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.In this sense, there is nosharp division between parliamentary democracies and totalitariandictatorships, liberal constitutional states and authoritarian regimes.Agamben s claim of an inner solidarity between democracy and to-talitarianism (1998, 10) has provoked much resistance.Although histhesis of the camp as biopolitical paradigm of the modern (ibid.,117) in no way makes relative or trivializes Nazi extermination poli-cies, it remains the case that Agamben ignores important and es-sential differences.The criticism that Agamben levels differencesis a less relevant argument than his lack of concretization and the 56 Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agambenexcessive dramatization that may lead, ultimately, to the impressionthat homo sacer is forever and everywhere (Werber 2002, 622). Bare Life and the CampWhat does Agamben mean when he describes the concentrationcamp as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity (1998, 123)? Evidently, the camp for him does not so much representa concrete historical place or a defined spatial unity, but symbolizesand fixes the border between bare life and political existence.Thecamps in this sense are not only Nazi concentration camps or con-temporary deportation centers but rather any space in which barelife is systematically produced: the camp is the space that is openedwhen the state of exception begins to become the rule (ibid., 168 169,emphasis in original).Agamben sees in the camps the hidden ma-trix (ibid., 175) of the political domain, and he wants to make visiblethe underlying logic in order to be er conceive the present politicalconstellation.In other words, Agamben proposes a significantly newdefinition of the camp, one that displaces the traditional definition.The camp, once the epitome and manifestation of the difference be-tween friend and enemy, is turned by Agamben into the materializa-tion of the state of exception (ibid., 174), where law and factum, ruleand exception, indistinguishably commingle.In contrast to Foucault, Agamben proceeds from a fundamentalcontinuity of biopolitical mechanisms whose foundation he findsin the logic of sovereignty.Yet he also uncovers a historical caesura.The modern era, he writes, distinguishes itself from previous ones tothe extent that bare life, formerly on the margins of political exis-tence, now increasingly shifts into the center of the political domain.The threshold to biopolitical modernity will be crossed, accordingto Agamben, when bare life proceeds beyond the state of exceptionto become central to political strategies; the exception will becomethe rule, and the difference between inside and outside, factum and Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben 57law enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction (ibid., 9).Modernbiopolitics, writes Agamben, has two faces :[T]he spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals intheir conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepareda tacit but increasing inscription of individuals lives within thestate order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation forthe very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate them-selves.(Ibid., 121)It is this same bare life that in democracies results in the privatehaving priority over the public and that in totalitarian states becomesa decisive political criterion for the suspension of individual rights.But even if the same substratum ( bare life ) forms the founda-tion of each form of government, this does not mean that they shouldall be assessed as politically the same.In contrast to what most com-mentators argue, Agamben is in no way equating democracy anddictatorship or devaluing civil freedoms or social rights.Rather, heargues that democratic rule of law is not an alternative political proj-ect to Nazi or Stalinist dictatorships.These political regimes, rather,radicalize biopolitical trends that according to Agamben are alreadyfound in other political contexts and historical epochs and whosepower today has increased rather than decreased.Thus, Agamben does not follow a logic of oversimplified parallels.Rather, he tries to elucidate the common ground for these very dif-ferent forms of government, namely, the production of bare life [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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