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    Roberto Oscar Taccetta
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    Norris (Ed.) - Politics, Metaphisics and Death. on Agamben's Homo Sacer

    Uploaded by

    Roberto Oscar Taccetta

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 160
    or eae AAD EBAY ~ 4068 ae Edited by ANDREW NORRIS pois ‘ypesetin Quadraat by KeystoxeTypeseting ne Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and republication acknowledgments appear on the lst printed page of this book CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics ofthe Living Dead ANDREW NORRIS 1 Au Hlasard ‘THOMAS CARL WALL 31 Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacr and the Insistence of Law PETER FITZPATRICK 49 SiCiting the Camp ERIK VOOT 74 “The Sovercign Weaver: Beyond the Camp ANDREAS KALYVAS 127 Anagrammaties of Violence: The Benjaminian Ground of Homo Sacer ANSELM HAVERKAMD 135 Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben ANDREW BENJAMIN 145 CCurting the Branches for Aba: Agamben’s Critique of Decrida ADAM THURSCHWELL 173 Linguistic Survival and Ethicality: Biopolitics, Subjectivation, and Testimony in Remnants of Auschuite CATHERINE MILLS 198 Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice: Bataille, Agamben, and he Holocaust PAUL FIEGARTY 222 Law and Life RAINER MARIA KIESOW 248 ‘The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer ANDREW NORRIS 262 ‘The State of Exception GIORGIO AGAMBEN 284 Contributors 299 Index 30r ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the long course of preparing this collection I have received 2 lotof help. I owe special debt to Tom Durnm for his friendly guidance and unflagging support {should also like to thank the contributors, my editor Courtney Berger, Kevin Attell, Adam Bull, Judith Butler, Fred Dolan, ‘Adam Franklin, Willie Gin, Daniel Heller-Roazen, James Noggle, Ante Norton, Tom Rockmore, Simona Sawhney, Hans Sluga, lames Wallenstein, Eric Wilson, and my family. My colleagues at the Department of Politica Science of the University ofPennsylvania have been extremely generous and helpful throughout, as have the directors ofthe Max Planck Institute For 3uropean Legal History in Frankfurt, where much of my own work was done. My greatest debt, however, is w Yaseunic Ok Nomis, whose advice and encouragement helped makethis project possible, and whose love and friendship made it worthwhile, ANDREW NORRIS INTRODUCTION Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead eat is most frightening, sce ities boundary, ~Arattle, Mconacheon Eos ‘and asthe samathing there cast nue ing and deed ane te aking and tho steping and young and old or hose things having Sronged round are those, and those having changed round are these. Whatis poiti-s today? What sits relationship tothe tradition fiom which it emerges? These questions are difficult ones to answer, in part because contempotaty politics seems so schizophrenic. In affluent Western countries polities is inereasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and ‘managed economies on the other.* Hannah Arendt seems quite confirmed inher claim thatthe once-glocious public realm of appearance is Fandamen- tally degraded whien itis overrun by concerns more appropriate to the pr- vate realm, such a houscheld management and gossip. If this “unnatural growth ofthe natural” inclines us toward nostalgia for atime when the wo realms were more decisively separated, such nostalgia i likely intensified by the “ethnic cleansing,” rape eamps, and genocide that we now associate with names such as Yagoslavie and Rwanda, But as improbable as any dight ro the past may be, itis even less likely thatthe politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological socieyy. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the atrompted genocides of our time are made possible only by quite modern forms of technology, organiza- tion, and experience,* but also recent scientific and “medical” advances, Consider just two: fitst, the corporate-diven and contzolled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to ge- netic “information” such s “all human blood cells that have come from the ‘umbilical cord of any] newborn child.” Ifthere are any doubts that such developments will lead us to redefine the fuuman being, these may be laid to rest by the se ofFohn Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found bis own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles an licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corpo- ration.* So much for Locke's attempt co ground the institution of privare property in the fact that “very Man has a Property in his own Person"! In its place we seem to be moving toward something more like the “logical syn- thesis of biology and economy” called for by the National Socialist institut allemand in Paris in 1942.°A similar process of redefinition is already under way in the field of death, a phenomenon that scientists and lawyers are having a harder and hanier time pinning down, Where once death was defined by the cessation of the movement of the heart and lungs, recent life support technologies have forced scientists to define death in terms of such technologies. Witness Doctor Norman Shumway's defense ofthe definition ‘of death as brain death: “I'm saying that anyone whose brain is dead is dead. Ieis the one determinant that would be universally applicable, because the brain is the one organ that can’t be transplanted” (163). By implication, if ‘and when technology is developed that allows for brain transplants, even those whose brains are “dead” will be brought back to some kind of life, perhaps as organ farms for others who aze less arnbiguously alive. Giorgio Agamben, from whose Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 1 take both this last grisly example and its analysis, argues that, contrary to appearances, such develogments do not represent a radical break with the tradition, His analysis both builds upon and corrects Michel Foucault's

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