"The Ripe Fruit of Redemption"

Toni Negri Reviews Giorgio Agamben's The State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben's latest book is dedicated to the State of Exception,
the condition that now invests each power structure and radically
empties any experience and definition of democracy. Despite being a habitual reader of Giorgio Agamben, so far I have only
reviewed one of his books, entitled Language and Death and
published in 1982 [1].

Language and Death was a proper introduction to philosophy and
proposed the method of analysis that was to mark his future work: to
critically build, digging at the margins the existential and the
linguistic, a road of redemption on the terrain of being: a fully
immanent redemption that never forgets the mortal condition.To labour in philosophy then entailed going through being with ethical
commitment whilst eliminating all dialectical residues (that were at the
time so popular amongst the epigones of idealism and the declining
socialism), and consequently producing a knowledge that was true,
politically oriented, ethically qualified, and moved towards a possible
human redemption. At first sight Agamben seemed to be close to Derrida
and Nancy, looking through a point of being desiring another, however
illusiory. But this was not the case. As Agamben deepened his
phenomenological analysis of being, he worked on the possible and on a
new horizon, similarly, in other words, to Blanchot when he went through
the linguistic world in terms of critical ontology. It is in this way
that Agamben and the description of the reality he observes come close
to the General Intellect, i.e. to a positive idea of the linguistic
being of the common as traversed by struggles, processes of
exploitation and quivers of liberation.

How is it possible to structure the world that this ontological approach
constitutes? How can someone like Agamben, who has always borne death in
mind in his phenomenological descriptions, positively construe the idea
of redemption? It is on this project that Agamben's theoretical path
presented increasingly evident jolts. Perhaps, we find the greatest jolt
in The Coming Community of 1990 [2], when the experience of redemption
presents itself as distopia. It demanded of the threshold of death to
be traversed by the tension of life, and of the method to interiorise
the Spinozian maxim: "Rather than thinking death, the wise man thinks
of life." In Agamben's thought, the idea of the biopolitical here began
to emerge as core potenza, surely a restless and perhaps alternative
power, yet structurally innovative. Then again in Homo Sacer [3] this
problematic is manifest in all its complexity and contradictions.

There are in fact two Agambens. The one holding onto an existential,
fated and horrific background, who is forced into a continuous
confrontation with the idea of death; the other seizing (adding pieces,
manouvering and building) the biopolitical horizon through an immersion
into philological labour and linguistic analysis: here, in the latter
context, Agamben sometimes almost looks like a Warburg [4] of critical
ontology. The paradox is that these two Agamben always live together
and, when you least expect it, the first re-emerges to darken the
second, and the gloomy shadow of death spreads over and against the
will to live, against the surplus of desire. Or vice versa.

In The State of Exception (Bollati Boringhieri, pp. 120, 12 Euro)
we have a chance to read the two Agambens together. Firstly, Agamben
recognises and denounces the fact that the state of exception (a state
of death) now invests all structures of power and eradicates any
experience and definition of democracy. This is the imperial condition.
Here a first line of interpretation emerges: this definition of the
state of exception is posited at the level of an undifferentiated
ontology, either cynical or pessimist, where each element is reassumed
in the empty game of an equal negativity. The state of exception here
appears to be the indifferent background against which all perspectives
are neutralised and discoloured in order to be brought back to an
ontology that is incapable of producing meaning in non destructive
terms. This being is completely unproductive and is confused with right
(or exists in its absence) where only right would be summoned to give
meaning to the real. We thus see here an overestimation of right and an
underestimation of ontology: reality does not produce meaning.

At this point, it is evident that there is no difference between state
of exception and constituent power, because they both live on the same
plane of indistinctiveness. The definition of the biopolitical -- in
this side of Agamben -- poses itself as indifferent to antagonism: it is
pointless to reply that the right of exception nullifies being, whilst
resistance and constituent power create it! No, here all that occurs in
bios is reduced to the indistinctiveness of nature, to zoe. In fact, it
is not difficult to see in action the drift that forces each unilateral
conception of bios to a naturalist reduction. The effect of this first
rift of analysis is paradoxical: everything that happens in the world
today seems to have been fixed onto a totalitarian and static horizon,
as under "nazism/" But things are different: if we live in a state of
exception it is because we live through a ferocious and permanent "civil
war." where the positive and the negative clash: their antagonistic
power can under no circumstance be flattened onto indifference.

However, Agamben does not stop at this point. The state of exception
presents us with a second, more original and powerful perspective: a
spinozist and deleuzian one. On this second terrain the analysis does
not look over an inert biopolitical but traverses it with a feverish
utopian anxiety and grasps its internal antagonism. The philological
weapon that Agamben handles with such dexterity, now faced with the
complexity that invests it, betrays uncertainty and begins to
vacillate; the discoveries come out as surprises, but they are real
discoveries, conceptual and linguistic innovations. The postmodern is
here presented as ontologically rigorous and creative. On this
unfolding the geneaology of the biopolitical gives continuity to the
archaeology and the philology. The utopic dispositif is not
synchronically counterposed to the ontological perspective, but
diachronically breaks into, penetrates and wrecks institutions and
juridical development. Here dialectics is really overcome because the
biopolitical is deconstructed and internally traversed.

In Agamben, the biopolitical is no longer looked at from the outside, as
if it was an independent reality to study or recognise a fruit to
pick. Hegelianism is here definitively overcome by a critique that
realises the impossibility of the dialectical homology of opposites. The
Hegelian Left is surpassed too. Agamben moves even beyond Benjamin, who
lived through and presented this series of problematic hitches and
painful dialectical reminiscences. With a formidable gesture, he
ethically and conceptually goes beyond the state of exception by going
through it: just as primitive christianity and the communism of the
origins had gone through power and exploitation and destroyed them by
emptying them. In this second scenario, Agamben's analysis shows how
immanence can be realist and revolutionary.

This is an annoying book in its development and its dualisms, yet
extraordinary in its realisation. It clarifies an issue which
post-structuralist and postmodern philosophy had so far only
circumscribed to no avail turning, on the contrary, the
biopolitical perspective into a verifiable and possible experience. A
copernican experience.

Published in Italian on "Il Manifesto quotidiano comunista." 26 July
2003.

Il Manifesto

Translated by Arianna Bove

[1] G.Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: un seminario sul luogo della
negativité, 2a ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1982. Published in English as:
Language and death: the place of negativity. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991. A good bibliography of Agamben's
contributions in different languages can be found here:
http://agambeniana.tripod.co.jp/index_it.html

[2] La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990. Published in English
as:The Coming Community. (Michael Hardt, trans.) Theory out of bounds,
volume 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991

[3] Homo Sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi,
1995. Published in English as: Homo Sacer (Daniel Heller-Roazen,
trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.

[4] Aby Warburg, art anthropologist (1866-1929).