possible? How canbare life be excluded and included? What implications would this have? In order to understand howbare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the polis, it is necessary to introduce another concept: state of exception. This notion is derived, by in large, from Carl Schmitt’s book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt concerning the nature of the state of exception. The state of exception is a “suspension of law”, which is usually instituted during a period of war or another state of emergency: “The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence ofthe state, or the like” (Schmitt 1922, 6). Under the state of exception there becomes a ‘threshold’ between law that is in the norm but is suspended and law that is not the norm – i.e. not necessarily part of the juridicalorder – but is in force; so, in the state of exception there appears this “ambiguous and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings, which are

themselves extra- or antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the mere fact – that is, a threshold where fact and law seem to becomeundecidable” (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be underlined here is the relation betweenthe state of exception and bare life. This point is absolutely crucial forAgamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the state of exception opens up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare life is outside law but constantly exposed to violence and “unsanctionable killing” (Agamben 1994, 82). Agamben’s position can beunderstood in the triadic relation ‘state of exception-camp-bare life’; the ultimate power of thesovereign, and the complete dissolution of democracy into totalitarianism – two political systems that, according to Agamben, already have an “inner solidarity” (ibid, 10)– happens at the point when the state of exception becomes the rule and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the indistinguishability between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are exposed. The paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be applied to our current political milieu.

Perm—x Surveillance Key The surveillance state replicates the permanent state of exception—locks in violence Keller 13 Jared Keller is a journalist living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Al Jazeera America, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Verge. (Jared, Pacific Standard, “Why Don’t Americans Seem to Care About Government Surveillance?”, june 12 2013, http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/why-dont-americans-care-about-government-surveillance-60011 //SRSL)

It’s been less than a week since former National Security Agency systems administrator Edward Snowden , through the reporting of The Guardian and The Washington Post, lifted the curtain on the United States government’s vast surveillance apparatus. Snowden, who shed light on how theNSA monitors the cell phone activity, credit card data, and Internet browsings of millions of Americans, is responsible for one of the biggest national security leaks in U.S. political history. And the American people

don’t really seem to care. More than half (56 percent) of the 1,004 adult respondents to a national survey conducted June 6-9 by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post said that the NSA program tracking telephone records is “an acceptable way for the government toinvestigate terrorism.” Forty-one percent felt the practice was unacceptable. The Americanpublic is somewhat more divided on the NSA’s Internet monitoring programs, with 45 percent of respondents agreeing that the government should be able to “monitor everyone’s email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks” and 52 percent disagreeing. Despite the Prism revelations, this isn’t a drastic shift from how Americans felt back in July 2002, when a Pew survey found that 45 percent of Americans were OK with the government monitoring Internet activity in order to prevent future attacks (47 percent said it should

not). Pew’s researchers conclude from the latest survey that there are “no indications that last week’s revelations of the government’s collection of phone records and Internet data have altered fundamentalpublic views about the tradeoff between investigating possible terrorism and protecting personal privacy.” In a poll conducted shortly after the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, 78 percent of respondents agreed with the increased used of surveillance cameras in public places. Despite days of headlines about the American surveillance state and

government invasions of privacy (and a huge spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984 on Amazon), Americans seem to have accepted the scope and reach of the post-9/11 surveillance state into their lives as necessary. Pew notes that 62 percent of Americans believe the federal government should investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that means intruding on personal privacy, while just 34 percent say it is more important for the government not to intrudeon personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats. Why are Americans so comfortable with the surveillance state? It’s likely that this acceptance goes hand-in-hand with

an acceptance of the reality of modern terrorism. In a New York Times/CBS poll conducted shortly after the manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 78 percent of respondents agreed with the increased used of surveillance cameras in public places, “judging the infringement on their privacy asan acceptable trade-off for greater security from terrorist attacks,” as the Times put it. Of those respondents, 24 percent said a terrorist attack on the United States was “very likely” in the next few months and 42 percent somewhat likely. (In the previous year, just 10 percent of people had said another attack in theU.S. in the next few months was “very likely.”) The threat of terror in our cities, immediately after 9/11, wasparalyzing. Now, despite the horror of the bombings in Boston and the attacks that have been thwarted by counterterrorism efforts in the years since 9/11 (like Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to detonate explosives on the New York subway), terrorism seems to have become more accepted as a modern geopolitical phenomenon, a

fixture in the background of our daily lives. “Concern about another terrorist episode in the United States has increased after the events in Boston,” wrote Micah Cohen at FiveThirtyEight shortly after the manhunt for the two suspects concluded. “But there has not been the upsurge in concern over such an attack that there was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in New York City. The post-Boston polls have also shown that Americans’ personal sense of threat—as opposed to the generalized threat that the country faces—remains low.” How, exactly, does one get used to the threat of terror? Have Americans become so habituated to domestic dangers (as opposed to, say, the faraway theater of conventional war) that we’ve come to accept the continued presence of the modern surveillance state,even when a someone like Edward Snowden provides a glimpse as to how it intrudes on our everyday lives? It’s certainly possible. While terrorism is designed to demoralize and, well, terrorize a target population, groups with regular exposure to ongoing violence can develop a high tolerance for disruptions to civil society. Some of the best research into this matter focuses on the psychological impact of terrorism on Israelis following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000. In a 2003 article in The Journal of the American MedicalAssociation, researchers Avraham Bleich, Marc Gelkopf, and Zahava Solomon set out to determine the relationshipbetween terrorist attacks and the prevalence of traumatic stress-related symptoms and the public sense of safety in Israel. They discovered a “moderate” level of stress immediately following the outbreak of violence around Jerusalem from 2000 to 2002; survey participants “showed distress and lowered sense of safety, they did not develop high levels of psychiatric distress, which may be related to a habituation process and to coping mechanisms,” according to the researchers. This resonates with the reaction of U.S. citizens immediately following 9/11. A national survey conducted just days after the attacks found that 44 percent of the adults reported substantial stress symptoms. But over time, the trauma caused by the Intifada became somewhat normalized throughout the Israeli population. New York University’s Ariel Y. Shalev found in 2006 that PTSD levels eventually stabilized in various neighborhoods throughout Jerusalem, regardless of whether they’d been directly a ected by terrorism or not. A 2010 study in ff Economica on Israel’s experience with terror by Cornell University’s Asaf Zussman (and co-authored with Bank of Israel researcher Noam Zussman and Dmitri Romanov of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics) examined happiness and psychological health among Israeli citizens from 2002 to 2004, the years immediately following those examined by Bleich et al. In their econometric analysis of happiness among Israelis four years after the start of the Intifada, Zussman and her colleagues found that terrorist attacks had practically no effect on happiness levels. Zussman is careful to note that this isn’t a blanket habituation phenomenon for Israel’s entire populace—Arab Israelis experience a more negative reaction to terror attacks than Jewish Israelis—but that the general tolerance for terrorism in the

nation remained high as the years passed from the initial outbreak of violence. “Overall, the level of happiness remained stable throughout the Intifada years despite a large variation in the intensity of terrorism across time and location,” writes Zussman. “The evidence thus casts a doubt on the e ectiveness of terrorism in achieving one of its main objectives—ffdemoralizing enemy population.” But even if terrorism seems uncontrollable to the average citizen, why aren’t more concerned with the level of surveillance undertaken by a state they, theoretically, have some legal and political power in? Not only are programs like

Prism classified as top secret and their mention outlawed by the FISA courts that authorize their usage, but the very architecture of surveillance is designed to be unseen and unobtrusive. We only get riled up about violations of our constitutional rights when they’re obvious, and immediate, like the genital scrutiny of the Transportation Safety Administration . By contrast, terrorism, despite its infrequency, isa still a highly visible and deeply personal experience for Americans. Conor Friedersdorf draws out this distinction with regards to September 11: Most Americans don't just remember where they were on September 11, 2001—they remember feeling frightened. Along with anger, that's one emotion I felt, despite watching the attacks from a different continent. That week, you couldn't have paid me to get on a plane to New York or Washington, D.C. Even today, I'm aware that terrorists target exactly the sorts of places that I frequent. I fly a lot, sometimes out of LAX. I've ridden the subway systems in London and Madrid. I visit Washington and New York several times a year. I live in Greater Los Angeles. ... As individuals, Americans are generally good at denying al Qaeda the pleasure of terrorizing us into submission. Our cities are bustling; our subways are packed every rush hour; there doesn't seem to be an empty seat on any flight I'm ever on. But as a collective, irrational cowardice is getting the better of our polity. Terrorism isn't something we're ceding liberty to

fight because the threat is especially dire compared to other dangers of the modern world. All sorts ofthings kill us in far greater numbers. Rather, like airplane crashes and shark attacks, acts of terror are scarier than most causes of death. The seeming contradictions in how we treat different threats suggest that we aren't trading civil liberties for security, but a sense of security. We aren't empowering the national-security state sothat we're safer, but so we feel safer. The “national emergency state” from which programs like Prism have originated has outlived the national emergency. A strong executive isn’t necessarily alien in the American constitutional system in the event of an emergency. The Prize Cases established that one of the core obligations of that branch is to meet any exigency “in the shape it presented itself, without waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name,” and subsequent Supreme Court cases—I’m thinking Ex parte Milligan, Schenck v. U.S. (which established the “clear and present danger” prerequisite for executive action),and Brandenburg v. Ohio, in particular—have continued to define and circumscribe the juridical spaces where the

executive branch of the government can act unilaterally to deal with a crisis. The late political scientist Clinton Rossiter called this America’s “crisis government.” The best description that I’ve ever read for the phenomenon comes fromItalian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who coined the term "the state of exception " to mean “a position at the limit between politics and law ... an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political” where an executive acts extralegally in order to preserve an existing legal framework, effectively superseding the rule of law in order to save it. But if terrorismand the resulting surveillance state have become accepted features of American public life (which, according tothe latest polls, they have), then the apparatus the government deploys to adjudicate and prosecute our war on terror should become normalized in our existing legal regime. The Patriot Act and National Emergencies Acts that provide the legal basis for the modern surveillance state were supposed to be temporary "emergencies," but

with their continued re-authorization by Presidents Bush and Obama, they have become the norm. We are lurching from emergency to emergency, living in a permanent state of exception. Margot Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, puts it nicely in The Atlantic: “Foreign intelligence is the exception that has swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole.” This, I think, is the most significant impact of Snowden’s leak: not necessarily to expose wrongdoing in the legal sense (since the sweeping dragnet of Prism and the NSA’s monitoring of Verizon’s phone records are

technically legal) but to take the abstract legal concepts outlined under our emergency constitution and translate them into a political reality in the minds of the American populace. "I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in," Snowden told The Guardian. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them." The Pew/Washington Post poll may indicate that people are comfortable with swapping liberty for security, but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with an unaccountable, totally opaque, Kafka-esque security apparatus that falls in the legal gray

area of our ongoing state of exception. There’s an historical anecdote that often crops up among political theorists and legal scholars when they discuss the tradeoff between liberty and security during national emergencies. Following the fall of the monarchy in 509 BCE, the Roman republic moved to establish an executive branch that was headed by two co-equal magistrates, but the Romans recognized the necessity of a unitary executive that could act swiftly and decisively in times of extreme crisis, if only for a brief period of time. The only person to serve in this special constitutional role of dictus in Roman history was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, a Roman statesman and aristocrat who had previously served as counsel. Cincinnatus was elevated to the role of dictator in order to repel an invading tribe, and, following a swift military victory, Cincinnatus relinquished his authority, stepped down from the role of dictator, and returned to his life as a farmer. Cincinnatus’ brief rule is often cited as a prime example of civic virtue, but for political theorists like the late Clinton Rossiter, the Roman consul was an historical antecedent for a successful constitutional dictatorship. If the Pew data is any indication, the American people are amenable to the idea of a temporary

dictus state in times when imminent danger comes to the United States. But the whole goal of leaks in general, let alone Snowden’s leak, is to ensure that citizensdon’t become as habituated to the emergency state as they have to terrorism, to rouse Americans from a period of complacency to, somehow, recognize and rein in the emergency state when the intelligence community cannot live up the the virtue and discipline ofCincinnatus.

Perm

Perm—Power Power is both inescapable and not wholly negative --- it’s contingent on social relations and can be productive --- make them contextualize offense specifically to the caseHall, 5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death,Power, and the Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 2-3)//roetlinIn his numerous writings Foucault was primarily interested in the way that power acts on individuals. His early work was largely consumed with the ways in which power working through institutions shapes individuals into subjects. By contrast, his later work focused on what he termed technologies of the self, techniques through which power can be taken up by individuals insuch a way that it is possible for them to subjectify themselves. Power is everywhere, he contended. But rather than existing as a repressive negative force, power exists in fluid, reversible, and unstable relationships (1980, 93). Individuals are highly situated in such relationships, not only integrally related to other persons, but to institutions as well. Thus, we cannot dissociate ourselves, even theoretically, Foucault claimed, from this vast network of connections in order to live up to the model of the autonomous individual that we so frequently envision ourselves to be in the West. Power, according to Foucault, is frequently characterized in a negative way, meaning a power that forbids rather than a power that tells us what is best. While power still operates negatively in society through laws and other juridical mechanisms, the importance of such mechanisms, Foucault theorized, has been superseded by more productive forms of power. In the modern era, Foucault contended, there was a virtual explosion of numerous anddiverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, thus forcing juridical forms of power into a subordinate role (1978, 140). These productive controls depend primarily upon knowledge: knowledge of populations and the individuals that comprise them.It is such knowledge (and the application of such knowledge) that, for Foucault, essentially constitutes modern power.

Perm—Sovereignty

Making the system of sovereign power more equitable and justis the only alternative to complete submission to its violence.Edkins & Pin-Fat ’04 (Jenny – University of Wales Aberystwyth international politics professor, Veronique – University of ManchesterIR lecturer, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 13-14)

The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. While, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed as a form of resistance, it is not a resistance to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Christine Sylvester's exploration of what she calls"fictional development sovereignties" in this volume can be read as testimony to this. Nevertheless, strategies that address where lines are drawn are, undoubtedly, crucially important and often seem the only possibility for resistance. Indeed, in Chapters 2 and 9 both William Connolly and Karena Shaw offer compelling arguments and illustrations as to how and why this can and should be done. For example, Connolly proposes the notion of an "ethos of sovereignty" by which he means "a modified ethos of constitutional action [that] wouldnonetheless incline the effective range of court decisions and popularresponses in a different direction" such that, despite the paradoxes of sovereignty, such an ethos could alter its course. Furthermore, Shaw suggests that the discourses and practices of sovereignty that take the form of a sovereign state can be "a terrain of power and resistance" mobilized by "those seeking to resist or delegitimize assertions of sovereignty over them." Shaw unpicks the complex ways inwhich a Hobbesian grammar of a "shared ontology as the precondition for legitimate authority" is reproduced by indigenous peoples but yet offers (albeit precariously) possibilities of critically reconfiguringboth what that shared ontology might be and the constitution of legitimate authority. The promise of the arguments both Connolly and Shaw make is an active demonstration that the grammar of sovereign statehood (distinct from sov¬ereign power) is not fixed in a timeless configuration. As Connolly puts it, resistance is possible within a

logic of state sovereignty transformed by an appropriate ethos such that"old ideas [old practices of sovereignty, territory, property, capital, mastery, nationhood, and faith] provide new sites for possible metamorphosis today."

Perm—Law Permutation do both-- endorse a legalistic invocation of sovereignty that emphasizes borders and governmental authority to challenge exclusion Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art community working to understand unmanned and autonomous vehicles. By bringing together research from diverse academic and artistic perspectives which have, up until now, remained fairly silenton the issue, we aim to encourage new creative thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow the latest news, encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research, and engage a diverse community of thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the Drone, “The Forever War is Always Hungry”, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/the-forever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)

Whenever someone mentions sovereignty, it’s pretty easy to come away with the impression that all that’s at stake is the law : questions of territory, jurisdiction, violations of airspace, and so on. Consider, for example: Two months ago, Pakistan accused the United States of violating its sovereignty with drone strikes, demanding that their own government begranted control over strikes within their borders. Addressing recent drone strikesin Yemen, Glenn Greenwald noted that “killing a person without trial is not only extrajudicial, it also violates the sovereignty and dignity of the entire tribe to which the slain person belonged.” Most recently, writing for Foreign Affairs in the emerging genre of drone sinomania, Andrew Erickson and Austin Strange voiced concern

about how China is following the United States’ example in disregarding the sovereignty of other nations as the Chinese drone fleet has rapidly caught up to American military and surveillance capabilities. And so on. In both popular discourse and the policy press, pundits and commentators have overwhelmingly adopted

the same familiar blueprint: a legalistic invocation of sovereignty that emphasizes borders and governmental authority to the exclusion much else. There is a dangerous intellectual poverty in this. We are not, as Trevor Paglen recently observed, “moving toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one.” This is the era of total surveillance and extrajudicial killing, of public austerity and mass incarceration, of permanent unemployment

and global warming: what Jakob Augstein recognized last week in Der Spiegel as nothing short of totalitarianism. The extraordinary measuresof rendition, black sites, secret laws, black budgets and retroactive legalizations that have accompanied the vicious internal targeting of Muslims, protesters and whistleblowers—all of this has become the new normal, and coming decades will reap the whirlwind. This is what Paglen has dubbedthe “terror state”: not merely the possibility of “turnkey tyranny” one step away, but its virtual

inevitability. As the War on Terror now transforms into the forever war, I think we must begin by asking how exactly we ever got here. Of course, at first glance, the connection between all of this and the question of whose legal jurisdiction prevails in Waziristan seems faint at best. Certainly, no matter how broadly one reads the term “war,” one struggles to find in this anything like the strangely resilient imagery of nation statesbattling each other with state of the art weaponry, no matter how muchthis continues to dominate the way we think of war. In none of the usual accounts can one find something like Jean Bodin’s definition of sovereignty as “the absolute and perpetual power of the republic,” one of the principal influences from which Carl Schmitt famously drew his definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” to the law. But I would insist: these are not esoteric historical or theoretical concerns. I want to offer a very different approach here to the question of

what sovereignty means. Sovereignty has never been an anodyne policy question of whose jurisdiction applies, of who controls drones, or of how visible such clandestine military programs will be. Rather, following Eyal Weizman, one should begin by asking how sovereignty came to be exercised as the economistic management of death. In the strangest of places, David Graeber’s historical critique of an old anthropological debate over the divine kingship of the Shilluk of Southern Sudan offers what I find to be the most compelling explanation

for the forever war. That is, that the War on Terror is better understood as an unusually visible example of the constitutive principle of sovereignty: a permanent war between the sovereign and everyone else—the only kind of war there is. This is why, as Teju Cole once remarked, the forever war is always hungry.

A2 Rights L— Ø Universal; k2 ∆ Pwr

Our deployment of rights does not employ universalism and iscritical to alter power relations.Patton 2k5 (Paul - Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales,“Foucault, Critique and Rights,” Critical Horizons 6:1, p. 269-270)

This preference for the particular over the universal, for the ‘event-like’ character of both the systems of power and knowledge through which we are governed and the forms of contestation to which they giverise, appears to rule out any appeal to right or to rights, since these are typically understood to rely upon universal features of human nature or the human condition. Foucault is well known for his reluctance to rely upon any such universalist concept of human nature or human essence. By contrast, the predominant approach to the nature of rights in contemporary moral and political philosophy supposes thatthese inhere in individuals by virtue of some universal ‘rights bearing’ feature of human nature, such as sentience, rationality, interests or the capacity to form and pursue projects. In this manner,for example, Alan Gewirth argues along Kantian lines that the capacityto form and pursue projects ensures that all humans have a right to freedom and well being since these are necessary conditions of such agency.7 My aim in this paper is to argue that the apparent tension between the particularism of Foucault’s preferred form of critique andthe universality supposedly implied by the appeal to rights disappearsonce we abandon the universality condition and understand rights as historical and contingent features of particular forms of social life.I argue that not only is this way of understanding rights implicit in Foucault’s historical and naturalistic approach but that it finds support by in elements of the ‘externalist’ understanding of rights defended by a number of Anglo-American political philosophers. In contrast to the attempts to ground rights in a particular feature of individual human beings, these theorists take the view that whether ornot a body (individual or collective, personal or corporate) possessesrights will depend on facts about how that body is able to act and howit is treated in a given social milieu.8 Despite his reticence with regard to concepts of human nature and despite the initial impression that genealogical critique is inconsistent with appeals to any kind ofright, Foucault makes frequent use of the concept of right. For

example, in “What is Critique?” he defines critique as “the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth.”9 In interviews and political essays, he often called for new forms of right or for reliance upon rights that are notyet widely recognised or established. For example, in a 1982 interviewon the issue of gay rights, he advocated the creation of new forms of relational right that would recognise same sex relationships.10 In a 1983 interview on Social Security, he endorsed the idea of a right to the “means of health” and also a right to suicide.11 Finally, in a 1984 speech in support of non-governmental organisations attempting toprotect Vietnamese refugees being attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, he spoke of the right of international citizens to intervenein matters of international policy hitherto reserved for governments. He further suggested that the suffering of individuals “founds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.”12

Alt Fails

Alt Links**

Agamben’s call for the total transcendence of the logic of sovereignty reproduces divisons between forms of life and forecloses effective partial projects in resisting domination.Connolly ’04 (William E. – Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, “The Complexity of Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed.Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 29-30)

3) The "logic" of sovereignty: Agamben retains one habit of severaltheorists that he criticizes: he acts as if an account of the "logicof sovereignty" reveals ironclad paradoxes, paradoxes that could beresolved only by transcending that logic altogether. His mode of analysisengenders the eschatological gesture through which it closes. I doubt, however, thatpolitics or culture possesses as tight a logic as Agamben delineates. If I am right,biocultural life displays neither the close coherence that many theoristsseek nor the tight paradox that Agamben and others discern. Bioculturallife exceeds any textbook logic because of the nonlogical character of itsmateriality. It is more messy, layered, and complex than any logical analysis cancapture. The very illogicalness of its materiality ensures that it correspondsentirely to no design, no simple causal pattern, or no simple set of paradoxes.Agamben displays the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses politicalculture within a tightly defined logic. Some social theorists, again, expressthis hubris by presenting a tight model of causal explanation, othersby displaying a closed model of historical realization, and others bydissolving the first two images into tightly defined paradoxes. Allthree stances overstate the extent to which the complexity ofbiopolitical culture is resolvable into a consummate logic. Theattraction of these perspectives of coherence, realization, and tight paradox is that,if accepted, they allow social and cultural theorists to assume the role thatecclesiastical authorities once played in Christian states: that of definitive publicvisionaries who articulate the larger picture of the actual, the possible, and thedesirable in which sovereignty, law, and politics are en-cased. Kant, for example,participated in such a political drive. He sought to replace ecdesiological authoritywith the public authority of academic (Kantian) philosophers who continued theChristian tradition by other means. The continuing attraction of the Kantianproblematic in academic philosophy is bound to the authoritative standing that itbestows upon ac¬ademic philosophers in biocultural life. Agamben, of course,translates Kantian antinomies into paradoxes. But just below that facelift beats theheart of another scholar who reduces cultural life to a logic.

Not S – Inevitable

Biopolitics are inevitable. They have been present to some degree and cannot be eliminated.Connolly ’04 (William E. – Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, “The Complexity of Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed.Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 29-30)

(2) Biopolitics and sovereignty. Agamben contends that biopolitics hasbecome intensified today. This intensification translates the paradox of sovereignty into a potential disaster. The analysis that he offers at this point seems not so much wrong to me as overly formal. It reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian assumption that there was atime when politics was restricted to public life, and biocultural lifewas kept in the private realm. What a joke. Every way of life involvesthe infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical. Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Augustine, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel, writing during different periods, all appreciate the layering of culture into different layers of biological life and the concomitant mixing of biology into culture.They treat the biological not as merely the genetic or fixed, but as zones of corporeality infused with cultural habits, dispositions, sentiments, and norms. Biocultural life has been intensified today with the emergence of new technologies of infusion. But the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes it out to be. In late-modern life, newtechnologies enable physicians, biolo¬gists, geneticists, prison systems, advertisers, media talking-heads, and psy¬chiatrists to sink deeply into human biology. They help to shape the cultural being of biology, although not always as they intend to do. Agamben's re-view of new medical technologies to keep people breathing after their brains have stopped functioning captures something of this change, showing why a sovereign authority now has to decide when death has arrived rather than letting that outcome express the slow play of biocultural tradition. Numerous such judgments, previously left to religious tradition in predominantly Christian cultures, have now become explicit issues of technology and sovereignty in religiously diverse states.

Not S – No Political Alt Agamben’s analysis is overly formalistic and precludes real political alternativesBrannstrom 8 (Leila Brannstrom is an assistant professor and member of the Lund University Faculty of Law “How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument” 2008)///CW

In this article, I will argue against both Agamben’s diagnosis and his¶ prescription. One of the troubles with his line of reasoning, the one that I will focus¶ on, is its deadlockedand overly formalistic understanding of how law operates and¶ of how it might be used and transformed.2¶ Surely Agamben insightfully points out¶

certain dangerous trajectories in contemporary law and politics, but I believe that¶ the rigid way in which he analyses law and politics forecloses the most promising¶ ways of responding to and acting upon the problems thathe outlines.¶ There is a more general rationale for scrutinizing Agamben’s analysis of law¶ and of the state of exception and the implications of his analysis. Agamben’s¶ understanding oflaw as a mechanism that puts limitations to our political potential¶ and imagination and his conviction that law cannot be used for emancipatory¶ purposes, is shared by many engaged in the field of critical legal and social studies¶ who assume that exposing the repressive character of law and legal practices is the¶ only possible way of conducting critical studies of law. Such an assumption is¶ problematic as it overlooks the possibility to raise legal arguments and to engage in¶ legal practices for pursuing emancipatory politics,a possibility that in many cases¶ would be both forceful and productive. Sometimes, as in Agamben’s case, these¶ assumptions are built on a perception of law as a machinewhose workings, effects¶ and possibilities are given beforehand – once and for all. The objectification of law,¶ in turn, induces fear and aversion which often leads to political, social and legal¶ analyses that suffer, like Agamben’s analysis does, from an overemphasis on, and an¶ overestimation of, the legally authorized power of the state which nourishes the¶ persisting, but

misleading, idea that the major threats to our freedom and to a better¶

future are to be found in repressive state-practices.

Agamben cedes the political --- his theories are consolatoryand insufficiently supported Virno, June 2002 – italian professor of philosophy teaching the University of Rome (Paolo, Interview with Paolo Virno for Archipélago number 54, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm)//roetlin

Agamben is a problem. Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion,a thinker with no political vocation . Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When

there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historicallydetermined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetishwords in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

Not S – Sovereignty

The alternative cannot escape the logic of sovereignty and forecloses the best avenues of resistance.Connolly ’04 (William E. – Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, “The Complexity of Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed.Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 26-27)

Nowhere in his book, however, is a way out of the logic actually disclosed. The response of Hannah Arendt-to pull the state out of biopolitics-is considered and appropriately rejected as unviable. But nothing else is offered to replace it. Agamben thus carries us throughthe conjunction of sovereignty, the sacred, and biopolitics to a historical impasse. This combination is almost enough to make you return to Rousseau. Indeed, Agamben helps us to see the persistent attraction to the Rousseauian idea of the nation, in a world where itspreconditions of attainment are even less propitious than that in Rousseau's day. For Rousseau tried to conceal from many the paradox heencounters, while Agamben's analysis exacerbates a paradox that he cannot imagine how to transcend. Perhaps it is possible both to resistthe fantasy to return to a past that never was and to slip past Agamben's insistence that the paradox must be overcome in a new way. At any rate, I want to suggest that while Agamben's analysis is insightful in identifying three critical elements in the paradox and in pointing to dangers that flow from it, the formalism of his analysis disarms the most promising ways to negotiate it. To show this, I reconsider three key elements in his account: the meaning and role of the sacred, the relation between biopolitics and sovereignty, and the "logic" of sovereignty.

Not S – State of Exception No alternative and Agamben’s theory of the law is flawed – even Guantanamo isn’t a state of exceptionBrannstrom 8 (Leila Brannstrom is an assistant professor and member of the Lund University Faculty of Law “How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument” 2008)///CW

Agamben’s characterization of the situation at Guantánamo is marked by his¶ objectification and overestimation of law. His presentation of law as a monolithic¶ object makesit difficult to see that the reduction of the detainees to infrahumansis¶ to a large extent a work of making distinctions through law. The prisonersat¶ Guantánamo have been treated as objects of law rather than legal subjects by the US¶ executive, legislative and, to a lesser extent, by the Supreme Court who has been¶ willing to leave the detainees to military justice or other kinds of ‘alternative¶ justice’.42 The different attempts to do ‘alternative justice’ show clearly that what is¶ at stake regarding legal protection might not necessarily be a matter of inclusion or¶ exclusion but a matter of different, and more or less pleasant, ways of being¶ included. The ‘alternative’ legal designs outlined by the different branches of US¶ government are reminiscent of colonial legal practices and maybe it is only within¶ that context that the dehumanizing treatments of people at Guantánamo can be¶ understood.43¶ We can see Agamben’s overestimation of law in his analysis of the interactions¶ between detainee and detainer as a matter determined by the (lack of) law. It is as if¶ the brutality and racism at work at Guantánamo could be explained by the absence¶ of legal protection. An example that William Connolly brought up to illustrate his¶ argument that sovereignty is the end product of political acts at the micro level, is¶ illuminating also in this context.44 Connolly argues that the ‘ethos infusing¶ sovereignty’ in the American society inthe 19th century was primarily agricultural¶ and protestant Christian. He points out this ethos, illustrated as a play of forces¶ between the multitude of people, the traditions infused in the people and the state¶ authorities, as the main reason for why American Indians were excluded fromthe¶ new settler society. Even though a Supreme Court decision had ratified the¶ autonomy of the Cherokee people in the southeast, the sovereign ethos of Christian¶ superiority personified by settler vigilant groups and the refusal of President¶ Jackson to enforce the decision of the Supreme Court overturned the authority of¶ the Court and American Indians were pushed outside of legal protection. Connolly¶ argues, however, that if there had been a strong and successful political movement¶ drawing on another aspect of the Christian faith to change the ethos in which¶Presidents made their decisions and the settlers acted, events could have taken¶ another direction. Similarly it is the forces that animate law and state sovereignty,¶ rather than the structure of law and sovereignty, which explain the brutality¶ demonstrated at Guantánamo. As these forces are not all pervasive and unchallengeable,¶ it is possible to change the situation of the detainees through political action.¶ Agamben presents the situation of the detainees at Guantánamoas the result of¶ the onward march of history, turning it into something of an ontological necessity¶ rather than the outcome of specific political actions and decisions that can be¶ reversed. These actions and decisions are grounded in a certain political mind-set¶ that can be

rebutted. In Agamben’s theory on the state of exception, however,¶ political actors and strugglesare conspicuous by their absence. His frame of¶ description and line of reasoning depoliticizes, in Jacques Rancières words, ‘matters¶ of power and repression […] setting them in a sphere of exceptionality that is no¶ longer political, in an anthropological sphere of sacrality situated beyond the reach¶ of political dissensus.’45¶ As the quote introducing this section indicates, Agamben posits law as the¶ opposite of political action in the true sense and in so doing forecloses the¶ possibility of political contestation through legal arguments and actions. One¶ available form of political action with regard to the situation of the detainees is,¶ however, toremind of, and make tangible, the humanity of the prisoners. Asserting¶ the legal subjectivity of the detainees is one way of doing this. The possibility of¶ performing this political action is open to all of us since the question of who is a¶ legal subject and what that subjectivity should entail is not ‘owned’ by superior¶ powers as Agamben seems to suggest. As Rancière argues ‘the Rights of Man are the¶ rights of those who havenot the rights that they have and have the rights that they¶ have not’ (Rancière 2004, 302), which reminds us that if rights were authoritatively¶ defined by supreme powers, nobody would ever need their rights.¶ The gap between the letter of the law and its actualization, or between law and¶ fact, which Agamben takes to be signs of the fraud of law, might not be there to be¶ closed – the gap sustains the possibility of interpretation. The reach and meaning of¶ legal rules and rights, and of law itself, is never ultimately given, but developed¶ through meaning-inducing legal, political and moral performative acts. Absolute¶ identity between law and factualcircumstances will never come about and neither¶ is it desirable because law is a living practicewhose performance involves engagement¶ in political and ethical struggles about its formulation, interpretation and¶ application.¶ The position of the Bush administration which acknowledges that both¶ domestic and international law place limits on the exercise of power while¶ maintaining thatthese limits are not applicable to the detainees at Guantánamo,¶ expresses the kind of simultaneous validity and non-application of legal rules¶ providing protection that Agamben points out as characteristic of a state of¶ exception. The attitude of the Bush administration towards law – a ‘tactic’ to be¶ used instrumentally and strategically – is however, despite Agamben, not the final¶ authoritative interpretation of law regarding the situation of the detainees at¶ Guantánamo. The Bush administration does not own the meaning of law; accepting¶ their legal position as the final word, as Agamben does, is to represent them as more¶ or less omnipotent, thereby intensifying the sense of despondence, and the¶ attendant political paralysis, that is already widespread among those wishing for a¶ change.¶ Legal arguments and legal action are admittedly not useful, or even desirable,¶ means of political action in all situations, and there is no doubt that the story of¶ how law curbs power is not the whole story, but the step that Agamben takes, in¶ more or less wiping out the differences between law and lawlessness and between¶ rights and domination, does away with much of the grammar of the field of justice.¶ Asit remains extremely vague what his suggestion that we should ‘reach beyond¶ law’ might entail in practice, Agamben leaves us less well equipped in our pursuit of¶ justice.

Sov Good—Natives

AFF - Natives DA to ALT

Rejecting sovereignty and identity devastates indigenous struggles against ongoing colonialism.Connolly ’04 (William E. – Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, “The Complexity of Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed.Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 29-30)

People do protest vocally about inalienable property rights when the question of distinctive forms of governance over lands previously wrested from indigenous peoples comes up. But they can be offered these examples of previous creativity in the property form within capitalism to loosen them up a little. And be reminded that, in the past, the most creative embellishments have been reserved for those who already control major economic resources. Recall, for instance, that Tocqueville worried about the future effects of the "new manufacturing aristocracy" on the agricultural form of property that he considered to be indispensable to American democracy. But he did not follow that concern with a call todismantle the aristocracy of capital; he reserved that conclusion for those Amerindians who lacked Christianity and, at least he thought, agriculture. To chart plural practices of property and governance within capitalism is to encourage support for the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples to govern large stretches of territory previously wrested from them. Such practices are being pursued today in large areas of Canada and Australia. New strategies are being proposed for indigenous peoples to participate inworld capitalism in ways that stretch and pluralize the paradigmatic practices of capitalist property, ownership, territory, and sovereignty. Indigenous casino capitalism might become a way to generate capital forother productive activities. Such changes neither overturn global capital nor remain within its most familiar forms. Such modes of governance enable indigenous peoples both to reject the coercive demand that they be stationary peoples with unchangeable customs and to fold traditional elements of spirituality into new practices of territory, property, capital, and governance.

Ks of Agamben

Race K

Alt doesn’t solve and TURN: Depicting the modern constitutional state as camp is not enough – biopolitics canbe ruptured through correcting abandonment by the state along racial and class lines. Giroux 2k6 (Henry A. – Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, College Literature 33.3, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,”p. 181-182)

Given the Bush administration's use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of "detainees" illegally and indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance, kidnapping, and torture of alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil liberties in the United States, Agamben's theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the dangers of a government in which the state of emergency becomes the fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben'sclaim that the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault's panopticon) is now the model for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical commitments that have less to do with preserving life than with reproducing violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too narrow and fails in the end to recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is not the only formof biopower in contemporary life. The dialectics of life and death, visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that now constitute the biopolitics of modernity have to be understood in terms of their complexities, specificities, and diverse social formations. For instance, the diverse ways in which the currentarticulation of biopower in the United States works to render some groups disposable and to privilege others within a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed, any viable rendering of contemporary biopolitics must address more specifically how biopower attempts not just to produce and control life in general, as Hardt andNegri insist, or to reduce all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the "death camp," as Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over others. The ongoing tragedy of pain and suffering wrought by the Bush

administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a biopolitical agenda in which the logic of disposability and the politics of death are inscribed differently in the order of contemporary power—structured largely around wretched and broad-based racial and class inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics.4 While the murderof Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William DiFazio points out, "the state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . .increasingly [End Page 181]fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integralto national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned bya permanent state of class and racial exception in which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them thestatus of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant,

pathological, and dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vastinequalities of symbolic and material capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given theincreasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise of security states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Psycho KAgamben fails to provide a realizable alternative – the affirmative’s utopian fantasy of playing with the law inevitably fails to create a real political solution Sharpe 9 (Matthew Sharpe is author of Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real, coeditor ofTraversing the Fantasy, and the author of numerous pieces on political theory, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. He currently teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University “Only Agamben Can Save Us? 2009 The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3)///CW

Jacques Derrida qualifies his recourse to a messianicity without messianism. Alain Badiou looks¶ to Paul’s messianism to illustrate a logic allegedly characteristic of any ‘political’ subjectivity. By¶ contrast, we have seen in Part I how Giorgio Agamben is far closer to an open recuperation of¶ kabalistic messianism. Yet, I want now to contend that critical theorists shoulddefinitively not¶ lose our (human) heads, faced by such extraordinary formulations as those whichclose The¶ Open. Thinking of psychoanalysis – one of earlier critical theory’s decisive sources – should at¶ least put us on our analytic guard about to a position whoseidea of ‘redemption’ invokes infancy,¶ boredom, the fantasy of ‘playing withthe law’ (Agamben, 2005b, 64), an ‘Edenic’ sexuality¶ without mystery (Agamben, 2004, 90–92), a ‘community’ without any discernible symbolic¶ identity nor founding prohibitions, and an ‘in-humanity’ characterized by what Heidegger precisely¶ calls the ‘nowhere without a no’ of animals’prediscursive ‘captivation’ by their ‘disinhibitors’.15¶ Gershom Scholem, who by contrast with Agamben frankly diagnoses Sabbatai Zevi as a manic¶ depressive (Scholem, 1971, 60), is characteristically more sober. ‘The escapist and extravagant¶ nature of such utopianism’, Scholem writes of the kabalistic messianism Agamben rejoins in The¶ Open:¶ … [a utopianism] which undertakes to determine the content of redemption¶ without

having experienced it in fact, does of course subject it to the wild indulgence¶ of fantasy …(Scholem, 1971, 13–14).¶ Keeping our analytic heads, I want to asknow firstly about the form in which the content¶ of Agamben’s messianism is proffered, and in which it has been received. For Agamben presents¶ his thought in the recent texts as meaningfully political, or as pointing towards what he calls¶ ‘another’, ‘coming’ or ‘newpolitics’. And, given the timely political subjects that Agamben analyses¶ in Homo Sacer and State of Exception – which both addressed executive exceptionalism –¶ Agamben has been widely received in the post-Marxian left as a political theorist or philosopher.¶ One stylistic peculiarity of these more ostensibly political texts, certainly, is the interruption of¶ Agamben’s erudite analyses of the history of ideas with invocations of this ‘new politics’. The¶ content of these political invocations is cut from the same messianic cloth as the claims Agamben¶ presents in The Open: namely, desoeuvrement or worklessness (Agamben, 2000, 141), ‘pure¶ mediality’, ‘inoperative community, … the coming people, whatever singularities, or however¶ else they might be called [sic.] ...’ (Agamben, 2000, 117–118)¶ Agamben’s claim to speak authoritatively concerning ‘the political’, on the strength of his¶ readings of philosophical and religious texts, seems principally to be founded on the following¶ non sequitur. Versions of this non sequitur frame The Open, Means Without Ends, and Homo¶ Sacer:¶ i. At the beginning of political philosophy, the opening book of Aristotle’s Politics defines¶ human beings as both political (zoon politikon) and speaking animals (zoon

logon echon). These¶ traits single humans out as living animals who are yet beyond (meta) their physical, animal being¶ (zoe). We are animals capable of qualified forms of life: especially the bios theoretikos and bios¶ politikos.¶ Given this true exegetical premise, the problem is, Agamben feasts immediately upon the¶ questionable conclusion that:¶ ii. the most needful, if not the only, ‘political’ thing left to do (at least in our allegedly ‘ultrahistorical’¶ cul de sac) is accordingly to theoretically question this Aristotelian framing of the¶ political realm. Any more mundane disputation within this political realm would by implication¶ fall above or beneath, but in any case ‘outside’, the scope of political thought. So, for example,¶ The Open advises us:¶ We must learn …to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these¶ two elements [of man and animal], and investigate … the practical and political¶ mystery of separation … It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in¶ what way – within man – has man been separated from non-man … thanit is¶ to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values …¶ (Agamben, 2004, 16).¶ The hidden premise is evidently the ultra-idealistic idea that:¶ iii. Politics, or at least what is of significance in political life, is determined in advance by the¶ framing ontologico-philosophical categories that would delimit the political realm.¶ In the most open variants of this position, Agamben strays very close to what could be termed¶ a

‘political Platonism’. By Platonism, we mean here that lineage of Western thought that accords¶ un-tethered priority to theoria over praxis or else – as in Agamben’s type of case – simply forgets¶ the theoretico-practical difference, by directly collapsing praxis into theoria. The false conclusion,¶ pleasing only to theoreticians, is that true theoria would itself be equated with progressive¶ political action. Does Agamben really sponsor such a Platonism?¶ To answer, we can consider how in Means Without Ends, Agamben invokes the idea of a¶

political ‘form-of-life’ which would lie, as we now know, beyond all Law and its founding violence¶ (Agamben, 2000, 3–12). What does this ‘form-of-life’ involve? Disappointingly for the practically¶ oriented critical theorist, Agamben explains that it involves neither action nor considerations of¶ any higher justice. No: it involves ‘thought’:¶ I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable¶ context as form-of-life …an experimentum that has as its object the potential¶ character of life and of human intelligence. To think does not mean merely to¶ be effected by this or that thing, but rather … to be affected by one’s own receptiveness¶ and to experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure¶ power of thinking (Agamben, 2000, 9).16¶ However unencouraging or simply opaque this reads, Agamben’s recourse to Heidegger in¶ The Open (see I) indicates, Agamben’s Platonism does need to be situated in its specific modern¶ philosophical heritage. In particular, it cannotescape the reader that the characteristic form of¶ argumentation Agamben proffers us in all his texts is transcendental in the technical sense this¶ term acquired after Kant’s critical philosophy. Whether he is analyzing how words refer to¶ things17¶ , the distinction between human and animal, or – as in Homo Sacer – the relations between¶ law and life, Agamben’s aim is always the disclosure of the condition[s] of possibility of the¶ phenomena or ‘separations’ in question.¶We saw in Part I above, for instance, how Agamben contends in The Open that the Western¶ distinction between man and animal has been framed by way of ‘deciding’ on an exceptional¶ liminal figure. We now need to qualify that, for Agamben, this ‘decision’ is a transcendental¶ datum. Agamben’s claim is that it made possible the West’s succeeding understandings of how¶ human beings can be speaking and also living animals. In other words, the form of Agamben’s¶ argument in The Open replicates that of Agamben’s earlier treatments of the relation between¶ language and being in Language and Death – where indexicals and the voice are what make¶ possiblelanguage’s ability to refer – and also of the political realm, wherein Carl Schmitt’s¶ theological conception of the ‘sovereign … decision on the state of exception’ (cf. Agamben,¶ 2005b, ch.1) is elevated to what trans-historically makes possible:¶ … the creation and

definition of the very space in which the juridico-political¶ order can have validity … the fundamental localization (ortung) which …makes¶ the validity of the juridical order possible (Agamben, 1998, 19 (my italics)).¶ So Agamben’s critical descriptive analyses of existing phenomena are avowedly transcendental¶ in their logic and their intent. Our principal concern, by contrast, is with his ‘positive’ political¶ statements. What of these?, the supporter of Agamben might still rejoin with justice. Do they¶ not have a different argumentative form? And how might this form relate to the extra-political¶ messianism into which he is drawn?¶ To answer, let us now consider the two chapters (3 and 4) in Homo Sacer in which Agamben¶ comes closest to an identifiable, political prescription:¶ i. chapter 3 of Homo Sacer opens by addressing the distinction between constituting and¶ constituted political power. This distinction is central to Schmitt’s 1921 Die Diktator and his¶ 1928 Verfassungslehre. In a way that literally paraphrases Schmitt’s reactionary critique of legal¶ positivism and / as ‘parliamentarianism’, Agamben complains that today ‘the general tendency’¶ in the liberal West is ‘to regulate everything by means of rules’. Against the background of these¶ claims, Agamben turns with praise to Negri’s 1992 work, Constituting Power. Negri’s text,¶ Agamben argues, interrupts today’s insipid liberal consensus. Against the grain, Il Potere Constituente:¶ … undertakes to show the irreducibility of constituting power (defined as ‘the¶ praxis of a constituting act, renewed in freedom, organized in the context of a¶ free praxis’) to every constituted [already established, legalized] power ...¶ (Agamben, 1998,.43).¶ Like Benjamin, whose ‘Critique of Violence’ aims at conceiving a ‘pure’ violence outside of¶ the horizon of law-preserving or law-constituting violence (cf. Agamben, 2005b, ch. 3), Negri’s¶ aim is to conceive of a constituting power ‘that cannot lose its [creative or constituting] characteristic¶ in creating’. (at Agamben, 1998, 43) The problem is that Agamben has to confess in¶ Homo Sacer that he cannot see that Negri succeeds in this attempt. Negri does not, in Agamben’s¶ words:¶ … find any criterion, in his wide analysis of the historical phenomenon of¶ constituting power, by which to isolate constituting from sovereign power¶ (Agamben, 1998, 43).18¶Why then does Agamben turn to Negri here? The strength of Negri’s book, Agamben now¶ qualifies, ‘lies elsewhere’ than in its analysis of the categories of constituted and constituting¶ political powers. Where does this different significance lie? Here, Agamben says without blinking,¶ ‘the problem is … moved from political philosophy to first philosophy’. (Agamben, 1998, 44)¶ Negri allegedly opens up a theoretical perspective given which constituting power, despite appearances¶ and history, ‘ceases to be strictly a political category and necessarily presents itself as¶ a category of ontology’. (Agamben, 1998, 44) In order to weigh Negri’s notionof constituting¶ power, Agamben contends, we need to recur to Aristotle – not however to the Politics or Ethics,¶ but to Book Theta of the Metaphysics concerning the categories of potentiality (dynamis) and¶ actuality (energeia). In this way, Agamben’s analysis of constitutingpower in Homo Sacer issues¶ directly into ontology, and finds its messianic pitch there:¶ Only an entire new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity,¶ and the other pathe tou ontas will make it possible to cut the knot that¶ binds sovereignty to constituting power (Agamben, 1998, 44).¶ Book Theta of the Metaphysics stands in unlikely opposition to ‘thosepoliticians today who¶ want to reduce all constituting power to constituted power’, for Agamben (44). It does so as it¶ allegedly allows us to glimpse the possibility that dynamis can be thought ‘by itself’, without relation¶ to the energeia (actuality) we might have assumed it was there to actualize. Just as a tradie¶ will keep his ability to ply his trade if he is retrenched,down-sized or downs tools (cf. Franchi,¶ 2004, 36–37), so Agamben specifies:¶ … if potentiality isto have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately¶ into actuality, it is necessarythat potentiality be able not to pass over¶ into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to … do¶ or be… (Agamben, 1998, 45).¶ ii. chapter 4 of Homo Sacer (‘The Form of Law’) sets out from an analysis of the comportment¶ of Kafka’s ‘man from the country’ in the famous parable of the door of the law. Within the¶ contemporary period wherein Agamben has told us that the state of exception has become the¶ norm, so that all today’s laws are allegedly ‘in force without significance’, the enigmatic passivity¶ of the man in Kafka’s fable is read by Agamben as an eminent instance of a new, ‘passive politics’.¶ In his assessment, Kafka’s

unlikely political hero undertakes ‘nothing other than a complicated¶ and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law’s beingin force without¶ significance’ (Agamben, 1998, 55).¶ In what would this passive and patient politics consist? Again it is difficult to say. For in answering,¶ Agamben almost instantly reconfigures his analysis of the man at the door around an¶ ontological inquiry (firstly) into the meaning of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘abandonment’ which¶ in its turn issues (secondly) into the ruminations of the later Heidegger. The State of Exception¶ controversially asserts that Benjamin’s ‘pure violence’ – the ‘extreme ‘thing’ of politics’ – is the¶ ‘counterpart’ to Heidegger’s Being (Agamben, 2005b,59–60). In similar ontological clip, chapter¶ 4 of Homo Sacer remarkably announces the ‘political’ importance of rethinking the relation of¶ Law to life through Heidegger’s thought of ontological difference. According to later Heidegger,¶ readers will recall, Sein is not an entity. This is because it is the condition for the possibility of¶ any such entities intelligibly appearing to us. In giving seindes over to presence, Being ‘itself’ as¶ it were withdraws, abandons or dissimilates itself behind what it makes possible. If this much is¶ well and good, less immediately clear is what any of this could have to do with the enigmatic¶ praxis of Kafka’s man from the country. Agamben is once again clear. The bridge that would¶ span the apparent gulf between fundamental ontology and a reflection on the (non-)relation of¶ subjects tosovereignty and law is, he argues, to be located directly on the side of ontology:¶ If Being in this sense is nothing other than Being in the ban of being, then [sic.]¶ the ontological structure of sovereignty … fully reveals its paradox… it is necessary¶ to remain open to the ideathat the relation of abandonment is not a relation¶ … [what is required is] nothing less than an attempt to think the politico-social¶ factum no longer in the form of a relation ... (Agamben, 1998, 60).¶ Once again, that is, politics is abandoned in a philosophical analysis whose logics explicitly¶ point away from the political realm to a reflection on the transcendental conditions for any such¶ realm.

Fem K

The concept of “play” is inherently exclusionary of gender difference – Agamben’s concept of Playland and biopolitics only apply to males which turns the case and makes biopolitics inevitableMills 8 (Catherine Mills is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics in the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. I was previously employed at University of Sydney, Australia, and have been Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New South Wales, and the Australian National University. I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Australian National University. My main research interests lie in the areas of biopolitics and bioethics. “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice”, The Agamben Effect p. 23-24)///CW

As I have argued elsewhere, to the extent that relationality enters into Agamben’s thought, it does so early in the form of autoaffection. But this radical rejection of relationality appears to be premised on the elimination of alterity altogether, including the alterity internal to and constitutive of autoaffection. The question that can be asked here, then, is what the cost of this would be. To make clear the weight of this question let me briefly consider one way in which this neglect of alterity and difference plays out. As I mentioned previously, Agamben takes his initial inspiration for his conception of play as an interruption of calendrical time from Collodi’s description of Playland in Pinocchio. One notable characteristic of this description that Agamben passes over in silence is that Playland is populated entirely by boys. Without taking this issue up in detail, the question that poses itself here is to what extent this idyllic conception of play is actively premised on the exclusion of gender difference. In what way would the presence of a girl or girls disrupt, interrupt, or undo the cacophonous, indifferent play of boys? Not dissimilarly, Agamben is silent on issues of gender in reference to Aristotle’s distinction between the life of the oikos and politics, even though it is insistently present in the designation of the oikos as the domain of reproduction that necessarily precedes and supports thelife of politics. As Derrida sharply remarks, the distinction of bios and zoe is not as straightforward as Agamben takes it to be. The point here is not that "girls" or "women" should, as if they could, simply be added to thescene of the play or biopolitics in such a way that the scene itself and the conceptual framework built on it would remain without substantial change. Nor is the point to simply note the exclusion of women from Agamben’s philosophical lexicon at an explicit textual level—the consistent useof gender-specific pronouns as if their reference were universal may sill be indicative of a philosophical blindness or “amnesia,” but it does not reach to the depths of the problem in itself. For what would it be to ask the “question of gender” within the messianic framework that Agamben proposes? Indeed, can such questions he asked within that framework?

Derrida KThe basis of Agamben’s philosophy is based on a false dichotomy between bios and zoe found in Aristotle’s text – this paradoxically turns the case because Agamben attempts to posit himself as the first to discover the truth which makes his work a form of sovereigntySwiffen 12 (Amy Swiffen is a professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University. She has a PhD from the University of Alberta. Her intellectual background is in socio-legal studies and social and political theory. Her areas of expertise include sociological theory, deviance studies, criminology, ethics, biopolitics, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of law “Derrida Contra Agamben: Sovereignty, Biopower, History” 9/30/12 Societies)///CW

Derrida’s issue with this conception of sovereignty is multi-layered. As mentioned above, he begins¶ by pointing out how it involves the naming of firsts: Agamben “Wants to be the first to announce an¶ unprecedented new thing (…) and also to be the first to recall that in fact it’s always been like that,¶ from time immemorial ([1], p. 332).” Indeed, Agamben claims both that the ‘‘Production of a¶ biopolitical body [is] the originary activity of sovereign power,” and that the politicization of bare life¶ in the state of exception is the “Decisive event of modernity ([2], pp. 4, 6).” That is, heclaims to be¶ uncovering the essence of sovereignty in the state of exception, while at the same time identifying the¶ entry of bare life into the polis as distinguishing of modernity. Derrida insists that the confusions and¶ contradictions inherent in this formulation are obscured by the naming of firsts. To illustrate, let us¶ turn more closely to the attribution of the zoe/bios distinction to Aristotleand scrutinize whether it can¶ indeed be found in his ancient text.¶ For Agamben’s theory to hold, the difference between zoe and bios must really be present in¶

Aristotle. However, Derrida points out several instances where Aristotle seems to usethe term zoe in a¶ way that contradicts the interpretation that Agambenputs forward. One significant exception would¶ seem to be the famous definition of the human being as politikon zoon (‘political animal’). With the¶ term politikon zoon, Aristotle seems to be describing a zoe that is political. In fact, Derrida points out¶ that zoe, or zen (‘to live’), is used repeatedly by Aristotle in the Politics to describe the human as a¶ political animal, and each time he “Never fails to specify” that the human zoon is political “By nature”¶ (physei) (Aristotle quoted in [1], p. 315). This specification implies that the descriptor ‘political’ refers¶ to how humans live naturally, and is thus a qualification of their animal life. Being political is a natural¶ attribute of human life and their specific difference from other animals. The definition of the human as¶ politikon zoon, therefore, would seem to be a glaring exception to the zoe/bios distinction. Agamben¶ addresses the issue by claiming that there is no contradiction if one interprets the meaning of the¶ qualifier politikon properly. Here is the passage:¶ It is true that in a famous passage of the same work [the Politics], Aristotle defines man as a politikon zoon¶ (Politics 1253a, 4). But here (aside from the fact that in attic Greek the verb bio nai is practically never used¶ in the present tense),

“political” is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather as a specific¶ differencethat determines the genus zoon ([2], p. 2).¶ Agamben is arguing that there is a difference between an attribute of a living being and a specific¶ difference that defines the living being. Yet, Derrida’s position is that this difference is neither certain ¶ nor clear. The phrase politikon zoon implies both: “The specific difference or the attribute of man’s¶ living, in his life as a living being, in his bare life, if you will, is to be political ([1], p. 330).” There is¶ no clear difference between the two notions. They seem to be “Perfectly reciprocal” and¶ ‘complementary’ ideas ([1], p. 330). Thus, Derrida insists that Aristotle did not oppose zoe and bios as¶ Agamben suggests. The concept of politikon zoon implies there was never any such distinction in his¶ concept of the political; for Aristotle, “Man is that living being who is taken by politics: he is a¶ politically living being, and essentiallyso ([1], p. 348).” Thus, Derrida claims that it is ‘obvious’ that¶ Aristotle is already “Thinkingof biopolitics ([1], p. 349).” However, the division in life that apparently¶ structures sovereignty is not based in his ancient text in the way that Agamben implies. The distinction¶ is of Agamben’s own making much more than the argumentative gesture he deploys would suggest.¶ It is evident that Derrida agrees with Agamben that biopower is an important concept in the¶ contemporary moment. He notes the “Incredible novelties in bio-power” that must be addressed, but¶ there is an issue concerning the “conceptual strategies relied on” to characterize these novelties ([1],¶ pp. 330, 326). Derrida’s reading of Aristotle demonstrates the zoe/bios distinction, which is “The¶ frontier along which Agamben constructs hiswhole discourse,” does not go deep enough to function as¶ an originary political relation ([1], p. 321). Moreover, the insistence on seeing historical and¶ philosophical origins, exemplified by the reading of the bios/zoe division in Aristotle is, in effect,¶ producing the very sovereign form of exclusion that Agamben criticizes in his work. This is not to¶ suggest that Derrida’s positionis that ancient texts are not relevant to contemporary politics. On the¶ contrary, they are ‘indispensable’ for understanding the “Bio-powers or zoo-powers of what we call¶ the modernity of‘our time’ ([1], p. 333).” The issue however is how to conceive of the relationship¶ between these texts and ‘our time,’ how to think history neither in terms of ‘diachronic succession’ nor¶‘synchronic simultaneity’ ([1], p. 333). Agamben’s approach involves thinking history in terms of “A¶ decisive and founding event ([1], p. 333).” Derrida’s criticism intends to compel a reconsideration of¶ this way of “Thinking history, of doing history, of articulating a logic and a rhetoric onto a thinking of¶ history ([1], p. 332).”¶ The difference in conceiving history corresponds to a difference in the two thinkers’ positions on¶ the future of sovereignty. On the one hand, Derrida rejects conceptualizing sovereignty in terms of an¶ essential relation. The readings in The Beast and the Sovereign suggest instead that sovereignty has¶ “More than one ground (…) more than one solid and single threshold ([1], p. 334).” This is not to¶ suggest Derrida leaves us with an abyssal void or groundless depth underlying the concept; rather, it¶ suggests that there are multiple forms of partition, division, and condition that broach a sovereignty¶ that is imagined to be indivisible. If this is

correct then it is not possible to oppose sovereignty¶ because sovereignty is not one thing.14 For instance, to unconditionally oppose sovereignty would¶ mean opposing classical principles of freedom and self-determination. There is no way to¶ conceptualize freedom without a certain sovereignty. Thus, it is impossible to reject

sovereignty¶ without also threatening the value of liberty. The issue is therefore not a choice between sovereignty¶ ¶ and non-sovereignty but among ways of sharing, transferring, translating, and dividing sovereignty.15¶ In contrast, Agamben’s formulation conceives sovereignty in terms ofan essential relation to bare life.¶ The idea of an essential political relation implies that it might be possible to overcome sovereign¶ politics, if only the relation were discarded.16 Sovereignty could be abandoned and a ‘coming¶ community’ ushered in, in which there would be no exception of the fact of living from the form of¶ life [20].17