October 19, 2005
I've just stumbled across signandsight. I know nothing about the magazine Does anybody?
Feuilletonists sounds much nicer than commentators doen't it? Is there any substance with the feuilletonists? Or do we have the well-written, glib piece akin to that of the Australian media? One difference is that the op. ed. writers in the Australian media have yet to hear about Agamben, let alone read his texts.
An op ed on Giorgio Agamben by Daniel Binswanger is a good test to evaluate the magazine. This is slick writing----'the perfume of the radical' -- and is spends a lot of time describing how fashionable Agamben has become. Okay, but what about his ideas? Eventually we get to them:
The Agambenian critique of democracy could not be more trenchant: today's constitutional states are in essence nothing more than huge concentration camps. This is what he attempts to demonstrate in "Homo Sacer", originally published in 1995, with an eclectic overview of the legal history of the West. The modern state is nothing other than a totalitarian organisation for the efficient administration of bare biological life.
Sovereignty today is biopolitics --- the control of bare life. "We live in a concentration camp" is the upshot of Agamben's diagnostic of contemporary life. For him, absolute authority over the inmates' bodies and souls lies in the secret matrix of modern administrative states. Agamben electrifies his audiences with this apocalyptic prophesy
Do we live in a concentration? Is that what Agamben is saying? Or is he saying that the camp has come into the centre of political life in liberal democracies? As Matt over at Pas au-dela observes, this is a
"... popular take-down of Agamben, albeit at some length. Daniel Binswanger has clearly bothered to bone-up enough to produce what is known as journalistic pap, interspersed with the odd correct sentence, if only to lend him what is known as the aura of authority."
What Agamben is saying is that the camp is constitutive of contemporary life in the west. It is not an historical fact, or an anomaly belonging to the past ... 'but in some way [is] the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.'
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Gary, It seems to me that this summary of Agamben is saying the same thing as my coop+tol posting in your previous Happiness posting. Except
that the coop+tol post does provide a way of dancing out of the iron cage and/or concentration camp. John