Agamban's State of Exception and Bare Life

Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, warned us about these days of covid, lockdown, government mandates, compliance, rebellion, and questions of freedom, surveillance, and individual sovereignty. Agamben's philosophy gives language to the crisis of security, regulation, and pandemic that modulates every aspect of our current global situation. In this way we might say that Agamben's biopolitical philosophy culminates in the lived experience of our present moment.

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Agamben interrogates Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty ("Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception") to its limit concept: indeed, where Schmitt identifies the relationality between the who within the political order and the subjects of the sovereign's dictates, Agamben pushes further into the question of the very threshold of the political order itself. Agamben, like Walter Benjamin before him, identifies the crumbling of the State structures whereby the state of emergency has become the rule rather than the exception. Thus Agamben writes, "the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new perspective" (12). For Agamben, it is a most urgent matter---an "urgency of catastrophe"---to identify this political threshold and, moreover, to give language to a sacredness of life eroding (if not totally eroded) under the failed and failing structures of the State.

Schmitt's Political Theology establishes the rule of law dependent on a "regular, everyday frame of life" whereas the exception---more interesting in its novel irregularity---"thinks the general with intense passion." "The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone," Schmitt contends in deference to Soren Kierkegaard's similar theologization of the exception. For Agamben, the exception is the most interesting threshold of political order because it is where "The rule applies...in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it" (18). The exception is that which is ex-capere, taken outside---it is not excluded per se, but it is set outside of the framework as a unique entity in suspension to that which is inside. To this phenomena, Agamban gives the name relation of exception to the extreme dialectic in which something is included because of its exclusion. This threshold between the two---that which is regular, internal, ordered, everyday; and that which is chaotic, external, disordered, and rare---is what Agamben delineates as the state of exception. One is a movement, a relationality, a dialectic; the other is a space, a localizable coordinate, a plane of being.

At this threshold of both relation and of the state of exception lies the paradox of sovereignty in which there is an "irreducible link uniting violence and law" (63) thereof. In Critique of Violence Benjamin observes that violence both posits a law and preserves it---a law comes into being in order to combat an act of transgression or criminality, but in order to maintain the law, the threat of violence legitimates the law thereby enacted. To break this tautological destruction that this dialectic perpetuates between the law and violence, Benjamin identifies that which he calls "divine violence"---a violence that deposes the law insofar as it dissolves or eradicates the constitutive link between the two (i.e., violence and law). The bearer of this link between violence and law Benjamin terms "bare life," and it is this bare life that interests Agamben. Indeed, what is the value of this "bare life" at the intersection between the law and violence?

There is a predominant assumption in our twenty-first century worldview that human life is sacred however much this elevation of life does not exist in classical Greek philosophical discourse. Agamben's project, therefore, is an analysis of the process by which human life came to be considered sacred and the ways in which the state of the exception operates in proximity (or even in constitutive relationality) with sovereignty. What, therefore, makes something sacred? Agamben writes, "the structure of sacratio arises out of the conjunction of two traits: the unpunishability of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice" (81). Said differently, the homo sacer may be put to death according to the law which is preserved through violence; and yet this same homo sacer, by nature of his ordinary existence, is not fit for sacrifice to the divine realm. The homo sacer has not undergone the consecratio which moves him from the human to the divine realm (from the profane to the sacred), but is, paradoxically, still set outside, ex-capere, of the human law when the law permits him to be put to death. Agamben identifies the double exclusion and double capture from both the human and the divine law in the identity of the homo sacer: "What defines the homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed" (82).

Moreover, it is not until the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 where the mere fact of birth gives each human his or her own individual claim to sovereignty: "The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien régime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the "sovereign subject" so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted" (128). Here, as Hannah Arendt has observed, nativity comes to imply nation so that the Rights of Man become intricately bound with the Rise and Fall of the Nation State in which he or she is born. Further, with the overthrow of King Louis XVI, the citoyens assume the position of the sovereign so that each individual person becomes elevated not only to national citizen but also on par with the former sovereign (les membres du souverain as Jean-Denis Lanjuinais referred to the people of France at the 1792 convention).

Today, the refugee crises at the borders of Europe and the United States challenge this notion of modern sovereignty defined by a mutually constitutive interpretation of nativity and nationality. Agamben writes, "Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain---bare life---to appear for an instant within that domain" (131). Refugee camps become the geopolitical space of exception, a biopolitical paradigm that disrupts bare life from the fragile and tenuous framework of natal/national sovereignty.

But beyond the refugee camp, any kind of camp---a quarantine camp, for example---becomes "the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule" (168-69). Further, laws or mandates that are devised and imposed based on the cases of exception rather than the cases of average, ordinary, predictable patterns (as Schmitt defines the rule of law), similarly operate in accordance with the suspended state of exception that imposes draconian, specific, and overreaching applications of the law to arenas that are otherwise ordinary, healthy, and functioning without such forceful surveillance and regulation. "In the camp, the state of the exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order" (169). The Nazi camps remain the most extreme example of the state of exception "insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life"; further "the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation" (171).

The camp is the materialization, the explicit manifestation, of the state of exception in which "bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction" (174) so that we enter into the liminality of the camp, however innocuous it may be, every time such a space is created. "In this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears an an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself" (ibid.). As the camp becomes a fourth constitutive element in the order of the state, the nation (nativity), and geographic location/land, the ordinary life of the polis or the city will, by extension, also have to adapt to the failure of the system to incorporate those of a-political status: "we must expect not only new camps but also always new and more lunatic regulative definitions of the inscription of life in the city" (176).

For Agamben, "it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West" (181), and we can see this playing out with governmental obsessions with isolation camps to quarantine the sick or the asymptomatic. The camp is the new extrajuridical space where laws can be suspended or haphazardly created and applied---with varying levels of violence and subjugation---depending on the whims of an autocrat or an individual enforcer's interpretation or persuasions. We are now at a point in time where globalist interests have posited the benefits of a borderless global conglomerate thereby initiating a "global civil war" of national versus globalist objectives.

Because so much of Agamben's work predicts the very crises of sovereignty, borders, isolation, and health mandates that we are experiencing today, Agamben himself has issued public statements on his theory of bare life vis-a-vis the coronavirus pandemic. As one can imagine, he identifies a tyranny of medicine as a new religion enforced on a population as a juridical norm: "That we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not a rational scientific demand is immediately obvious." Agamben identifies that cardiovascular disease still supersedes the risk of death of covid, and yet doctors have not demanded by decree ex lege a prescribed diet, exercise, and national health requirement. And yet, with covid, "Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted, as if it were obvious, renouncing their own freedom of movement, work, friendships, loves, social relations, their own religious and political convictions." Agamben argues that covid obsession has taken over Christianity and capitalism as the primary global cult worship.

Agamben writes powerfully on the state of coronavirus exception that has dominated all other narratives and marginalized any truth seeker that questions the logic, rationality, the ethics, or the morality of the autocratic medical tyranny subjugating the people of the planet since January 2020. Agamban's closing arguments:

As has happened many times in the course of history, philosophers must again enter into conflict...clearly the thought of those who continue to seek the truth and reject the dominant lie will be, as is already happening before our eyes, excluded and accused of spreading fake news (news, not ideas, because news is more important than reality!). As in all moments of emergency, real or simulated, we see once again the ignorant slander philosophers and scoundrels seeking to profit from the disasters that they themselves have provoked. All this has already happened and will continue to happen, but those who testify to the truth will not stop doing so, because no one can bear witness for the witness.

Here is Agamban's article in English translation by Dr. Adam Kotsko; and here is his article in the original Italian. I agree with Agamben.

Who Is a Christian?

My former approach to theological/philosophical/literary reading was to sit with book and pen: reading, furious note taking, more reading, more frenetic marginalia. But since I have had a baby (or two or three or four) sitting on my lap for the past six-and-a-half years, I no longer have a free hand to take intensive notes. Instead I have taken to earmarking the pages in my books that deserve repeating, re-reading,  pondering. As it turns out, I have earmarked *every* page in my most recent book selection, Who Is a Christian?, by Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Von Balthasar especially takes aim at the ambivalence of academic Christians. By parodying the academy's patronizing language, Von Balthasar outlines the dichotomy between the "backward-striving Catholic" and the "'modern man' (truly a mythical giant!)" and thereby urges every scholar "to take the Word of God for what it is, namely, a call to an absolute decision…'He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters'" (Matthew 12:30; Luke 11:23). And here is where Von Balthasar pointedly critiques the academic world that would divorce faith from reason, that would eradicate religious conviction from scholarly critique: "In scholarly neutrality one can at best labor only on the margins, and those who tarry too long in the margins seem either to have evaded the decision or to have decided in the negative and to be covering up the fact with scholarly activity" (36).

Von Balthasar offers a clarion call toward Christ-centered scholarship. Encouragingly, my discipline of literary theory has begun to explore the themes that we Catholics have embraced for over two millennia: a priori virtues such as love (i.e. Alain Badiou); the importance of bare life (homo sacer), Pauline wisdom, and Benedictine communal living (i.e., Giorgio Agamban); and Christological reconciliation or, in immanent terminology, "hegemonic relationality" (i.e., Ernesto Laclau). These scholars, operating in the margins of Christian belief, adamantly refuse to search beyond the material threshold into the transcendent possibility of an infinite God-creator…but even these self-styled "moderns" cannot explain from where love or conversion or community or reconciliation derives in a purely physical cosmology. They concede that St. (the excision done by "modern" man) Paul spoke quite elegantly if not beautifully and accurately about what it means to love (1 Corinthians 13). And they also insist upon a relationality that reconciles itself unto itself, but heaven forbid, don't mention Jesus---so they say. I even read one scholar write about the failure of Jesus owing to Jesus's inability to wed his radical anti-clericalism to a state-sponsored longevity, as though Christ's death was the death-knell to his radical mission. Hello!? It is precisely because of his death and *resurrection* that Jesus of Nazareth became not only the historical figure that he is today but the Savior of the World. As much as these scholars want to deny Christ (and as much as those who study these texts seek to compartmentalize their Christian belief from their academic reputations), Christ is *always* the answer, looming in the margins of secular scholarship, ready to fill the space with His preeminent light: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John 14:6). Even these skeptical, atheistic, relativistic, intellectual, and "modern" theorists cannot help but turn again and again and again to the teachings of our Church. And then they laud themselves for discovering something which first they denied, then they mocked, then they profaned, then they eventually (re)discovered after centuries of disdain, and now they hubristically profess to "backward-striving Catholics" the truths that the Church has held constant from the very beginning. Yet, it is hopeful to see that Christ is again the center of scholarly attention (blessed be to God!) however much the name of Jesus still is ignored, vilified, or treated as an annoying non sequitur to the more enlightened work of immanent research. Indeed, the actual name of "Jesus" is rarely employed by these authors so as to avoid the visceral reactions such iteration imposes: "At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bend" (Philippians 2:10). To avoid the intrusion of Jesus, scholars simply avoid uttering his name altogether. As such, they unwittingly offer the highest homage to Jesus's name not unlike the sacred tetragrammaton of ancient Judeo-worship whereby pious Jews honor their/our God by not speaking His name.

I was also particularly taken by Von Balthasar's emphasis on the "doubly intensive theological effort" (42) of the Catholic theologian who must allow for an infinite number of additions to Church pedagogy while also preserving the constant teachings of the Church's past. Where other "modern" approaches even in Christianity favor a "method of subtraction" (ibid.) whereby the solution to moral conundrums results in a relaxation or subtraction of moral laws, Catholics view such theological strain as an ever-deepening relationship between God the Father and we His children. "But how very important it is, as a precondition of such an enterprise, for both parties to the dialogue to have God before them and not at their backs!" (43). Rather than conforming ourselves to God's law, our modern culture demands God's law to change to ourselves. Contrary to the spirit of the times (i.e.,  the serpent-like dialectic of the Hegelian zeitgeist), the Church does not waver from the unchanging truths of God's laws and seeks instead to understand the pedagogical unfolding of God's unchanging laws. "Instead, they must be striving toward him, as the ever greater and more mysterious One, the One who, in the words of Saint Augustine, is 'infinite, in order still to be the object of our search' (Tractate 63, I) (ut inventus quaeratur immensus est)" (ibid.).

Later in the text, Von Balthasar begins to answer the question of the book's title, "Who Is a Christian?"  Rather than looking to the minimalist Christian (i.e., someone who is baptized, someone who fulfills his Easter duties, etc.), he encourages us to look to the maximalist of Christian living, the person who lives according to Christ's example par excellence. Von Balthasar writes, "Anyone wanting to study the essence of a Christian by analyzing a person who cannot really make up his mind whether or not to be one---a person who to some extent understands the demands it makes but lacks the courage to fulfill them; who clearly knows or senses that he does not manage to cut a sufficiently clean figure to convince himself or others---is investigating the wrong object" (57). How often do we hear people objecting to the hypocrisy of Christianity after identifying the tepid or fallen-away Christian as a paragon of said Christianity? "Anyone trying to discover the true nature of a horse or a donkey by examining a mule will run into difficulties" (ibid.), to say the least! Rather than looking to the most wishy-washy of Christian identifiers, why not look to the most convicted, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, or Saint Teresa of Avila, or Saint Padre Pio, or, best of the best, Mother Mary? "Who is a Christian? If we are to advance toward an answer, then we must not waste time on the lower or outer fringes…but must go straight to the center" (58). Such centrifugal radiation reminds me also of C. S. Lewis's contention in Mere Christianity that the Christian must begin with the innermost concentric circle of the self before converting the world of concentric circles far-removed (a commentary against Mrs. Jellyby's telescopic philanthropy to be sure, a la Charles Dickens's Bleak House).

Finally, Von Balthasar speaks profoundly about the tension between worldly markers of success and the elemental power of Christian life. Von Balthasar's words resonate with me especially during a time in my life when very few of my family, friends, or colleagues seem to understand or appreciate my value system of vocational motherhood over academic rank, university affiliation, and intellectual competition. Von Balthasar writes, "What in a worldly sense would seem to be progress and development should in her [i.e., the Church] be immediately suspect of being flight from her true essence. Large numerical increase, honors, wealth, cultural and political positions of power should awaken in her a sense of unease and a fear of having been forgotten by God….The most essential elements of her powers---prayer, suffering, the obedience of faith, the (perhaps not fully utilized) willingness to serve, humility---elude all statistical analysis" (125-26). Von Balthasar further equates "the Church" with "the self": "No longer can any layperson today begin a sentence accusingly with the words, 'the Church ought to…,' without at the same time asking if he himself is doing what she ought to do" (126). Mea culpa! Mea culpa!

Now that Von Balthasar has answered his question, "Who is a Christian?", he then offers the final chapter of his beautiful text to the powerful effects of prayer. He reclaims the profanation of the secular world by arguing that "Pro-fane means outside the sanctuary (fanum). The 'pro' means that we are not yet inside it but also that we stand always in front of it and are moving toward it. So it is in every encounter with another person: it takes place before the sanctuary, but it would not take place at all if the Christian could not see through the profane to the holy and, in this perspective, did not also stride toward it. In the striding, the difference between the profane and the sacred is made manifest" (130). For what do we strive?  Through humility, hope, obedience of faith, and especially prayer, we stride toward Jesus, toward Christ in all our human frailties and stumblings, always foreigners in a foreign land, desperately seeking the kingdom of God and our inheritance through Jesus's sacrifice and resurrection. Homo sacer indeed!