Finlayson, James Gordon 2010. „Bare Life“ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle. The Review of politics 72: 97-126. doi:10.1017/S0034670509990982

[…] Arendt originated the thesis that the economic, biological, and instinctual bases of human association—because they are based in our physical and animal existence—areopposed to and excluded from political life, and the idea that what the Greeks called zoe is opposed to and excluded from bios. Arendt is also the person who first offers Aristotle’s Politics as evidence for this view. Persuaded by her account of ancient politics, Agamben complains that Arendt unfortunately failed to connect it with “the penetrating analysis she had previously devoted to totalitarian power.” By means of his thesis on the destiny of Western politics, Agamben accordingly takes up her ideas, increases their significance, and presses them into the service of a diagnosis of totalitarian power. (103)

Each of these three ingredients is, viewed from a source-critical point of view, controversial and open to objection. First, there is Agamben’s anachronistic and ahistorical reworking of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics mentioned above; second, his application of Arendt’s reading of Aristotle and her critique of the rise of the social to the phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarianism; and third, his use of the idea of the state of exception to explain the suspension of aspects of international law, as well as the recent erosion of civil and human rights by executive and autocratic governance. That said, I shall leave these lines of objection to be pursued by scholars of Foucault, Arendt, Benjamin, and Schmitt respectively. (104, footnote 32)

Aristotle: „When several villages are united in a single complete community large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the polis comes into existence, originating in life itself [ginomene¯men tou ze¯n heneken] and existing essentially for the sake of the good life [ousa de tou eu ze¯n].“ (106)

First, Agamben reads Aristotle’s contrast in the passage between life (ze¯n) and the good life (eu ze¯n) as the original instance of the opposition between bare life and politics. Second, he claims that the contrast Aristotle makes is captured by the semantic distinction between two different Greek words for “life,” namely, “zo¯e¯” and “bios.” Third, he takes this sentence as evidence that Aristotle conceives these two distinct kinds of life—“bare life” and “political life”—to be exclusive and mutually opposed and, hence, to exemplify the logic of exception. Fourth, Agamben claims that the distinction between zoe¯ and bios was pandemic in the ancient Greek language. Fifth, he claims that actual politics in the ancient world was marked by this same relation. Finally, Agamben claims both that this passage is “canonical for the political tradition of the West” and that the opposition it contains defines the end of the political community. (106)

Although it is true that for Aristotle only human beings (among mortals) are capable of living the life of contemplation and practical virtue, it is not the case that only human beings have “ways of life,” and Aristotle does not reserve the term biosexclusively for humans. Throughout his biological writings (and Aristotle was as much a biologist as a philosopher), he refers to the different “ways of life” (and the different characters or dispositions) of various species of animal. (108)

The noun zoon, by contrast, literally means an ensouled, and in this sense living oranimated, being. It is more an ontological than an ethological noun. Its primary sense in fourth-century Greek is not “animal,” although many people including Heidegger have claimed that it is. Agamben, to give him credit, notes that the term is applied equally to “animals, men or gods.” The closely cognate noun zoe is more abstract and means life, or living, or (just like bios) way of living. For Aristotle, zoe and zoon do not carry the pejorative connotation they came to have when, much later, they came to denote the life of beings with a value below that of humans, that is, beings that lacked a Christian soul or human dignity, “animals.” (108-109)

For Aristotle, zoe and bios are not a conceptual pair like dynamis and energeia, nor are they systematically linked in Greek philosophy and political culture, as, for example, physis and nomos. They are just two ordinary polysemous Greek nouns with a slightly different, partially overlapping range of meanings. (109)

Aristotle’s argument is that, if all the constituent parts of a whole exist by nature, then a fortiori the whole exists by nature; that the polis (the whole) comprises the household and the village (its parts), and that, therefore, the household and the village exist by nature. This is clear enough from the sentence directly following the one on which Agamben bases his interpretation: „And therefore if the earlier forms of association are natural so is the polis, for it is the end of them, and the nature of a thing is its end.“ (110)

Aristotle only denies that these biological, instinctual, and material bases of association are sufficient conditions of political life. A properly political order has to have, in addition to this material, economic, and instinctual basis, a deeper (and more worthy) basis in citizenship, civic friendship, and justice. The political order proper is something that is inscribed in the constitution, laws, practices, institutions, and the collective life of the polis and instilled in the ethos or character of its individual citizens through education and upbringing. (111)

[…] far from conceiving the relation between mere life and the good life to be one of exclusion or opposition, Aristotle thinks of them as two internally related and continuous, albeit qualitatively distinct, layers of life. (112)

Mere life and the good life, in fact, relate to one another in much the same way that material, moving, formal, and final causes relate to one another in Aristotle’sPhysicsand Metaphysics: they cooperate in directing a being toward its essence and inner perfection. Broadly, Aristotle views i– iv above—”life,” “mere life,” or “life itself”—as the efficient cause of the polis; its citizens, territory, walls, and so forth as its material cause; the constitution, laws, and so on as its formal cause; and eudaimonia or the happiness of its citizens and the polis as a whole as its final cause. (112)

The property of beingpolitikoncannot be the specific difference that determines the genus zoon, for the simple reason that the attributepolitical, as Aristotle understands it, is not specific to human beings. In his biological writings, Aristotle maintains that there are several different kinds of “political animal.” For example in theHistory of Animals, he distinguishes between gregarious animals and solitary animals. Some gregarious animals, he notes (not those that merely herd or flock together or swim together in shoals), are political animals. (113)

„Animals that live politically are those that have any kind of activity in common, which is not true of all gregarious animals. Of this sort are: man, bee, wasp and crane.“ (Aristotle, 114)

The shared collective endeavor that marks human beings as political animals is organized on the basis of practical reason, which is peculiar to humans and makes them the most political among animals. Thus, man’s political nature has a biological, instinctual, and material basis, but also a deeper and more specifically human essence. If there is a definition here, it is that man is an animal with speech and reason, a capacity for ordering his political existence on the rational basis of mutual advantage and justice. (114)

Agamben follows Arendt’s view of the Greek household as a private realm of human labor and reproduction, which is opposed to and excluded from the public realm of speech and action, the bios politikos. However, Agamben’s analysis is vitiated by the insistence that the public/private distinction sits flush with, and indeed stems from, the alleged bios/zoe distinction. (122)

Paul Patton “Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics”

Patton, Paul 2007. Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics. – Calarco, Matthew; DeCaroli, Steven (eds). Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 203-218.
His “correction” of Foucault consists of the claim that the entry of bare life into the sphere of political calculation and the exercise of sovereign power involved no radical transformation of political-philosophical categories. (205)

His “completion ” of Foucault draws upon his own account of the manner in which bare life was originally included in the political realm, namely in the fo rm of an “inclusive exclusion,” in order to suggest that the decisive feature of modernity is not so much the emergence of biopolitics as the manner in which a phenomenon originally situated at the margins of poli tical order “gradually begins to coincide with the poli tical realm” (HS, 9). (205)

Whereas police government operated on the principle that there could never be too much government regulation, liberalism operated on the converse principle that there is always too much government. Instead or supposing that the population was in need of detailed and constant regulation, liberalism relied upon a conception of society and the economy as naturally self -regulating systems that government should leave alone. (207-208)

In comparison with the techniques of disciplinary power, biopower required the development of new mechanisms and new forms of knowledge to identify its objects and to facilitate its exercise. However, it remained a technology of power exercised by the state over people insof ar as they are living beings and insof ar as they belong to populations. In this sense, it enabled effective government by the sovereign of the biological life of the subjects. In the context of Foucault’s definition of the concept, this is how Agamben’s phrase “the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis” must be understood. (209)

Homo sacer is not the same as simple natural life, since it is, as Agamben later notes, the natural lif e of an individual caught in a particular relation with the power that has cast him out from both the religious and the political community. (210)

In this sense, homo sacer is not simply pure zoe bur zoe caught up in a particular “status.” This status is defined by “the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken” (H S, 82). The double exclusion in terms of which this figure is defined mirrors the exceptional status of rhe sovereign; hence Agamben’s hypothesis that the figure of the sovereign and the figure of homo sacer are inextricably linked. (210)

In eff ect, Agamben’s argument relies on an equivocation with regard to the two senses of the term bare lift. While in the context of his analysis of sovereign ty, “bare life” is identified with the sacred lif e or status of homo sneer, in the context of his critical remarks about modern democratic politics he identifies it with the natural life of zoe. (211)

This right is strange because, ro the extent that the sovereign really does have the right to decide whether subjects live or die, the subject is, as it were, suspended between life and death. Qua subject, he or she has no right to live or die independently of the will of the sovereign: “in terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive. From the point of view of lif e and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead.” In this sense, since the lif e of the subject is entirely encompassed within the sp ere of the sovereign’s power, it is biopolitical power in Agamben’s other sense of the term (homo sacer) . (213)

The life of the subject in the terms of the classical theory of sovere ignty , as Foucault defines it, is structurally identical to the bare lif e of the homo sacer : it is biological existence doubled by its exclusive inclusion within the political sphere. In this sense, Foucault’s analysis of classical sovereign right removes the need for any correction on this point. (214)

In the end, the difference between his approach and that of Foucault is not so much a matter of correction and completion as a choice between epochal concepts of biopolitics and bare
life and a more fine-grained, contextual, and historical analysis intended to enable specific and local forms of escape from the past. (218)

William E. Connolly “The Complexities of Sovereignty”

Connolly, William E. 2007. The Complexities of Sovereignty – Calarco, Matthew; DeCaroli, Steven (eds). Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 23-42.

Agamben contends that biopolitics has become 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 fo rmal. It reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian assumprion that there was a time when politics was restricted to public life and
hiocultural lif e was kept in the private real m. What a joke. Every way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective lif e of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of life is bioculrural and biopolitical. (29)

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 our to be. In !are-modern life, new technologies enable physicians, biologists, geneticists, prison systems, advertisers, media talking heads, and psychiatrists to sink deeply into human biology. They help to shape the
cultural being of biology, although not always as they intend to do. (30)

If I am right, biocultural life displays neither the close coherence that many theorists seek nor the tight paradox that Agamben and others discern. Bioculcural lif e exceeds any textbook logic because of the nonlogical character of its materiality. It is more messy, layered, and complex than any logical analysis can capture. The very illogicalness of its materiality ensures that it corres ponds entirely to no design, no simple causal pattern, no simple set of paradoxes. Agamben displays the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses pol itical culture within a tightly defined logic. (31)

Ernesto Laclau “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?”

Laclau, Ernesto 2007. Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy? – Calarco, Matthew; DeCaroli, Steven (eds). Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 11-22.

This is the perspective from which we want to question Agamben’s theoretical approach: his genealogy is not sensitive enough to structural diversity and, in the end, it risks ending in sheer teleology. (12)

[…] the ban holds together bare life and sover eignty. And it is important for Agamben to point our that the ban is not simply a sanctio n-which as such would still be representable within the order of the city-but that it involves abandonment: the homo sacer and the other figures that Agamben associates w him are simply left outside any communitarian order. That is why he can be killed bm nor sacrificed. In that sense the ban is non-relational: their victims are lef t to their own separatedness. This is for Agamben the originary political relation, linked to sovereignty. It is a more originary extraneousness than that of the foreigner, who still has an assigned place within the legal order. (13)

[…] has not Agamben chosen just one of those possibilities and hypostatized it so rhar it assumes a unique character? (14)

What remains as valid from the notion of ban as defined by Agamben is the idea of an uninscribable exteriority, bur the range of situations to which it applies is much wider than those subsumable under the category of homo sacer. I think that Agamben has not seen the problem of the inscribable/uninscribable, of inside/outside, in its true universality. In actual fact, what the mutual ban between opposed laws describes is the constitutive nature of any radical antagonism – radical in the sense that its two poles cannot be reduced to any super-game which would be recognised by them as an objective meaning to which both would be submitted. (15)

[…] it is enough that we introduce some souplesse within the Hobbesian scheme, that we accept that society is capable of some partial self -reg ulation, to im mediately sec that its demands are going to be more than those deriving from bare lif e, that they are going to have a variety and specificity that no “sovereign” power can simply ignore. When we arrive at that point, however, the notion of “sovereignty” starts shading into that of “hegemo ny.” This means that, in my view, Agamben has clouded the issue, fo r he has presented as a political moment what actually amounts to a radical elimination of the poli tical: a sovereign power which reduces the social bond to bare life. (16)

What is, anyway, wrong in the argument about a rigid opposition between political sovereignty and bare lif e is the assumption that it necessarily involv es an increasing control by an over-powerful state. All that is involved in the notion of a politicization of “natural” lif e is that in creasing areas of social lif e are submitted to processes of human control and regulation, but it is a non sequitur to assume that such a control has to crystallize around a tendentially totalitarian instance. (18)

This teleologism is, as a matter of fact, the symmetrical pendant of the “ethymologism” we have ref erred to at the beginning of this essay. Their combined effect is to divert Agamben’s attention from the really relevant question, which is the system of’ s truc tural possibilities that each new situation opens. The most summary exam ination of that system would have revealed that: (1) the crisis of the “automatic rules fo r the inscription of lif e” has freed many more entities than “bare lif e,” and that the reduction of the latter to the former takes place only in some extreme circumstances that cannot in the least be considered as a hidden pattern of modernity; (2) that the process of social regulation to which the dissolution of the “automatic rules of inscription” opens the way involved a plurality of instances that were far from unified in a single unity called “the State”; (3) that the process of State building in modernity has involved a far more complex dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity than the one that Agamben’s “camp-based” paradigm reflects. (21-22)

By unifying the whole process of modern political construction around the extreme and absurd paradigm of the concentration camp, Agamben does more than present a distorted history: he blocks any possible exploration of the emancipatory possibilities opened by our modern heritage. (22)

To be beyond any ban and any sovereignty means, simply, to be beyond politics. The myth of a fu lly reconciled society is what governs the (non-)political discourse of Agamben. And it is also what allows him to dismiss all political options in our societies and to unify them in the concentration camp as their secret destiny . Instead of deconstructing the logic of political institutions, showing areas in which fo rms of struggle and resistance are possible, he closes them beforehand through an essentialist unification. Political nihilism is his ultimate message. (22)

Colin Koopman “Two Uses of Michel Foucault in Political Theory”

Koopman, Colin 2015. Two Uses of Michel Foucault in Political Theory: Concepts and Methods in Giorgio Agamben and Ian Hacking. Constellations. doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12153.

In sum, I shall be arguing that Agamben’s use of Foucault’s concepts, as detached from the methodological constraints of historicist genealogy, evince a project of transcendental philosophy in which it is difficult to recognize Foucault, but that Hacking’s use of Foucauldian genealogy and archaeology evince a methodological use of Foucault that helps us to recognize a critical empiricism at the heart of Foucault’s work. (1)

Methods (or, to use an approximate term for the same, analytics) refer to strictures, constraints,
designs, and strategies for inquiry: the way in which inquiry is conducted. Concepts refer to the ideational material that is developed in the course of conducting an inquiry: that which inquiry produces in doing its work.nThus, methods function as grids or lenses that make possible a coherent practice of inquiry, while concepts function as the materials with which inquiry works, in drawing objects of inquiry through the grid. (2)

Reading Agamben through the lens of his longest standing philosophical commitments helps us recognize that, and also understand why, the biopolitical index through which Foucault reads much (but not all) of modern political practice is for Agamben the transcendental condition of politics as such. (4)

When it comes to biopower, Agamben looks for it, in the form of the state of exception and bare life, everywhere. But in looking for his assumed concepts everywhere, Agamben is forced to see them everywhere — in the camps and at the supermarket, in the gas chamber and on the television. If we had to give a name to the apparent methodological procedure guiding Agamben’s argument, then I would suggest that we call it ‘biopower-hunting.’ (6)

But whereas for Foucault concepts are meant to describe a fairly circumscribed field, Agamben universalizes the concept by making it a paradigm that stands for something as broad as modern
politics itself, or even politics as such. (8)

In Foucault the concept of biopower often seems to have much to do with biology, medicine, and psychiatry. His concern is with the ways in which these sciences gain a tight hold on sex, in part because they manage to constitute sexuality itself. In Hacking the discussion of biopower is tightly focused on questions of the sciences, especially statistics and their impact on human sciences, perhaps most notably the many and sprawling branches of demography. There are two interwoven kinds of processes in Hacking’s histories of biopolitics. The one he calls “the avalanche of numbers” and the other he places under the banner of what he calls “making up people.” Hacking’s avalanche of numbers refers to the solidification and explosion in the nineteenth century of “statistical information developed for purposes of social control.” This period, roughed out at the edges, was witness to the emergence of all manner of demographic data in public health (e.g. numbers about the 1832 cholera epidemic), the rise of census bureaux, education statistics, crime statistics, and all manner of other numbers for very large sets of things. Though these social measures largely began in Britain and France, they quickly spread elsewhere, and soon spread over the entire planet. The result was what Mary Beth Mader calls, closely following Foucault, “statistical panopticism.” (9)

Biopower, which in Foucault had to do with the regulation of life by its apprehension as objects
of population, now in Hacking has to do with the inevitable and none-too-innocent consequence of that statistical avalanche that continues to pile higher and higher every year. (9)

The empiricism of epistemology involves the thesis that experience is the sole or primary source
of knowledge. The empiricism of method involves no thesis; it is a stance. It is achieved by taking up an empirical orientation whereby we might gain a certain kind of grip, however evanescent, on the objects of our inquiries, for instance, ourselves and our present. (10)

Martine Leibovici “Biopolitique et compréhension du totalitarisme”

Leibovici, Martine 2005. Biopolitique et compréhension du totalitarisme. Foucault, Agamben, Arendt. Tumultes 25 : 23-45.

[…] entre les politiques de la vie considérant les populations comme des ensembles vivants — qu’elles soient menées par des Etats totalitaires ou par des Etats démocratiques — et l’organisation de la mort dans les camps, il y aurait un rapport de lumière à ombre, comme si on avait affaire aux deux faces d’un seul et même phénomène. L’ombre plus ou moins cachée dans la démocratie viendrait à effectivité dans le totalitarisme. (25)

Faisant passer à l’arrière-plan la vieille mise en scène de la souveraineté dans les supplices publics, la discipline pénitentiaire se met en place à l’ombre de la souveraineté, mais se développe d’une manière qui lui est irréductible aussi bien dans ses mécanismes que dans les discours qui les accompagnent. Présentes aussi dans les ateliers ou les hôpitaux psychiatriques, les disciplines sont des micro-pouvoirs qui ne s’exercent pas nécessairement à partir de l’Etat mais au sein d’institutions disséminées dans toute la société. (27)

Mais ce qui distingue en général le biopouvoir — qu’il soit « anatomo-politique » ou « biopolitique » — du pouvoir souverain est qu’il s’applique aux corps par des normes plus que par des lois. Pour prendre la vie en charge, soit pour la discipliner, c’est-à-dire la rendre productive, soit pour la réguler, la corriger ou la protéger, le biopouvoir doit en passer par des régulations de plus en plus fines, alors que la loi est caractérisée par sa généralité. Contrairement à la loi, la norme n’interdit ni ne prescrit rien, elle est directement formatrice du comportement de l’individu et le conforme à celui des autres. De ce point de vue, la différence entre les biopolitiques et l’anatomo-politique est que seules les premières supposent l’Etat comme organe régulateur. Non pas l’Etat souverain mais, selon une expression apparue au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle, l’Etat de police dont l’objet est « la vie en société d’individus vivants13 ». Investi d’un pouvoir biopolitique, c’est l’Etat de police et non l’Etat souverain qui fonctionne selon la norme plus que selon la loi. (28)

[…] renforcer la vie d’une population, la rendre plus saine, ne se fait pas sur le mode d’une victoire sur des adversaires politiques, ni sur le mode militaire de l’affrontement, mais « avec les instruments, la technologie de la normalisation ». Ici la lutte n’est pas menée sous la forme d’une guerre, mode d’exercice par excellence de la violence de l’Etat souverain opposé à un autre, mais elle est l’affaire des hygiénistes et des médecins. (30)

Ainsi, si on arrive à montrer que la structure de la biopolitique dégagée par Foucault — l’Etat moderne mettant la vie biologique au centre de ses calculs — est la même que celle de l’exclusion/inclusion de la vie au langage, du vivre au bien-vivre que pose Aristote, alors on montrera aussi qu’« en assumant (la tâche biopolitique), la modernité ne fait (…) que déclarer sa propre fidélité à la structure essentielle de la tradition métaphysique ». (36)

L’opération d’Agamben consiste à articuler explicitement une logique de souveraineté à une logique biopolitique afin d’éclairer le « faire mourir » qui est la contrepartie du « faire vivre » biopolitique. Ainsi peut-il enrichir la notion de souveraineté telle que l’entendait Foucault, de celle de mise au ban, de détermination d’un espace d’exception, où la distinction entre légal/illégal est suspendue, rendue indifférente. L’acte souverain d’édicter la norme juridique dans sa généralité suppose l’institution préalable d’une distinction entre situation normale et situation d’exception, l’état d’exception étant la doublure invisible mais instituante de la situation normale elle-même. L’espace de la loi doit ainsi toujours être référé à un espace où la loi est suspendue, cas d’espèce insubsumable et unique où se manifesterait dans tout son éclat la toute-puissance souveraine. Une telle toute-puissance n’est en fin de compte qu’un pouvoir de tuer sans que le meurtre ici soit la transgression de la loi. (36)

Il s’agit au fond de montrer que dans sa structure même, l’édiction de la loi par le souverain est solidaire d’un espace de violence absolue où quiconque y pénètre est susceptible d’être mis à mort sans que cela soit qualifié de meurtre. (37)

[…] les analyses d’Agamben qui ont le mérite d’attirer l’attention sur l’aspect biopolitique du camp de concentration, sur l’analyse de la notion même d’exception telle qu’elle s’y matérialise, l’exception n’étant pas conçue en extériorité d’avec la norme, mais comme faisant système avec elle. (39)

Elizabeth Balskus “Examining Potentiality in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben”

Balskus, Elizabeth 2010. Examining Potentiality in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Macalester Journal of Philosophy, 19(1): 158-180.

Both Aristotle and Agamben maintain that anything potential is capable of not existing in actuality, and that “what is potential can both be and not be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be”. (160)
Aristotle states that nous, or the intellect, “has no other nature than that of being potential, and before thinking it is absolutely nothing”. This statement leads Agamben to establish the intellect as the perfect example of pure potentiality, a potentiality “which in itself is nothing, [but] allows for the act of intelligence to take place”. (162)
When viewed as the ability to know or reflect, pure potentiality of the intellect becomes extremely important. This potentiality can exist apart from the actualization of any thought of a particular object because it is, in fact, this potentiality itself that allows for an object to even be thought. Therefore, the potentiality of the intellectnot only allows for thought to maintain a supreme position ontologically, it is also the foundation of thought in general. (163)
“Inoperativeness… represents something not exhausted but inexhaustible—because it does not pass from the possible to the actual”. The reason that Bartleby is so disturbing to his employer (who is the narrator of the short story) is that, in removing himself from the constraints of reason and, indeed, the constraints of society as a whole, he is the paradigm of the inoperative, of “the other side of potentiality: the possibility that a thing might not come to pass”. And because Bartleby never offers a reason for his refusal to work and never actually denies the requests made of him, the authorities at hand are completely bewildered as to how to deal with the scrivener. (167 – quotes „Agamben: Critical Introduction”)
Through his phrase “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby challenges the principle of sufficient reason. If the laws of reason do not apply, then there is no legitimate justification for why this world exists and the infinite number of potential worlds were never actualized. This is why Agamben refers to Bartleby as a messiah who has arrived to “save what was not”. Because the laws of reason do not apply to him, Bartleby asserts the right of those possibilities that have never and will never exist to be actualized. (172)
In decreation, contingency is returned to all events, causing us to rememberthat, along with the few potentialities that are actualized, there are an infinite number of potentialities that will never be and, yet, will continue to shape and influence our lives. (174)
The sacred realm of capitalism is, according to Agamben, consumption, and capitalism in its most pure, extreme form is concerned with making experience unusable or unprofanable by separating our actions from ourselves and presenting them back to us as a spectacle, to be observed and not used. A good example of this attempt to alienate ourselves from ourselves is pornography: the human form is appropriated, filmed, and then presented to us as something that can be watched but never experienced. Agamben calls this phenomenon “museification.” “Everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing”. (175)

Mika Ojakangas “On the Pauline Roots of Biopolitics”

Ojakangas, Mika 2010. On the Pauline Roots of Biopolitics: Apostle Paul in Company with Foucault and Agamben. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 11(1): 92-110.

Pauline  theology  seems  to  be  the  origin  of  two significant  tendencies  in  modern  biopolitical  societies:  1)  profanation  and instrumentalization of the law and 2) the demand of the liberation of bare life and its affirmation as the highest value. (92)

[…] the primary concern of both the Judeo-Christian pastoral power and biopower is the life of the herd/population. The aim of this power is  to promote  life:  “Pastoral power is  a power of care,” the  shepherd being someone who provides subsistence to the flock by taking  care of each one’s particular needs. Likewise, the role of biopower is to “ensure, sustain,  and improve” life, not only of the population in general but of each individual in particular. (93)

According to Foucault, the shepherd constantly watches over his flock, but in the Pauline ecclesia  there  is  no  such  shepherd.  Rather,  everybody is  everybody  else’s shepherd: “Encourage one another and build up each other” (I Thess. 5:11). Control  is  horizontal  as  well:  “My  friends,  if  anyone  is  detected  in  a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a  spirit  of  gentleness” (Gal.  6:1).  Does  this  egalitarian or  “democratic”  care then  mean  that  Pauline  theology  would  offer  a  point of  resistance  againstpastoral  power  and  thereby,  against  biopolitical  governmentality,  as  John Milbank  suggests  in  his  recent  article  entitled  “Paul  Against  Biopolitics”? This does not necessarily follow and in the next section I shall explain why. (95)

[…] within the biopolitical order the law becomes a mere tool. It has  only  instrumental significance.  Yet  it  is  precisely  this  theme  that  links Pauline  theology  to  the  modern  biopolitical  constellation  depicted  by Foucault.  With  Paul,  both  the  Mosaic  and  natural law are  reduced  to  mere tactics the aim of which is to arrange things in such a way that such and such ends may be achieved. (96)

The law, both the Mosaic and the law written in the heart,  awakens  the  sense  of  guilt:  “The  law  brings  wrath”  (Rom.  4:15); “through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20).  The end of law means,  consequently, the  end of the  knowledge of sinand  guilt. Therefore, neither  the  Mosaic  nor  natural  law  can  be  in  force  when  we  live  in  Christ. Christ  has  discharged  us  from  the  law  and  with  it  from  its  logic  of  debt through redemption, literally by ransoming (dia tês apolutrôseôs), which is in him (Rom. 3:24). When Paul criticizes the law, whichis a curse and a power of sin, he means the whole law—including the law of the heart. (97)

Agamben holds that the Pauline critique of the law includes a double operation of sorts. According to him, Paul first “renders inoperative” the law through the act of  katargêsis in which the law becomes unobservable. This amounts, in Agamben’s view, to what he calls the (sovereign) state of exception in which the law is in force without signification, as he explains elsewhere. Yet Paul does not stop here. Agamben  maintains that the  katargêsis of the law is  merely the condition of possibility for the authentic and, in fact, only possible relationship between human  life  and  the  law  after  the  resurrection  of  Christ  (in  the  “messianic time,” as Agamben puts it). This relationship is characterized by the  free use of  the  law.  By  “rendering  the  word  of  law  inoperative,”  Agamben  writes, Paul makes the law “freely available for use.” (98)

The  Pauline  Aufhebung of  the  law  rendered  inoperative  in  the “messianic time” means that the law also becomes an object of free use: “It is obvious  that  for  Paul  grace”  (grace  is,  for  Agamben,  one  of  the  Pauline figures  of  absolute  katargêsis)  “cannot  constitute  a  separate  realm  that  is alongside that of obligation and law. Rather, grace  entails nothing more than the  ability  to  use  the  sphere  of  social  determinations  and  services  in  its totality.” (99; Agamben, „The Time that Remains”)

Indeed, given the fact that the law means, for Paul, not only the Mosaic Law, but also tradition and natural law— freedom from the law signifies absolute freedom. For  a  person  liberated  by  Christ  from  the  law,  “everything  is  permitted (exesti)”  (1  Cor.  6:12). On  the  other  hand,  as  Paul  immediately  adds, “everything  is  not  useful  (symphoros).”  For  the  one  who  lives  in  Christ, everything  is  permitted  but  not  useful—  to  the  extent  that  all  other determinations and measures are cancelled in the operation of katargêsis, it is precisely  usefulness  itself  that  becomes  the  ultimate measure  of  mundane life. (100)

Even though Paul writes once in the Romans that the law is holy (hagios), it is nevertheless  the  holiness  of  the  law,  I  argue,  that  Paul  wants  to  render inoperative by the  katargêsis. Why? Because: if the law is sacred, it is out of reach  and  untouchable.  It  cannot  be  used  but  merely worshipped  and obeyed. Hence, by rendering the sacred law inoperative, Paul operationalizes it, restoring it to profane use. (100)

Thus, even though I fully agree with Agamben that the aim of Paul’s critique of the law is to make law freely usable, I do not subscribe to Agamben’s view that  the  Pauline  messianism  surpasses the  biopolitical  constellation  of  late modernity.  In  my  opinion,  on  the contrary,  by  rendering  the  law  and  the worldly  conditions  inoperative  as  a  whole,  and  thus making  them  freely available for use, Paul inadvertently gives a perfectarticulation to what both Milbank  and  Badiou  call  contemporary  “nihilism”  (utilitarianism, instrumentality, biopolitics, and so on). (101-102)

As  we  have  seen,  Foucault  posits  life at  the  core  of  both pastoral power and biopolitics. So does Paul in his epistles. For him, Christ himself is  zôêand  zôêis Christ: “For to me to live is Christ” (emoi gar to zên christos)  (Philip.  1:21).  We  could  cite  dozens  of  passages,  but  that  is unnecessary  as  the  fact  is  well  established,  and  it  suffices  for  one  to  read certain  passages  in  Romans  (2:7,  5:10,  5:21-22,  6:5,  6:22-23)  to  become convinced  of  it.  Foucault  also  argues  that  biopower  is  characterized  by  a certain “disqualification of death.” What else is Paul’s Christ but a figure of such  disqualification?  Indeed,  christos-zôê signifies,  for  Paul,  an  absolute disqualification of death: “The last enemy to be destroyed (katargeô) is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). With Christ, life is without death. It is eternal (zôê aiônios). (102)

Through the law, God takes life, whereas through grace, he lets live. He does not take care of life like a shepherd but judges it like  the  sovereign.  The  same  applies  to  Christ:  “It  is  the  Lord  (kyrios)  who judges (anakrinô) me” (1 Cor. 4:4). For Paul, in other words, both God and  Christ,  Father  and  Son,  are  lords,  sovereigns,  and  judges—not  shepherds. (102)

In his [Agamben’s] view both  the  juridico-institutional  and  biopolitical  forms  of  power  have  a common  (although  hidden)  foundation  in  the  notion  of  bare  life:  “The production of bare life is the originary activity ofsovereignty.” What then is bare life? In Agamben’s definition, bare life is characterized solely by the fact that it can be killed. Bare life is thus a sort of un-dead life that has no other form or content than being “exposed to death.” (104)

Moreover,  Paul  also  urges  his  addressees  to become  lowly  and “despicable:” “Let you become lowly together” (tois tapeinois synapagomenoi) (Rom. 12:16); thus, suggesting that instead of pursuing the good form of life (eu zên), those who live in Christ should now abandon it andbecome humble slaves,  representatives  of  the  mere  zôê exposed  to  the  continuous  threat  of death: “The messianic life,” as Agamben calls the lifeof the Pauline person living in Christ, means the “revocation of every bios.” (105)

Although Paul  identifies  flesh with vice and sin, the most fundamental characteristic of the flesh is that  it entails death. Indeed, for Paul, flesh meansdeath, whereas spirit meanslife: “To set the mind (phronêma) on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life” (Rom. 8:6). Whereas Aristotle and the Greeks  thought that vices (the Pauline  works of  the flesh)  entail shame, while virtues (the Pauline fruit of the spirit) entail glory and good reputation, Paul maintains instead that they entail  life  and  death:  zôê and  thanatos. (105)

Indeed,  the  Pauline  christos appears  to  occupy  a  place  on  both sides  of biopolitical rationality: first as a sovereign judge of  zôê, then as a liberator of zôê.  The  first  figure  is  the  son  of  a  wrathful  father-God (and  more conventionally, the father-God himself) who confines his subjects within the law  (“before  faith  came,  we  were  imprisoned  and  guarded  under  the  law” Gal. 3:23) that has no other function than to discloseone’s guilt and to subject one  to  what  Agamben  calls  the  “sovereign  ban.” The  second  figure  is  the son of the redeemer-God whose grace redeems us from thelaw and hence, from  death:  “[All]  are  now  justified  by  his  grace  as a  gift,  through  the redemption  that  is  in  Christ  Jesus”  (Rom.  3:24).  Thus,  this  second  figure (kyrios  christos as  the  son  of  the  redeemer-God)  renders,  as  it  were, inoperative  the  first  figure,  rendering  simultaneously  inoperative  the sovereign biopolitics in order that a new form of biopolitics (democratic and revolutionary) could  emerge—a biopolitics that  vindicates  and liberates the zôê of  the  entire  humankind  from  under  the  yoke  of  law and  death, transforming  the  law  to  a  mere  instrument  and  abolishing  death.  (Is  it  not precisely through a successful sovereign biopoliticaloperation, the slaying of Christ,  that  this  biopolitical  liberation  of  zôê became  possible  in  the  first place? God is the subject of violence through the sacred law and the subject of  liberation  through  Christ,  but  is  He  not  the  latter  because  He  is  the former?) (106)

In sum, if my analysis is correct, both the modern techno-instrumental view of the law and the world and the revolutionary (democratic) biopolitics find their  common  home  in  the  Pauline  epistles.  Contrary  to  Agamben,  who  in Homo Sacer  argues that this revolutionary biopolitics is the other side of the contemporary biopolitical constellation, however, I  would like to emphasize that  distinguishing these even as  two sides of the samecoin is increasingly difficult  today,  if  not  entirely  impossible.  Contemporary  biotechnology,  for instance,  is  not  only  a  paradigmatic  case  of  techno-instrumental  biopower (taking care of each and everyone, not like a good shepherd, but rather on the basis of a cost-benefit calculus developed for the sake  of the bare life of the late  modern  democratic  sovereign:  the  taxpayer),  but  also  a  revolutionary endeavor to redeem life, not only from the moral law (Milbank’s ius naturale) but also from death—its most fanciful dream still being the same as it was for Paul: the ultimate eradication (katargeô) of death. (109)

Mathew Abbott “No Life Is Bare”

Abbott, Mathew 2012. No Life Is Bare, The Ordinary Is the Exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology. Parrhesia 14: 23-36.

[…] political ontology: We could give a preliminary definition of it as follows: the study of how our ontology—our conception of the world  as such—conditions what we take to be the ontic possibilities for human collectives. (23)

Political ontology, then, is already part of political philosophy (though it appears there with varying degrees of explicitness), and presupposed as part of the methodology of political theology, at least in its (arguably paradigmatic) Schmittian variant. (23-24)

But the task of political ontology is not just to insist on the contingency of ontological concepts, or to think new ones for the sake of opening up ontic political possibilities (as though by itself this would constitute anything more than melancholic and/or utopian speculation). It is to think the political through the exigency of the ontological question. (24)

This is the root of Heidegger’s history of being as metaphysics, under which the question of being cannot even pose itself as such. As Heidegger puts it in the third volume of his  Nietzsche, “within metaphysics there is nothing to being as such.” The history of being as metaphysics is a history of a blindness before the question of being, of representational understandings of truth repeatedly passing over its very status as a question. (25)

At this point, it should be clear that political ontology is (or is intended to be) post-metaphysical. This means that it will be concerned with thinking our political situation in terms of its metaphysical heritage, working from the premise that the blindness before the ontological question characteristic of metaphysics has real consequences for ontic politics. To engage in political ontology, then, means thinking from out of the idea that our conceptual systems have a deep and deeply problematic blind spot; that our representational models miss the fact of being because of a constitutive structural flaw. (25)

In this aporia, the natural life of human subjects is excluded from the city as something extraneous to political life, and yet constitutive of the city as that which must be presupposed for the construction of political life to be possible. (26)

Crucial here is a movement of presupposition, in which the fact of living is presupposed by the polis as its unthinkable ground. For Agamben, this exclusion, in which the political subject is divided from its non-political natural life, represents the original political relation. He finds, however, that the exclusion can never quite reach completion, because it was always an “implication… of bare life in politically qualified life.” (26)

When Heidegger claims there is nothing to being as such within metaphysics, then, Agamben takes him one step further to claim that there is nothing to life as such within our politics. Like Heidegger, Agamben finds something like an ontological law here: that which is presupposed and passed over by a system of thought will return to that system as its unthinkable (such that any exclusion of being/life is always already an inclusion). (27)

Agamben’s hyperbole, his tendency to pass over historical nuance (‘all societies and all cultures today’), is the result of his ontological method; hyperbole, we might say, is simply what becomes of ontological thought when it bleeds into the ontic. Sociologically (that is ontically), Agamben’s claims are exaggerations at best; ontologically however their status is yet to be properly grasped. Any fair analysis of them will have to take place on their proper ontological terrain. (27)

If we embark on such a resolutely ontological reading of Agamben, it will not only emerge that ‘bare life’ cannot function as a properly sociological category, but also that it could never be a concrete ontic potential for human beings. Instead, it is the unthought ground of the metaphysics underpinning our political systems, a presupposition that, after the failed attempt to exclude it in the classical world, has returned to haunt us in modernity. Bare life, in other words, is a metaphysical figure of (a failure of) thought, and not a category of ontic politics. This is to say that  no life is bare: that (and indeed despite some of Agamben’s own apparent suggestions to the contrary) no human form-of-life has ever been reduced to bare life. Bare life, like pure being, can never exist (has never existed). But this is not to say that it plays no role in ontic politics. On the contrary, this figure is a metaphysical condition of the possibility of those ontic spaces of domination that Agamben calls ‘camps,’ whether they be death camps, concentration camps, refugee camps, refugee ‘detention centres,’ Guantanamo Bay, or whatever. Ontically, these spaces are all very different; however they are ruled by the same metaphysical logic. The conditions of the possibility of the inclusive exclusion of the bare life of human beings are the same as those that allow for the presupposition of pure being in metaphysics. Cancelling these metaphysical conditions, then, will require a politicised rethinking of the ontological category of pure being, and a properly thinking politics. (27)

No life is bare in the ontic sense: rather, bare life is the figure of the return of a repressed metaphysical problem, a metaphysical image or even fantasy that haunts our politics. (28)

The claim ‘no life is bare’ does not imply a commitment to the idea that there is something irreducibly human or moral that remains alive in us even in the most extreme circumstances. The claim does not say humanity is indestructible; it says there is something inhuman in it that remains. It is not identity, which can be destroyed, but the impersonal core of singularity. (28)

A rough but useful way of framing the difference between Agamben and Foucault would be to say that while the latter is concerned with the ontic biopolitical field, and the myriad concrete practical problems that arise in it, Agamben is more primarily concerned with the historically contingent quasi-transcendental conditions of the biopolitical as such. (29)

Here Agamben attempts to think the conditions of a life that would escape the metaphysical image of bare life. The concept form-of-life, which is actually a strategic ontological intervention, designates a life that can never be separated from its form, a life that exists not as faceless bare life but rather as the intelligible singularity that makes each of us ourselves. (29)

The face of the individual is composed of properties (brown eyes, gold hair, large mouth, full lips, etc.), and can be constructed with an identikit in a police station. The face of form-of-life, on the other hand, is the face that the state can’t see (because it can’t represent it): it effects the dissolution of the face of the individual and the temporary shattering of its representational logic (it is the face of someone making a gesture, of someone laughing, or of someone at the point of orgasm). The concept form-of-life designates the impersonal (because it is pre-individual) and yet most intimate part of each of us (it is what surprises us when we surprise ourselves). If we follow Agamben in his claim that “political power as we know it always founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of forms of life,”40 then the intended political import of this concept should be obvious: form-of-life is meant to function as a spanner in the works of the modern political machine, rendering inoperative every attempt to divide the human from its being. Form-of-life is unrepresentable (for it disrupts predicative logic) and yet intelligible (for we can get to know it, recognise it, and fall in love with it); it is a figure of pure equality (for it is impossible to judge or place in any hierarchy) that does not sublate difference (for it is singular, absolutely unrepeatable). The concept form-of-life, then, is designed to disrupt the metaphysical logic of presupposition, in which being as such can only appear as a brute, ‘bare’ presence. Form-of-life thus functions as a tool for bringing the intelligibility of pure being to light, for redeeming the object banished in the inclusive exclusion from the nothingness to which it was consigned. In this sense, form-of-life is an exemplary Agambenian concept, operating as it does in two registers at the same time, functioning to disrupt both the inclusive exclusion of bare life in metaphysical politics and the unthinkability of being as such within metaphysics. (29)

Agamben’s wager, and the wager of political ontology, is that these two operations are inseparable (which is not to say they are identical). (29-30)

The ontological question uproots all foundationalisms, precisely insofar as it doesn’t (can never) lead to an answer. It is the very gratuity of existence that makes it surprising, the fact that being emerges as unnecessary. This is what Nancy means when he refers to a “surprising generosity of being.” For Nancy, the ‘fact of freedom’ is nothing other than the fact of being itself, the very “freedom of being” that is being as such. When Nancy writes that “[t]he fact of freedom is this de-liverance of existence from every law and from itself as law…” and describes freedom as “the withdrawal of the cause in the thing,” then, we need to understand this in all its ontological radicalism: it is a claim about causality which, though left untouched at the ontic level (the level of billiard balls), can no longer be understood as ontologically necessary. (31)

Against Schmitt, then, the miracle is not a name for an exceptional event that contravenes the laws of nature, but rather a name for the very fact of being as that which is irreducible to any causal law. We must in other words generalise the Schmittian position on miracles, taking the very existing of the world to be miraculous, depending as it does on no law, no foundation. (31)

Political ontology shows that the real state of exception would be a state in which being as such is collectively lived as exceptional, which of course is logically identical to there being no exceptions (if being as such is exceptional, then nothing in particular is). Here we see how political ontology will require us to turn not to theorising the exceptional event a la Alain Badiou, but rather to the ordinary and the everyday, and in particular toward an idea of the exceptionality of the ordinary as a potential political achievement […] (31)

Gershom Scholem writes that “[m]etaphysics is a legitimate theory in the subjunctive form. This is the best definition I have found so far; it says everything.” Though Scholem uses the term ‘metaphysics’ here, exchanging it for ‘political ontology’ will see his point sit perfectly with this project. Political ontology is a mode of thought in which the distinction between fact and value collapses, such that what is shown to be valuable is the fact of existence itself. As such, a politics in-keeping with political ontology would be a subjunctive politics, a politics informed by an exigency. (32)

Nicholas Heron “The Ungovernable”

Heron, Nicholas 2011. The Ungovernable. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16 (2): 159-174.[…] for him [Agamben] the term dispositif serves simply as the general designation for a particular modality of power, assuming many and varied forms, generating many and varied effects, which has accompanied the appearance of living beings since time immemorial – but whose distinct orientation is nonetheless always specific, always practical (‘‘economic’’ in the precise sense that Aristotle gives to this term). (161)

So we have, according to Agamben, two great groups or classes, as it were separated by a massive partition: on the one side, living beings (or substances), and on the other, the dispositifs in which they are incessantly captured. […] he decisively complicates this schema through the implication of a third element, ‘‘between the two’’; what he terms precisely the ‘‘subject.’’ It is at this point that he advances his second conceptual definition. ‘‘I call subject,’’ he writes, ‘‘what results from the relation and, so to speak, from the struggle [ corpo a corpo : literally, ‘‘body to body’’; in the corresponding English phrasing, ‘‘hand to hand’’] between living beings and dispositifs .’’ (161)

The dispositif is not an external mechanism, intervening as it were from without, entirely separate from the living beings whose conduct it would seek to administer. It is nothing other than its effects, and has no consistency outside of them. The dispositif functions, that is to say, as an index of the living being’s governability : it names both the being disposed (the being ordered) and the disposition itself (the order itself). The first operation of the governmental dispositif, of every governmental dispositif , thus consists in making the living being governable – which is to say, by transform-ing it into a subject . In this sense, the governmental paradigm not only presupposes but also effectively procures – precisely through the attribution of the predicate – the freedom of the governed. (166)

Being a subject thus constitutes the living being’s mode of being in the mesh of whatever dispositif. And the modal category to which it corresponds is contingency. If there is no constituent subject, but only a living being which becomes the subject of this or that dispositif, then the subject is, by definition, a being that can both be and not be; it is a contingent being . The occurrence of a subject, in so far as it can both be and not be, marks the occurrence of a contingency. (166)

In order to perform and to fulfil its function, in order to operate as a mechanism of governance, the grafting of each and every dispositif , according to Agamben, must always involve a concomitant process of subjectivation (in the absence of which, he writes, it risks being reduced to a mere exercise of violence). (168)

[…] the dispositif itself has no separate existence outside of the contingent of subjects which manifest its functioning; by virtue of what is only apparently a tautology, its end is immanent to the subjects it governs precisely in so far as it governs them. The subject is thus the mode that living beings assume in the mesh of this or that governmental dispositif (in so far, that is to say, as they are nothing other than this mesh). (168)

Properly contingent, according to Agamben, are those events that could not have happened, could not have taken place, precisely at the moment in which they did happen, in which they did take place. A contingency is a potentiality that exists: it names the condition according to which a potentiality – that ‘‘amphi-bolous’’ being which, even in actuality, following Aristotle’s definition, preserves its own capacity not to be – can realise itself. The subject, for Agamben, is precisely what marks this taking place of a potentiality as the event – contingit – of a contingency. (168-169)

To be subject means, in this sense, to be the subject of this activity, this praxis; it means to have this activity, this praxis, within one’s capacity . But with this important caveat: that the subject is wholly determined as this capacity and cannot be said in any sense to pre-exist it. Such is, according to Agamben, the operation conducted by the governmental dispositif : the tracing of a caesura in the living being, which separates out in it a capacity to and a capacity not to – which makes of it, precisely, a subject. (169)

Power, in its governmental form, does not therefore merely presuppose the freedom of the subjects it governs, as Foucault had main-tained; rather, as we have sought to demonstrate, it effectively produces it, each and every time, in and through the act of governance itself. But for precisely this reason freedom is not something outside of the subject, like a property, which it may be said to possess or not possess: qua subject it is inscribed in its very being. (169)

Only if the subject could (also) not be, could (also) not take place – only there, according to Agamben, is there a subject. In its very being, the subject thus ‘‘attests’’ to its contingency; it ‘‘bears witness’’ to its being able not to be. (169)

What is a living being? We can now answer with some precision: it is that which receives definition only on account of its inclusion – only on account of its capture – in a governmental dispositif. (169)

The living being is thus included in a dispositif through its very exclusion – which is to say, through its becoming a subject. The subject is the necessarily contingent result of this capture: it is what appears as such when the living being disappears as such. The inclusive exclusion of the living being in a governmental dispositif is what grounds the possibility of a subject. (169)

If it is true, according to Foucault’s inversion of the Aristotelian formula, which Agamben has adopted for his own purposes, that ‘‘modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’’ 67 and that, henceforth, all politics is biopolitics, we cannot fail to register the follow-ing, drastic consequence: once the oikonomia of bare life itself is installed as the ultimate political task, once bare life itself becomes, so to speak, the subject of politics, this means the impossibility not only of politics (which now subsists as a decision on the ‘‘impolitical’’) but also of a subject in the strict sense. (169-170)

The Ungovernable: it is the beginning, the starting place, the source of every politics, as we have seen, because it is precisely what the governmental dispositif must presuppose, what it must capture at its centre, in order to be able to operate, in order to be able to function. It is the vanishing point, because the task of its exposition is not something that may be accomplished once and for all, is not a state that may be ultimately achieved. Precisely because the living, human being as such is an ungovernable, ‘‘inoperative’’ being, precisely because its existence is without purpose, in vain – this is what triggers, sustains and, indeed, necessitates the incessant activity of the governmental machine. But for this very reason it is also always that which can be retroactively affirmed in order to interrupt its functioning. (170)