The Italian philosopher and philologist Giorgio Agamben has been on the scene
now for more than twenty years, even though most of his work has only been
available in English for a decade or so. Perhaps, it might strike you, the reader,
as somewhat strange to have a thinker like Agamben in a book on theorists of
organization. While it is true that his work is characterized by a profound interest
in human beings, which is, I believe, how most organizational scholars would
characterize themselves as well, the kind of human beings portrayed by
Agamben are probably not the kind of human beings you are likely to encounter
in and around organizations (managers, shareholders, workers, and so on). On
the contrary, Agamben\u2019s work seems to focus on those who are, for many different
reasons,ex cluded from these seemingly well-ordered places. If, for a single
moment, Agamben does seem to speak about people working in organizations,
then his attention will always be rapidly diverted towards those who have,
for reasons that must remain obscure for all the people who continue doing
their jobs, stopped working \u2013 as is the case, for example, in his splendid analysis
of Melville\u2019s short story about a scrivener called Bartleby (Agamben, 1999a:
243\u2013271; see also ten Bos and Rhodes, 2003). The truth about human beings,
Agamben seems to suggest, is, if anywhere, surely not to be found in organizations
that put people to work.
In the next section, I will argue that Agamben opens up to a concept of organization
as athreshold, that is, a zone of indifference between work and
non-work, humanity and bestiality, culture and nature. These insights are
subsequently linked to a dramatic and gloomy understanding of contemporary
USA-dominated politics that might, I will argue, be pertinent to the work of
organization theorists as well. While I am broadly sympathetic to Agamben\u2019s
work, it is in the sections called \u2018Prophecy\u2019 and \u2018Melancholia\u2019 that I will raise
some critical issues. These are related to Agamben\u2019s sometimes astonishing
understanding of bourgeois consumers and to his denial of melancholia as a

source of the coming politics. Yet, accusations that Agamben\u2019s work is unrealistic
miss the point. Here is aphilosopher at work and in the final two sections
of the chapter, I will show that Agamben\u2019s understanding of what a philoso-

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pher should do is intimately related to his analysis of contemporary capitalistic
organization.

The human beings figuring in Agamben\u2019s texts are refugees, tramps, migrants,
angels, poets, patients, sub-proletarians, the inmates of concentration camps and
others who are generally only noticed for their uselessness with respect to the
dictates of labour. These people generally appear to us as if they are coming
from places where something called organization has been perverted \u2013 which is
the reason why the very presence of these people is considered to jeopardize the
normal civil order and the categories of classification that go with it (\u2018being
British\u2019, \u2018being an employee belonging to firm X\u2019, \u2018being a citizen with a social
security number\u2019, \u2018being a customer with a special customer number\u2019, and so
on). Nevertheless, it is always some sort of organization that excludes these \u2018lessthan-
humans\u2019. That is to say, the places from which they speak to us in hardly
audible voices are neither pristine nor natural, but are themselves creations of
order and organization: camps like Auschwitz and Guantanamo Bay are, for all
their mutual differences, the result of well-organized political efforts to pervert
order and organization.
How are we to understand these perversions? In camps, Agamben explains,
human beings live detached from soil and are therefore placed beyond any constitutional
or civil order, they live there as \u2018naked bodies\u2019 without a shimmer of
the privacy warranted elsewhere, and so on. Agamben\u2019s tone when invoking the
idea of the camp is, if anything, alarmist: he wants us to believe that today \u2018it

is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm
of the West\u2019 (1998: 181). This paradigm, Agamben goes on, \u2018throws a sinister
light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture
are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world\u2019s cities
without any clear awareness that at their very centre lies the same bare life (even
if this has been transformed and rendered apparently more human)\u2019 (1998:
181\u2013182). This may all be somewhat exaggerated \u2013 for example, do we organize
camps for poets or tramps? Or is a hospital a camp for patients? Is a prison a
camp for its inmates? But Agamben also uses less-alarmist concepts that might
convince even the most persisting sceptic that what he has to say is as important
as it is disquieting.
More particularly, he describes efforts to pervert order and organization also
in terms of \u2018sovereignty\u2019 and \u2018law\u2019: the political sovereign can, in an act of great
arbitrariness, decide to suspend the law, for example, in order to fight a
dangerous enemy (e.g., Hannibal and his elephants or Osama Bin Laden).
Necessity knows no law: you may have to suspend the law just in order to
paradoxically save it. In this way the sovereign creates a \u2018state of exception\u2019: a
situation where law and order are put into action in order to place human beings
outside law and order. Where \u2018states of exceptions\u2019 were once, for example,

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during the Roman Empire, very rarely \u2018used\u2019 by the political sovereign, nowadays
the state of exception has become the rule. The disquieting suggestion made
by Agamben is that the normal and civil order in which we, as average citizens
of our late-capitalistic society, might feel so protected and secure might easily
turn into a perverted order where the law is suspended and where we lose our
civil status and become, indeed, less-than-human. If we are to believe Agamben,
the likelihood that this happens to the citizens of our precious democracy has
never been bigger.
Indeed, when he writes that his work must be seen as \u2018a response to the bloody