Agamben Giorgio - Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben

On Catastrophe and Redemption

This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past and not remember tomorrow in the story.

Mahmoud Darwish, This Is Forgetfulness

In March 2009, Giorgio Agamben gave an address inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. In the audience were a number of high-ranking Church officials, including the Bishop of Paris. Although his talk has been described as a homily, its content was far from edifying. An evocation of final things, of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the Church, he told the assembled listeners, that it has been said, not without irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window.

In this depiction of the permanence of the liberal capitalist present as hellish, we see the immense gap that separates Agamben from the liberal consensus that shaped the period in which many of his major works were written. The unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and rapid collapse of the Soviet Bloc gave rise to a form of liberal utopianism that was most starkly expressed in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In that book, which now has the feel of a relic from a bygone (post)-historical era, Fukuyama argued that despite the horror of the twentieth century, good news has come in the form of the demise of totalitarianism and the ascendancy of liberal democracy as the only coherent political idea with global reach.

This liberal utopianism was a paradoxical onemore a sigh of resignation in the face of the failures of previous, more compelling, utopias than a promised land. Although even Fukuyama was unable to stifle a note of anxiety about whether such a posthistorical condition could actually make us happy, the purchase of his thought relied on its ability to capture a zeitgeist marked by the foreclosure of such anxieties, and the promise of happiness they recalled, and the affirmation of the eternal and uninterrupted continuation of the liberal democratic present. In stark contrast, for Agamben, it is this transformation of the liberal-capitalist present into an infinite horizon that is truly infernal.

Before long, it became clear that liberal capitalism had not produced the irrepressible movement toward a world of peace and democracy that had been proclaimed in the wake of the fall of the wall. Agamben's thought was particularly suited to analyzing the transformations the demise of the Soviet Bloc wrought on those liberal democratic states that Fukuyama had portrayed as the victors of the ideological battle against totalitarianism. By the time Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life appeared, with its striking claim that today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, By 2005, when State of Exception was published in the midst of the War on Terrorwhich saw the declaration of a state of emergency, the suspension of a host of basic rights and the utilization of Guantnamo Bay as an interrogation camp in which so-called enemy combatants were placed outside the reach of the U.S. court systemAgamben's analysis of our time seemed disturbingly prescient.

More than a decade later, it is clear that while the early reception of his explicitly political works was bound up with the events that seemed to confirm his central theses, the descriptive value of his thought was double-edged: while it led to enormous interest in his work across a range of disciplines, it tended also to obscure the underlying philosophical claims about the nature of Western politics and metaphysics that provided the horizon of intelligibility for his more provocative arguments. Furthermore, it led to a one-sided focus on