Giorgio Agamben - Means Without End: Notes On Politics

Preface

Each Of the texts included in this volume attempts in its own way to think specific political problems. If politics today seems to be going through a protracted eclipse and appears in a subaltern position with respect to religion, economics, and even the law, that is so because, to the extent to which it has been losing sight of its own ontological status, it has failed to confront the transformations that gradually have emptied out its categories and concepts. Thus, in the following pages, genuinely political paradigms are sought in experiences and phenomena that usually are not considered political or that are considered only marginally so: the natural life of human beings (that zoe that was once excluded from properly political spheres and that, according to Foucault's analysis of biopolitics, has now been restored to the center of the polis); the state of exception (that tempo rary suspension of the rule of law that is revealed instead to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private as well as the hidden matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, formerly regarded as a marginal figure, who has become now the decisive factor of the modern nation-state by breaking the nexus between human being and citizen; language, whose hypertrophy and expropriation define the politics of the spectacular-democratic societies in which we live; and the sphere of gestures or pure means (that is, the sphere of those means that emancipate themselves from their relation to an end while still remaining means) posited as the proper sphere of politics.

Form-off-Liffe

THE ANCIENT Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by the word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, humans, or gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group. In modern languages this opposition has gradually disappeared from the lexicon (and where it is retained, as in biology and zoology, it no longer indicates any substantial difference); one term onlythe opacity of which increases in proportion to the sacralization of its referentdesignates that naked presupposed common element that it is always possible to isolate in each of the numerous forms of life.

By the term fonn-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life human life in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.1 Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life as political life. "Civitatem... communitatem esse institutam propter vivere et bene vivere hominum in ea" [The state is a community instituted for the sake of the living and the well living of men in it].2

Political power as we know it, on the other hand, always founds itselfin 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 partic ular 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 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.3