Notes on Agamben: Homo Sacer II.2
Prospectus
So far we have entered initial investigations of bare life and the state of exception.
Many questions remain outstanding but there is significant bulk in the book's remaining content to resolve this aporia.
Is the state of bare life something to seek or avoid? What is a post-operative law and what is its world like that it should be an eschatological desire? How is it different from the despised global state of exception where law and life have collapsed into one another?
The next entry in Homo Sacer takes the form of a pair of lectures given at Princeton University in October 2001. It is no accident that the global emergency at the forefront of political consciousness would flavor these lecture as those events had als shaped II.2.
The lectures focus on two separate moments to elucidate a theory of "civil war", first the ancient Greek notion of στάσις and second Hobbes' own theory of sovereignty.
Homo Sacer II.2: Civil War as a Political Paradigm
Στάσις - Greek "Civil War"
It is strange that while revolution has taken a pre-eminent place in the scholarship of political theory of the twentieth century, its deeply related (one could even say prior) institution of civil war has been by and large ignored.
Even a scholar as astute as Hannah Arendt considered the Greek concept of στάσις irrelevant for a theory of revolution, despite the fact that revolution effectively depends upon internecine warfare that conventionally defines "civil war".
This investigation will not create a general theory of civil war but analyze its conceptual history first as στάσις in ancient Greece and hten again in Hobbes. Both moments are two faces of the same paradigm. The first asserts the necessity of civil war while the other asserts the necessity of its exclusion from the political order.
Agamben takes his starting point in the work of Nicole Loraux and her novel contributions to the study of στάσις (the Greek word for internal strife), particularly in situating this concept in the bifurcation between household (οἶκος) and city (πόλις).
Family dynamics are central to the understanding of Greek στάσις. The vast majority of episodes of στάσις were triggered by rifts in or between families. Yet at the same time it was through the family that these rifts were often healed or reconciled, often through gifts or diplomatic marriages. The family is both the origin of the division and of the reunification that opens and closes the στάσις. The Oresteia can be read as a testament to the structure of this event.
Traditionally, scholarship demarcates Greek politics and laws as a chronological sequel to the household. The power of the household was supplanted by the power of the Greek πόλις as laws were ushered in to regulate the families.
However, στάσις calls this perspective into question because we see here that the fragmentation of the city into feuding parties can only be resolved through the household. The household remains an originary kernel of division and healing within the city throughout Greek antiquity.
Yet this does not elucidate the nature of στάσις itself.
Referencing the first chapters of Homo Sacer I, Agamben recapitulates the distinction of zoe from bios, zoe as simple natural life excluded from the city and confined to the household
In light of this distinction, speaking now as Agamben, how then should we understand civil war?
One thing that is not clear from Loraux's conclusions is how the household can be both the center or reconcilation and disintegration? Why does the family have conflict at its center?
Etymologically, στάσις (στάσις) refers to an act of standing firmly upright.
If we consider Loraux's reading of Plato's Laws 869c-d, we should find that while she uses it to tie στάσις to family, it should rather be read in light of how civil war renders the distinction between brother and enemy indistinct. A brother can also be an enemy, when a brother is almost always the starting point of a friend/enemy distinction.
Be it enacted, therefore, that for the man who in rage slays father or mother the penalty is death. If a brother kill a brother in fight during a civil war, or in any such way, acting in self-defence against the other, who first started the brawl, he shall be counted as one who has slain an enemy, and be held guiltless; so too, when a citizen has killed a citizen in like manner, or a Stranger a Stranger. And if a citizen kill a Stranger in self-defence, or a Stranger a citizen, he shall be accounted pure in the same way.
R.G. Bury's translation. Plato's Laws 869c-d.
Rather than interpreting the pre-eminence of the household over the city as Loraux does, we should rather situate the στάσις as a threshold of undecidability between household and city. The family bond can become more exterior than a political faction; the faction moves into the household. The household and city are rendered indiscernible.
Agamben takes this to argue that the system of Greek politics is founded upon civil war as its center, the politicization of the family and the depoliticization of the city.
For as Solon's law states, it is the individual who recuses themselves from a civil war who should be punished the most. To live in the city is to be liable to be embroiled in these factional conflicts. To play it safe and attempt to stay neutral, to remain "unpolitical" is the deepest wrong of all.
This is equally tied to the principle of amnesty where everything that happens in a civil war must be forgotten after its conclusion. Amnesty is terminologically quite literally an exhortation to not make "bad use of memory" vestigial from this alternate state of civil war.
Στάσις necessitates both participation and amnesty.
Agamben concludes from this that (1) στάσις does not originate in the οἶκος as Loraux does but is similar to the state of exception. It is an inclusive exclusion of the household in political life. (2) A threshold of indifference exists between the household and city. Στάσις operates as a balancing force that asserts itself if one extreme takes over.
Today's world sees a global civil war through terrorism when life as such is politicized. The global economy (οἶκος) is politicized and a new στάσις has emerged to right the balance. Terror coincides with the moment when biopolitics (life) is the principle of sovereignty. Life as such can only be politicized in exposure to death. This is what makes it bare life.
Hobbes - Eschatology of the Leviathan
Despite what Schmitt says when he claims Hobbes wrote Leviathan as an esoteric work, it must be emphasized that Hobbes saw the Leviathan project as the first endeavor to truly ground politics as a science.
Agamben begins with some observations on the famous frontispiece of Leviathan.
What is most pertinent for the point of the following investigation is that the body of the sovereign (but not the head) is composed of the bodies of individuals, that is the body politic of citizens, and that this sovereign body resides outside the city which seems almost totally uninhabitated save for a scattering of individuals. (Agamben notes how the two guards by the cathedral sare illustrated like plague doctors for Hobbes' intent was that the guards should safeguard the health of the city. This is an interesting biopolitical gesture.)
As Noel Malcolm has observed, the Leviathan resembles the optical illusions popular in Hobbes' time and it calls attention to the fact that there is an illusion at force which pretends that a multitude of bodies could be united into a single body "the people". How can a multitude have a single will? This is a paradox Hobbes himself alludes to, as well as Pufendorf when writing on Leviathan.
There are multiple logical stages in Hobbes' narrative of the formation of sovereignty.
First, in the state of nature, there is a disunited multitude who live in their war of all against all.
Second, this disunited multitude comes together and for a single instantaneous moment are united as the consenting political will of the "people" when they elect a sovereign, whether that be monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy.s
Third, as soon as this sovereign is elected, the people are transformed into a dissolved multitude with no political agency or will.
The frontispiece features this second stage where the city is vacated of all individual bodies who are then united in this extra-political body who can then choose their sovereign. This represents the paradox of popular sovereignty: the people are in one way always present to itself, and yet in another sense cannot be presented as a unit but only represented, hence representative politics. This was in fact Foucault's starting point for biopolitics.
These observations can be tied to "civil war" by noting that if the dissolved multitude that succeeds the election of a sovereign is the only human presence in the city, and if the multitude is the subject of civil war, then civil war is always possible in the city (Hobbes himself notes this in chapter 29 of Leviathan). The civil war must conclude before the the commonwealth can descend back into a state of nature that is pre-requisite for the new election of sovereign. The state of nature appears when the city is dissolved in an eternal cycle.
From here, Agamben turns to the biblical nature of the Leviathan as a monstrosity. Jerome was the first Christian to comment on Leviathan and associated it with both Satan and the Antichrist. This, in conjunction with the Talmudic tradition that the Leviathan and Behemoth are at war with each other until the arrival of the Messiah, indicates an eschatological dimension to the Leviathan.
Agamben reads Hobbes as saying the Leviathan (i.e. earthly sovereignty) is a temporal beast we must contend with until Christ returns and assumes headship of a new political order that vanquishes the cycle of the state of nature.
Modern politics is the secularization of this eschatological foundation undergirding the notion of popular sovereignty. The kingdom of Leviathan will be supplanted by the kingdom of God. If we are to continue to employ this form of politics grounded in theology, we must first become aware of our theological roots.
In Review
II.2 ushers in what I would contend are the strongest set pieces of the Homo Sacer project, which will continue up through II.4. Remarkably lateral connections following remarkably granular samplings of obscure primary or secondary sources.
It is the capaciousness of the source material that should earn Agamben acclaim, even if there is a shocking absence of analytical rigor that accompanies the conclusions he draws from these encounters.
But let us focus on these two lectures here.
Taking "civil war" as a starting point is a wonderfully provocative point of departure for a discourse so inundated with studies and monographs and books speculating on theories of revolution. To brush those aside and point out the absence surrounding "civil war" which is functionally a necessary part of revolution, marks the judicious aplomb of the true philosopher.
I have not engaged with Loraux's work myself, so I am not endowed with the proper perspective to assess Agamben's summation or response to her claims. We will take his readings at face value here.
Situating the "civil war" as a zone of ambiguity between the household and city does intuitively indicate we will find some intriguing ideas here. And so we do, at least at first glance.
I am moderately familiar with the metanarrative which claims there is an evolution in ancient Greece from the sovereignty of the household as we see in the Homeric world to the sovereignty of the πόλις as we see by the Peloponnesian War, yet I believe most historians (such as Gagarin who I wrote on last year) offer various nuances on the gradations of this process.
Agamben reads Loraux as arguing that the phenomenon of στάσις turns this narrative on its head since the household is both the origin and conclusion of the conflict that tears the city asunder. The household holds primacy over the city.
This is not terribly persuasive on its own. The force of this argument probably depends upon the evidence Loraux presents (Agamben only relays a few items) to frame this study , if this is what she is claiming.
There are several begged questions from what is unarticulated here. Is the στάσις discussed here that of conflict between or within households? There are several argumentative moves made here that seem to bait-and-switch interfamilial and intrafamilial conflict. Does Loraux's taxonomy of στάσις account for this distinction?
In what way does στάσις come from within the οἶκος? Is it because the belligerents are pursuing conflict primarily out of familial interests which renders their political interests subsidary? Is it not possible for someone to act primarily out of motivation for political aggrandizement that may either help or harm familial interests? What is used to ground this genitive relation that juxtaposes στάσις and οἶκος?
Of course these and other questions may be appropriately answered in Loraux's work so we will not dwell on them further here.
When Agamben takes his own departure from Loraux, he principally connects στάσις to two of his own points of interest: bare life and the state of exception.
The connection with the state of exception is sound and cogent, and frankly the στάσις could be used as a case study of the state of exception itself as it contains the suspension of normal legal procedures, the deactivation of unitary political sovereignty, emergency measures of violence, the indistinction of friend and enemy, and the subsequent provision of amnesty. It hits the right beats that maps effectively onto the theory of the state of exception.
I think this is rather superbly tied in with Solon's law which necessitates every political individual to participate in a civil war. It politicizes the intrafamilial conflict, so to speak.
Yet there remain confused or at best unarticulated notions here that do befuddle the weight of Agamben's position as he overplays the attempt to identify the στάσις with his particular brand of the state of exception.
I have stated this before in my last entry, but there is an operative assumption here that isn't necessarily persuasive. The idea that it is the edge case that defines the whole game. That the Freudian slip is more important than the full sentence.
It does not necessarily follow that if the supremacy of the πόλις is suspended in στάσις and the οἶκος takes pre-eminence, that means the household is always superior in power to the city state. A stronger case needs to be made if we are to assert the temporary breakdown of order presents the more essential phenomenon.
It is certainly true that the στάσις can and does render the prioritization of political and familial kinship more confused than in "normal times", perhaps even inverting them. But again it is strange to use such a basis to advance the consequent that the household becomes politicized and the city becomes depoliticized.
If this is intrafamilial warfare it would make sense to describe the politicization of the family in a sense of factionalization. But this would not add any nuance to an understanding of interfamilial conflict within a city. Nor is it clear how such mechanisms of conflict would depoliticize a city. The implicit reasoning seems to be that as the political temperature of the family surpasses the city, thus by comparison, the city is depoliticized. This does not seem justified unless Agamben were able to frame a more precise constellation of these concepts to demonstrate why there is a depoliticization at play.
(If the idea is that the sovereign force is the exclusive political entity in a zone, and that the household, in becoming sovereign, becomes the exclusive political entity, thus deactivating the city, it would need to be established why there could only be one political force in an arena, as it is fairly common to have competing "political zones" much like we will see later in Homo Sacer with discussions of medieval church and state.)
Additionally, it is not clear why the internal disunity of a family should instigate the calling into question the existence of such a thing as a family unit. This plays into the strange logical plays around sovereignty and law from earlier volume: the idea that if anything has internal dissonance or momentary fracture, the entire thing loses meaning. It is this same gesture that is used to assume that the momentary breakdown of the family unit renders the whole term "household" indistinct and useless.
It is a habitual haste of Agamben to use edge cases as grounds for calling a whole concept a "zone of indistinction", a paradox, and ultimately meaningless. Which does not seem fair to how language works.
Those questions are starting points to engage with Agamben's conclusions.
But he goes beyond the pale in three additional ways in concluding this lecture.
First, he makes an at best tenuous reference to his own concept of bare life which he introduces as the vehicle to rebut Loraux's theses but remains entirely outside the force of his critique. He declines to clarify the nature of this concept of bare life, playing off its ambiguity as both/and a prior state of pre-political innocence as well as a posterior state of biopolitical oppression and reduction to bare life.
Why does this disprove Loraux's idea that στάσις emerges from the household? This is not spelled out and is not readily deducible from insinuation. And again, what is this bare life?
Second, Agamben makes a strange momentary gesture in his concluding thoughts to state that not only that στάσις rests as a political field and current between household and city. This follows from what he claimed earlier, given his assessments are accurate. But he then immediately turns the metaphor of field and current to assert that στάσις is an organic historical force that can be activated to reintroduce balance when either household or city gain too much power.
Such a Hegelian extrapolation is a bizarre addendum which may be best understood as a momentary speculative spasm tempting to provide at the conclusion of lectures.
Third, this Hegelian στάσις is then animated to comment upon contemporary global affairs, specifically the 9/11 attacks that had occurred the preceding months. Agamben argues that terrorism is the state of global civil war. Terrorism emerges as a reactant to economic globalization to re-introduce balance.
Agamben received near-universal disapproval in 2020 when he published an article arguing that Covid-19 was an event to further advance the permanent state of emergency in our global society. At the time, one of my professors in graduate school drew attention to this shameful fact after glowfully talking about Agamben for twenty minutes.
Such a claim does not seem as bizarre in retrospect as Agamben here stating that the 9/11 attacks were a natural and organic "spirit of history" counter-reaction to America's global empire, which given Agamben's commmitments is certifiably a positive characterization of Osama bin Laden. To be stating this a mere month after the attacks is questionable, but perhaps it is best to grant general intellectual amnesty to all those in that War of Terror moment, when its hysteria rendered so many heads foggy and indistinct.
Beyond that, it seems that Agamben himself is not sure which polarized end of the household/city distinction our global world has reached. He gestures simultaneously to the total politicization of all life (reducing all of us to bare life) but also to global economic management with overt mapping of οἶκος (oikos) to global economic discourse which would seem to indicate we are far too οἶκος-leaning. This seems more like casual postmodern wordplay than an attempt at logically serious categorization, so we will leave that one be.
Turning then to Hobbes.
Hobbes is on his own a truly delightful sui generis intellectual on the grade of Aristotle and Kant, and it is rarely improper to mark Hobbes as a starting point in deciphering various elements of modernity.
There have been many discussions on the famous frontispiece, and Hobbes is right to land up Noel Malcolm's studies of Hobbes as a primary conversation partner.
If we skip over the potential skepticism that all this "book cover" analysis is merely judging a book by its cover, overloading Abraham Bosse's engraving with project meaning, there are a few points to touch upon here.
Many of Agamben's insights here do not seem particularly novel to the student of Hobbes, and so a lecture is perhaps the best place for these.
The idea that the state of nature is a logically rather than chronologically prior moment. The paradox of the united multitude in popular sovereignty. The strongly eschatological bent of Hobbes' thought (it is often ignored that the last third or so of Leviathan is strictly theological and runs through the gamut of presenting Hobbes' unorthodox theological opinions on just about every question known at the time.)
I do not think Agamben presents as much assertoric material in this second lecture as the first, but the observations and findings he does present on Hobbes are certainly intriguing enough. In this way, it is a robust lecture of instruction by paying attention to theological traditions of the Leviathan, and the briefest treatment of Christian eschatology.
The idea that the plague doctors are a biopolitical premonition is quite frankly one of the most proper uses of the biopolitics buzzword that Agamben has exercised quite casually elsewhere. These are impersonalized agents of the State instructed with the care of the health of the citizen body with direct implications for both popular sovereignty and the statistical management of individual bodies.
Hobbes' philosophy was a corpuscular philosophy and there could be more analysis done to situate Hobbes as the original theorist of biopolitics.
What seems less cogent is how this ties into the "civil war" discussion of the first lecture. Aside from the reference to Leviathan chapter 29, it is not stated what this means for a theory of civil war informed by the previous investigation.
There is no mention of household whatsoever. Agamben mimics the Hobbesian move between individuals and multitiude without considering the intermediate unit of family and household that was so pivotal in the previous lecture.
There is no discussion of indistinction between brother and outsider, or frankly any other particular observations or conclusions that build upon the groundwork of the first.
The cycle of sovereignty is loosely linked to a potential state of civil war so long as a multitude exists, but this is self-evident. Is there anyone who would contend that a civil war is not possible in a society with more than one person? The distinction between disunited and dissolved multitude does not seem to usher in any broader claims or engage directly with questions of Hobbesian scholarship.
Tying the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-8 to an anomic figure in Agamben's technical sense again introduces a questionable gesture toward the Antichrist as a good thing.
But as we said with his messianic assessment of 9/11, it is not clear to what extent Agamben genuinely sees these as normative connections we should learn from versus discovering wordplay in various texts and trying to make the most of them.
What does remain certain is that sacer bare life is just as confused now as it was as the first volume concluded, if not more so. We have in this single volume, positive and negative insinuations as to its nature.
We do have an astute likening of the στάσις to the state of exception. That is one postiive contribution to the themes of the broader Homo Sacer project, but beyond that it does not seem clear what this pairing of lectures provides to that investigation of bare life.
It is a charming and enjoyable excursion into source material and concepts, but the chartered work has not progressed significantly otherwise.