Birth of the Nation

From Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, U. of Minnesota, 2000.

Political power as we know it, on the other hand, always founds itself -- in the last instance -- on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life. In Roman law, vita [life] is not a juridical concept, but rather indicates the simple fact of living or a particular way of life. There is only one case in which the term life acquires a juridical meaning that transforms it into a veritable terminus technicus, and that is in the expression vitae necisque potestas, which designates the pater's power of life and death over the male {sic} son. Yan Thomas has shown that, in this formula, que does not have disjunctive function and vita is nothing but a corollary of nex, the power to kill . . .

It is time to cease to look at all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day as proclamation of eternal metajuridical values aimed at binding the legislator to the respect of such values; it is time, rather, to understand them according to their real function in the modern state. Human rights, in fact, represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty. This is the meaning (and it is not even a hidden one) of the first three articles of the 1789 Declaration: it is only because this declaration inscribed (in articles 1 and 2) the native element in the heart of any political organization that it can firmly bind (in article 3) the principle of sovereignty to the nation (in conformity with its etymon, native [natio] originally meant simply "birth" [nascita]). The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference between these two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen . . .

Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the {concentration} camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized -- a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics become biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how -- that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices -- human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible) . . .

From this perspective, the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity. This birth takes place when the political system of the modern nation-state -- founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state), which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation) -- enters a period of permanent crisis and the state decides to undertake the management of the biological life of the nation directly as its own task. In other words, if the structure of the nation-state is defined by three elements -- territory, order and birth -- the rupture of the old nomos does not take place in the two aspects that, according to Carl Schmitt, used to constitute it (that is, localization, Ortung, and order, Ordnung), but rather at the site in which naked life is inscribed in them (that is, there where inscription turns birth into nation).

Originally Derivative

[A]s much as *argot* is not properly a language but a jargon, so the Gypsies are not a people but the last descendants of a class of outlaws dating from another era:

Gypsies are our Middle Ages preserved; dangerous classes of an earlier epoch. The Gypsy terms that made it into the different argots are much like the Gypsies themselves: since their first appearance, in fact, Gypsies adopted the patronymics of the countries through which they traveled -- gadjesko nav -- thereby losing somehow their identity on paper in the eyes of all those who believe they can read {Alice Becker-Ho, Les prince du jargon: Un facteur négligé aux origines de l'argot des classes dangereuses; Édition augmentée (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 50}.

This explains why scholars were never successful in interpreting the Gypsies' origins and in getting to know well their language and customs: the ethnographic investigation, in this case, becomes impossible because the informers are systematically lying . . .

Political theory, in fact, must presuppose, without the ability to explain it, the factum pluralitatis -- a term etymologically related to populus, with which I would like to indicate the simple fact that human beings form a community -- whereas linguistics must presuppose, without questioning it, the factum loquendi. The simple correspondence between these two facts defines modern political discourse.

The relation between Gypsies and *argot* puts this correspondence radically into question in the very instant in which it parodically reenacts it. Gypsies are to a people what argot is to language. And although this analogy can last but for a brief moment, it nonetheless sheds light on that truth which the correspondence between language and people was secretly intended to conceal: all people are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot.

The Unstated

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May, in fact, was the relative absence of specific contents in their demands. (The notions of democracy and freedom are too generic to constitute a real goal of struggle, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yaobang, was promptly granted.) It is for this reason that the violence of the state's reaction seems all the more inexplicable. It is likely, however, that this disproportion was only apparent and that the Chinese leaders acted, from their point of view, with perfect lucidity. In Tiananmen the state found itself facing something that could not and did not want to be represented, but that presented itself nonetheless as a community and as a common life (and this regardless of whether those who were in that square were actually aware of it). The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like Cantor's inconsistent multiplicity).

State: Police

The point is that the police -- contrary to public opinion -- are not merely an administrative function of law enforcement; rather, the police are perhaps the place where the proximity and the almost constitutional exchange between violence and right that characterizes the sovereign is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else. According to the ancient Roman custom, nobody could for any reason come between the consul, who was endowed with imperium, and the lictor closest to him, who carried the sacrificial ax (which was used to perform capital punishment). This contiguity is not coincidental. If the sovereign, in fact, is the one who marks the point of indistinction between violence and right by proclaiming the state of exception and suspending the validity of the law, the police are always operating within a similar state of exception. The rationales of "public order" and "security" on which the police have to decide on a case-by-case basis define an area of indistinction symmetrical to that of sovereignty. Benjamin rightly noted that:

The assertion that the ends of police violence are always identical or even connected to those of general law is entirely untrue. Rather, the "law" of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain. {Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 287.}

Hence the display of weapons that characterizes the police in all eras. What is important here is not so much the threat to those who infringe on the right, but rather the display of that sovereign violence to which the bodily proximity between consul and lictor was witness. The display, in fact, happens in the most peaceful of public places and, in particular, during official ceremonies . . .

[T]he investiture of the sovereign as policeman has another corollary: it makes it necessary to criminalize the adversary. Schmitt has shown how, according to European public law, the principle par in parem non habet iurisdictionem eliminates the possibility that sovereigns of enemy states could be judged as criminals. The declaration of war did not use to imply the suspension of either this principle or the conventions that guaranteed that a war against an enemy who was granted equal dignity would take place according to precise regulations (one of which was the sharp distinction between the army and the civilian population). What we have witnessed with our own eyes from the end of World War I onward is instead a process by which the enemy is first of all excluded from civil humanity and branded as criminal; only in a second moment does it become possible and licit to eliminate the enemy by a "police operation." Such an operation is not obliged to respect juridical rule and can thus make no distinctions between the civilian population and soldiers, as well as between the people and their criminal sovereign, thereby returning to the most archaic conditions of belligerence. Sovereignty's gradual slide towards the darkest areas of police law, however, has at least one positive aspect that is worthy of mention here. What the heads of state, who rushed to criminalize the enemy with such zeal, have not yet realized is that this criminalization can at any moment be turned against them. There is no head of state on Earth today who, in this sense, is not virtually a criminal.

Degradation and Hope

The mock seriousness with which secular politicians rushed to welcome the entrance of repentance into codes and laws as an unquestionable act of conscience is therefore all the more irresponsible. If it is the case, in fact, that the ones who are forced by an inauthentic belief to gamble their whole inner experience on a false concept are truly wretched, it is also the case that for them there is perhaps still some hope. But for the media establishment elite acting as moralists and for the televisual maîtres à penser, who have erected their conceited victories on the misfortunes of the former, for these, no, there is truly no hope.

* * *

In a crucial passage of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wonders whether there is such a thing as an ergon, a being-in-the-act, a being-operative, and a work proper to man, or whether man as such might perhaps be essentially argo-s, that is, without a work, workless [inoperoso]:

For just as the goodness and performance of a flute player, a sculptor, or any kind of expert, and generally of anyone who fulfills some function or performs some action, are thought to reside in his proper function [ergon], so the goodness and performance of man would seem to reside in whatever is his proper function. Is it then possible that while a carpenter and a shoemaker have their own proper function and spheres of action, man as man has none, but was left by nature a good-for-nothing without a function [argo-s]? {Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, trans. Martin Oswald (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1962), p. 16.}.

* * *

E.M. Forster relates how during one of his conversations with C.P. Cavafy in Alexandria, the poet told him: "You English cannot understand us: we Greeks went bankrupt a long time ago." I believe that one of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that, since then, all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt. We live after the failure of peoples, just as Apollinaire would say of himself: "I lived in the time when the kings would die." Every people has had its particular way of going bankrupt, and certainly it does make a difference that for the Germans it meant Hilter and Auschwitz, for the Spanish it meant civil war, for the French it meant Vichy, for other people, instead, it meant the quiet and atrocious 1950s, and for the Serbs it meant the rapes of Omarska; in the end, what is crucial for us is only the new task that such a failure has bequeathed to us. Perhaps it is not even accurate to define it as a task, because there is no longer a people to undertake it. As the Alexandrian poet might say today with a smile: "Now, at last, we can understand one another, because you too have gone bankrupt."

Agamben and the U.S.

From an article of January 23, 2003, by Standard Schaefer posted on the CounterPunch Web site (click here to link).

In an act of protest, world-renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has cancelled plans to teach at New York University and UCLA because of the United States' new policy of photographing and fingerprinting foreign visitors. Described by the New York Times and Newsday as a mere professor of philosophy and aesthetics, Agamben has written extensively about the holocaust and questions of political sovereignty . . .

A few years ago I wrote that the political model of the west is not the city but the concentration camp, not Athens but Auschwitz. That was, of course, a philosophical, not a historical thesis. This is not about mixing phenomena that must be separated. I only want to remind readers that the tattooing in Auschwitz possibly appeared as "normal" and economic in order to regulate the admission of the deportees to the camp. The bio-political tattooing, which we are forced to undergo today in order to enter the United States is a relay race to what we could tomorrow accept as the normal registration of the identity of the good citizen considering the mechanisms and machinery of the state . . .

Agamben’s positions is particularly honorable considering that as an Italian citizen he is exempt. Twenty-seven countries, limited largely to Bush’s hallucinatory pro-war coalition, have been exempted from the policy that began this month and subjects foreigners to photographing and fingerprinting. He says his position is one of solidarity with those excluded from the exemption . . .

Agamben teaches at the University of Verona, the College International de Philosophie in Paris and the University of Macerata in Italy. Recently, he has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.