Agamben KAff Ans

Impact

Representation Good
Representations of suffering test the limits of biopower by
bearing responsibility to naked life. This breaks through the
imperfection of language demanding solidarity beyond identity
or universality.
Athanasiou 03 (Athena prof of social anthropology University of Thessaly,
Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, Technologies of
Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1, p. 127-128)
My theme here is the political engagement with the technoperformativity of
biopolitics in the age of genocide and in light of what Giorgio Agamben has called
the Nomos of modernitythe concentration camp and its spectral echoes in Europe
and the Balkans. Martin Heideggers critique of technology will provide the basis on
which to address and develop my questions: What happens to the language of
representation when it encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken,
abandoned, dismembered human corporeality onto the body of the text? How does
unrepresentability organize the representable? I attempt to trace the
technoperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits,
designated as they are by the palpable and yet ineffableat once all too
represented and radically unrepresentablecorporeality of deported,
tortured, raped, violated, detained, dismembered, quarantined, annihilated, and
surviving bodies. It is on the ethicopolitical force of such engagement that
rests the responsibility to face up to the exigency of thinking and
responding, even if there can be no question of knowing what it means,
even if one cannot sense what it would be like to suffer the pain of the
marked Other as s/he stands before the totalizing nomos of the power
over naked life and living death, before biopolitical sovereignty and its demand for
a uniform and [End Page 127] unified body politic. This act of responding,
mediated as it may be by the unfixable semantic and performative forces
of language, exceeds the formal structure of mere naming or remembering. It even exceeds bearing witness. It is, above all, a movement of
imagining the necessary possibility of shifting, evading, or disrupting this
limitation, this irreparable limit to othering the self and selfing the other;
a movement of reckoning with the radical incalculability of the possibility
of perverting the limits of this impasse, even thoughor rather, because
there can be no question of fully overcoming it; and even thoughor rather,
becauselanguage will always fail us.

Death Bad
Death is no longer a political event --- its merely a biological
cessation of life --- aff outweighs
Hall, 5/7/2007 Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, Death, Power, and the
Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, p. 19)//roetlin
Death, in modernity, according to Foucault, is no longer a visible manifestation of power,
it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too. Death is outside the power
relationship, he claimed, [it] is beyond the reach of power, [for] power has a grip on it only in general,
overall, or statistical terms (Foucault 2003c, 247-8). As exemplified by Damiens execution, death in a society
based upon sovereign power was the most public, the most obvious, and the most spectacular manifestation of
sovereign authority. Even if one did not die by execution, death still had everything to do with power, as it was
ultimately the manner in which one sovereign (the king) was relieved by another (god) (Foucault 1978, 138). In
contrast, Foucault maintained, modern death is now the moment when the individual escapes power, the most
secret and private aspect of existence (2003c, 248).

A2 Genocide
Agamben is nothing more than an opportunist --- he preys on
such terrible and sensitive issues as the holocaust in his
attempt to aestheticize politics
Durantaye, 5/21/2009 Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard
University (Leland de la, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, Stanford
University Press, p. 12-13)//roetlin
One response to the challenge of defining Agambens idea of politics , and the
concomitant problem of relating his early work on art to his later work on politics, has been to diagnose
what a number of commentators have called an aestheticization of politics in his writing . J.M.
Bernstein (2004) has called Agambens approach in Remnants of Auschwitz an
aestheticization of [the concentration camp prisoners] fate for the sake of a
metaphysics of language (14). A similar indictment is to be found in Mesnard and Kahan who find that
Agambens ethical and political reflections in that work stem from an aesthetic
position (Mesnard and Kahan 2001, 126). The charges levelled by Bernstein, Mesnard, and Kahan are the most
scathing that can be made, tantamount as they are to accusing Agamben of callous opportunism
in his discussion of the most sensitive and painful of matters . Whether those charges of are
justified is something that we will look at in depth in Chapter Seven. For the moment, it is important to take note of
this idea of an aestheticization of politicsas well as that this is not the only key in which it has been advanced.

Agambens conceptions of the relations of means to

ends and law to violence are fundamentally shaped by Kants theory of aesthetic
judgement and thereby that his idea of politics is one whose model is to be found in
an idea of art. On a related note Arne de Boever (2006) has concluded that Agambens thought is crucially a
Benjamin Morgan (2007) has argued that

literary-political thought. It is a literary thought that, in its political force, cannot be articulated within the limits of
political science. Thus, it oscillates between the literary and the political and demands to be studied comparatively,
across the disciplines (159; italics in original). Whether or not De Boever is right in this claim, it should not be
mistaken for a solution to the problem.

Surveillance Bad

Surveillance Bad
Biopolitically violent electronic surveillance and information
collecting systems are at the forefront of the move from
Athens to Auschwitz
Agamben, 1/10/2004 professor of philosophy at the College International de
Philosophie in Paris (Giorgio, No to Bio-Political Tattooing, published in Le Monde, a
French evening newspaper)//roetlin
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and
normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly
considered inhumane and exceptional. Thus, no one is unaware that the control
exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices , such as credit cards or cell
phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels . All the same, it wouldnt be possible
to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without
entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the
progressive animalisation of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques. Electronic
filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices
of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The
security reasons that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress
us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for
foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry. What is at stake
here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political relationship between citizens
and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active
participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrollment and the filing away
of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the bodys
biological life. These technological devices that register and identify naked life
correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech:
between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the
space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny. Thus, by
applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to
a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life,
have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that its humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

the Wests political paradigm was no longer the city state,

but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to
Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse
Some years ago, I had written that

phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish. I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at
Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of

The bio-political tattooing the United States

imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be
asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the
states gears and mechanisms. Thats why we must oppose it.
deported persons into concentration camps.

Biopolitical control has become the primary function of the

state --- surveillance plays a crucial role in forcing bare life
upon the populace and sustaining the states ability to
regulate your life --- this normalizes the state of exception
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 (Jeremy, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6,
No 1, p. 33-34 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
This type of structure, which allows for an unseen seer to watch over individuals occupying a given territory, is

surveillance structures have been recorded from as far back as

the Early Bronze Age (3000-2650 BC) (ibid, 78-85). However, these earlier surveillance systems
were used in order to guard a territory against an attack , as with the lookout towers
constructed at the top of castles. What distinguishes the Roman work camp from other
ancient surveillance mechanisms is the way in which it is integrated into, and in many
ways the precondition for, the political structure that creates the camp. The
encampment of rebellious Jews characterizes the state of emergency, in which
normal law is suspended in order to use any means necessary to protect the
interest of the sovereign. Thus, the Jews in the camp must be removed from the
political realm and treated as bare life that must be constantly monitored
and exposed to the potentiality of violence . As we shall see, this camp serves a
paradigmatic example of affects of surveillance, insofar as it is the amalgamation of
the state of exception, bare life, violence, law, biopolitics, territory, and
governmentality; not to mention that evidence of surveillance and camp structures that existed thousands of
years ago demonstrates that none of these concepts are new and modern phenomena. Governmentality is
able to function as the control of the population and the creation of bare life
because it employs surveillance as a crucial tactic in the management of life this is
clearly presented in the Roman camp example. However, although many of the concepts and techniques
we see at work in the camp are not fundamentally different today , not everything has
remained the same. The importance of a juridical-political system that acts according to
the state of exception, or suspension of the law, is evident in the emergence of
recent totalitarian and democratic permanent states of emergency; for example,
the UK and the US have normalised the exception through the passing of laws (Terrorism
Act, Patriot Act, etc.) that essentially nullify the application of normal laws protecting human
rights, while still holding them technically in force. We see also that these exceptional laws go
hand in hand with increased surveillance, both of which are tactics that establish
control of the population. Yet what remains to be analysed is the relation(s)
between surveillance, territory, and the state of exception how does surveillance allow for
the rise of the state of exception and the camp? And, more broadly, how are all there concepts
integrated in an art of government? Surveillance must be regarded as the point at
which the camp and the bare of the state of exception intersect in the governmental
control of the population. Defining the Terms: Foucault and Agamben Although Michel Foucault wrote a
nothing new in fact, such

book (Discipline and Punish) that dealt extensively with one method of surveillance, the panoptic, his more useful
contribution to the theory of surveillance comes from his study of governmentality, or the art of governing. In the
course of his 1970s lectures at the College de France, Foucault underwent a significant shift in the emphasis of his
theory, moving from the powerterritory relationship of sovereignty to the politico-economic governmentality of
population; the concept of sovereignty concerned with maintaining power and territory is a dated pre-modern
concept, and what needs to be analysed now is the governing of a population though various circulatory (that is,

relational) mechanisms: it is not expanse of land that contributes to the greatness of the state, but fertility and the
number of men (Fleury quoted in Foucault 2007, 323). In other words, what is emerging in Foucaults writings,
beginning with The History of Sexuality Vol 1, is the concept of biopolitics: the management of life rather than the
menace of death (Foucault 1990, 143). Broadly, what is taking place in Foucaults works and lectures in the mid to
late 1970s is his description of the differences (not transitions) between sovereignty, discipline, and governmental

The
essential goal of sovereignty is to maintain power , which is achieved when laws are obeyed and
the divine right of the throne is reaffirmed. Power is the essential defining component of
sovereignty, while government is more or less just an administrative component
Surveillance & Society 6(1) 33 Douglas: Disappearing Citizenship management (Foucault 2007, 107).

within the sovereign state a component that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was
the private management (government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth,
and goods of his wife and children, while the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance
in striving for the good life. The rise of government in the sixteenth century is marked by this family government
model being applied to the state as a whole (ibid, 93), as well as by the rise of mercantilism - the former not
realizing its full scope and application until the eighteenth century and the latter being a stage of rasion dtat

when the art of governing becomes the

predominant goal of the state in the eighteenth century, the family is relegated to
the position of an instrument and population emerges as the main target (ibid,
108) of the government (territory is the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself
between sovereignty and governmentality. However,

according to its territory, while government defines itself in term of its population). With population as the central

territory, the family, security (military),

police, and discipline - all become elements or instruments in the management
of the population these biopolitical tactics are what primarily distinguish
governmentality from sovereignty.
concern for government, other institutions and sites - such as

O/W the Link

We are core of the topic --- surveillance occurs at the
intersection of bare life and the state of exception
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 (Jeremy, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6,
No 1, p. 35-36 http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Bare Life and the State of Exception This conception of biopolitics as an ancient and founding notion of sovereignty
needs to be distinguished from what Agamben terms bare

life or homo sacer (life that may be killed

but not sacrificed). Biopolitical life, as mentioned above, is still within the juridical-political
realm, but bare life is that which is banished from the polis. It is not pure political
life as such, but a life that exists at the threshold between zoe and bios. Bare life is the
indistinguishability between natural life and political life a life that exists neither
for the sake of politics nor for the sake of life: bare lifedwells in the no-mansland between the home and the city (Agamben 1998, 90). It is a life that is banished from
politics outside of law but included in its exclusion still within the force of law : The
ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in

What has been banned is delivered

over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the
one who abandons it at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured.
relation to something presupposed as nonrelational [i.e. bare life].

(ibid, 110) How is this possible? How can bare life be excluded and included? What implications would this have? In

it is
necessary to introduce another concept: state of exception . This notion is derived, by in large,
order to understand how bare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the polis,

from Carl Schmitts book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin and

The state of exception is a suspension of

law, which is usually instituted during a period of war or another state of emergency: The exception,
which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a
case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like (Schmitt 1922,
6). Under the state of exception there becomes a threshold between law that is in
the norm but is suspended and law that is not the norm i.e. not necessarily part of the
juridical order but is in force; so, in the state of exception there appears this ambiguous
and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings, which are themselves extra- or
antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the mere fact that is, a
Schmitt concerning the nature of the state of exception.

threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be underlined

the relation between the state of exception and bare life . This point is absolutely
crucial for Agamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the
state of exception opens up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare
life is outside law but constantly exposed to violence and unsanctionable
killing (Agamben 1994, 82). Agambens position can be understood in the triadic relation state of exceptioncamp-bare life; the ultimate power of the sovereign, and the complete dissolution of
democracy into totalitarianism two political systems that, according to Agamben, already have
an inner solidarity (ibid, 10) happens at the point when the state of exception becomes the rule
and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the indistinguishability
between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are exposed . The
here is

paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be applied to
our current political milieu.

Permx Surveillance Key

The surveillance state replicates the permanent state of
exceptionlocks in violence
Keller 13 Jared Keller is a journalist living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared
in the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Al Jazeera America, the Los Angeles
Review of Books, and the Verge. (Jared, Pacific Standard, Why Dont Americans
Seem to Care About Government Surveillance?, june 12 2013,
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/why-dont-americans-care-aboutgovernment-surveillance-60011 //SRSL)
Its been less than a week since former National Security Agency systems
administrator Edward Snowden, through the reporting of The Guardian and The
Washington Post, lifted the curtain on the United States governments vast
surveillance apparatus. Snowden, who shed light on how the NSA monitors the cell phone activity, credit card data,
and Internet browsings of millions of Americans, is responsible for one of the biggest national security leaks in U.S. political history.

More than half (56 percent) of the 1,004 adult

respondents to a national survey conducted June 6-9 by the Pew Research Center
and The Washington Post said that the NSA program tracking telephone records is
an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism. Forty-one percent felt the
practice was unacceptable. The American public is somewhat more divided on the NSAs
Internet monitoring programs, with 45 percent of respondents agreeing that the
government should be able to monitor everyones email and other online activities
if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks and 52 percent
disagreeing. Despite the Prism revelations, this isnt a drastic shift from how Americans felt back in July 2002, when a Pew
And the American people dont really seem to care.

survey found that 45 percent of Americans were OK with the government monitoring Internet activity in order to prevent future

Pews researchers conclude from the latest survey that

there are no indications that last weeks revelations of the governments collection
of phone records and Internet data have altered fundamental public views about the
tradeoff between investigating possible terrorism and protecting personal privacy.
attacks (47 percent said it should not).

In a poll conducted shortly after the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, 78 percent of respondents agreed with the
increased used of surveillance cameras in public places. Despite days of headlines about the American surveillance state and

Americans seem to
have accepted the scope and reach of the post-9/11 surveillance state into their
lives as necessary. Pew notes that 62 percent of Americans believe the federal government should investigate possible
government invasions of privacy (and a huge spike in sales of George Orwells 1984 on Amazon),

terrorist threats, even if that means intruding on personal privacy, while just 34 percent say it is more important for the government
not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats. Why are Americans so
comfortable with the surveillance state? Its likely that this acceptance goes hand-in-hand with an acceptance of the reality of
modern terrorism. In a New York Times/CBS poll conducted shortly after the manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspects
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 78 percent of respondents agreed with the increased used of surveillance cameras in public
places, judging the infringement on their privacy as an acceptable trade-off for greater security from terrorist attacks, as the
Times put it. Of those respondents, 24 percent said a terrorist attack on the United States was very likely in the next few months
and 42 percent somewhat likely. (In the previous year, just 10 percent of people had said another attack in the U.S. in the next few
months was very likely.) The threat of terror in our cities, immediately after 9/11, was paralyzing. Now, despite the horror of the
bombings in Boston and the attacks that have been thwarted by counterterrorism efforts in the years since 9/11 (like Najibullah
Zazis 2009 plot to detonate explosives on the New York subway), terrorism seems to have become more accepted as a modern
geopolitical phenomenon, a fixture in the background of our daily lives. Concern

about another terrorist

episode in the United States has increased after the events in Boston, wrote Micah
Cohen at FiveThirtyEight shortly after the manhunt for the two suspects concluded.
But there has not been the upsurge in concern over such an attack that there was
in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in New York City. The post-Boston polls
have also shown that Americans personal sense of threatas opposed to the

generalized threat that the country facesremains low.

How, exactly, does one get used to the

threat of terror? Have Americans become so habituated to domestic dangers (as opposed to, say, the faraway theater of
conventional war) that weve come to accept the continued presence of the modern surveillance state, even when a someone like
Edward Snowden provides a glimpse as to how it intrudes on our everyday lives? Its certainly possible. While terrorism is designed
to demoralize and, well, terrorize a target population, groups with regular exposure to ongoing violence can develop a high tolerance
for disruptions to civil society. Some of the best research into this matter focuses on the psychological impact of terrorism on Israelis
following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000. In a 2003 article in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, researchers Avraham Bleich, Marc Gelkopf, and Zahava Solomon set out to determine the relationship between terrorist
attacks and the prevalence of traumatic stress-related symptoms and the public sense of safety in Israel. They discovered a
moderate level of stress immediately following the outbreak of violence around Jerusalem from 2000 to 2002; survey participants
showed distress and lowered sense of safety, they did not develop high levels of psychiatric distress, which may be related to a
habituation process and to coping mechanisms, according to the researchers. This resonates with the reaction of U.S. citizens
immediately following 9/11. A national survey conducted just days after the attacks found that 44 percent of the adults reported
substantial stress symptoms. But over time, the trauma caused by the Intifada became somewhat normalized throughout the Israeli
population. New York Universitys Ariel Y. Shalev found in 2006 that PTSD levels eventually stabilized in various neighborhoods
throughout Jerusalem, regardless of whether theyd been directly affected by terrorism or not. A 2010 study in Economica on Israels
experience with terror by Cornell Universitys Asaf Zussman (and co-authored with Bank of Israel researcher Noam Zussman and
Dmitri Romanov of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics) examined happiness and psychological health among Israeli citizens from
2002 to 2004, the years immediately following those examined by Bleich et al. In their econometric analysis of happiness among
Israelis four years after the start of the Intifada, Zussman and her colleagues found that terrorist attacks had practically no effect on
happiness levels. Zussman is careful to note that this isnt a blanket habituation phenomenon for Israels entire populaceArab
Israelis experience a more negative reaction to terror attacks than Jewish Israelisbut that the general tolerance for terrorism in the

Overall, the level of happiness

remained stable throughout the Intifada years despite a large variation in the
intensity of terrorism across time and location, writes Zussman. The evidence
thus casts a doubt on the effectiveness of terrorism in achieving one of its main
objectivesdemoralizing enemy population. But even if terrorism seems
uncontrollable to the average citizen, why arent more concerned with the level of
surveillance undertaken by a state they, theoretically, have some legal and political
power in? Not only are programs like Prism classified as top secret and their
mention outlawed by the FISA courts that authorize their usage, but the very
architecture of surveillance is designed to be unseen and unobtrusive. We only get
riled up about violations of our constitutional rights when theyre obvious, and
immediate, like the genital scrutiny of the Transportation Safety Administration. By
nation remained high as the years passed from the initial outbreak of violence.

contrast, terrorism, despite its infrequency, is a still a highly visible and deeply personal experience for Americans. Conor
Friedersdorf draws out this distinction with regards to September 11: Most Americans don't just remember where they were on
September 11, 2001they remember feeling frightened. Along with anger, that's one emotion I felt, despite watching the attacks
from a different continent. That week, you couldn't have paid me to get on a plane to New York or Washington, D.C. Even today, I'm
aware that terrorists target exactly the sorts of places that I frequent. I fly a lot, sometimes out of LAX. I've ridden the subway
systems in London and Madrid. I visit Washington and New York several times a year. I live in Greater Los Angeles. ... As individuals,
Americans are generally good at denying al Qaeda the pleasure of terrorizing us into submission. Our cities are bustling; our
subways are packed every rush hour; there doesn't seem to be an empty seat on any flight I'm ever on. But as a collective, irrational
cowardice is getting the better of our polity. Terrorism isn't something we're ceding liberty to fight because the threat is especially
dire compared to other dangers of the modern world.

All sorts of things kill us in far greater numbers.

Rather, like airplane crashes and shark attacks, acts of terror are scarier than most
causes of death. The seeming contradictions in how we treat different threats
suggest that we aren't trading civil liberties for security, but a sense of security. We
aren't empowering the national-security state so that we're safer, but so we feel
safer. The national emergency state from which programs like Prism have originated has outlived the national emergency. A
strong executive isnt necessarily alien in the American constitutional system in the event of an emergency. The Prize Cases
established that one of the core obligations of that branch is to meet any exigency in the shape it presented itself, without waiting
for Congress to baptize it with a name, and subsequent Supreme Court casesIm thinking Ex parte Milligan, Schenck v. U.S.
(which established the clear and present danger prerequisite for executive action), and Brandenburg v. Ohio, in particularhave
continued to define and circumscribe the juridical spaces where the executive branch of the government can act unilaterally to deal

The late political scientist Clinton Rossiter called this Americas crisis
government. The best description that Ive ever read for the phenomenon comes
from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who coined the term "the state of
exception" to mean a position at the limit between politics and law ... an
ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the
with a crisis.

political where an executive acts extralegally in order to preserve an existing legal

framework, effectively superseding the rule of law in order to save it. But if terrorism and the
resulting surveillance state have become accepted features of American public life (which, according to the latest polls, they have),
then the apparatus the government deploys to adjudicate and prosecute our war on terror should become normalized in our existing
legal regime. The Patriot Act and National Emergencies Acts that provide the legal basis for the modern surveillance state were
supposed to be temporary "emergencies," but with their continued re-authorization by Presidents Bush and Obama, they have
become the norm.

We are lurching from emergency to emergency, living in a permanent

state of exception. Margot Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, puts it nicely
in The Atlantic: Foreign intelligence is the exception that has swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole. This, I think, is the most
significant impact of Snowdens leak: not necessarily to expose wrongdoing in the legal sense (since the sweeping dragnet of Prism
and the NSAs monitoring of Verizons phone records are technically legal) but to take the abstract legal concepts outlined under our
emergency constitution and translate them into a political reality in the minds of the American populace. "I really want the focus to
be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we
want to live in," Snowden told The Guardian. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that
which is done against them." The Pew/Washington Post poll may indicate that people are comfortable with swapping liberty for
security, but that doesnt mean theyre comfortable with an unaccountable, totally opaque, Kafka-esque security apparatus that falls

Theres an historical anecdote that often crops

up among political theorists and legal scholars when they discuss the tradeoff
between liberty and security during national emergencies . Following the fall of the monarchy in 509
in the legal gray area of our ongoing state of exception.

BCE, the Roman republic moved to establish an executive branch that was headed by two co-equal magistrates, but the Romans
recognized the necessity of a unitary executive that could act swiftly and decisively in times of extreme crisis, if only for a brief
period of time. The only person to serve in this special constitutional role of dictus in Roman history was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus,
a Roman statesman and aristocrat who had previously served as counsel. Cincinnatus was elevated to the role of dictator in order to
repel an invading tribe, and, following a swift military victory, Cincinnatus relinquished his authority, stepped down from the role of
dictator, and returned to his life as a farmer. Cincinnatus brief rule is often cited as a prime example of civic virtue, but for political
theorists like the late Clinton Rossiter, the Roman consul was an historical antecedent for a successful constitutional dictatorship. If
the Pew data is any indication, the American people are amenable to the idea of a temporary dictus state in times when imminent

But the whole goal of leaks in general, let alone Snowdens

leak, is to ensure that citizens dont become as habituated to the emergency state
as they have to terrorism, to rouse Americans from a period of complacency to,
somehow, recognize and rein in the emergency state when the intelligence
community cannot live up the the virtue and discipline of Cincinnatus.
danger comes to the United States.

Perm

PermPower
Power is both inescapable and not wholly negative --- its
contingent on social relations and can be productive --- make
them contextualize offense specifically to the case
Hall, 5/7/2007 Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, Death, Power, and the
Body: A Bio-political Analysis of Death and Dying, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, p. 2-3)//roetlin
In his numerous writings Foucault was primarily interested in the way that power acts on individuals. His early work
was largely consumed with the ways in which power working through institutions shapes individuals into subjects.
By contrast, his later work focused on what he termed technologies of the self, techniques through which power can

Power is
everywhere, he contended. But rather than existing as a repressive negative force, power
exists in fluid, reversible, and unstable relationships (1980, 93). Individuals are highly
situated in such relationships, not only integrally related to other persons, but to institutions as well. Thus, we
cannot dissociate ourselves, even theoretically, Foucault claimed, from this vast
network of connections in order to live up to the model of the autonomous individual that we so frequently
envision ourselves to be in the West. Power, according to Foucault, is frequently characterized in a
negative way, meaning a power that forbids rather than a power that tells us what is best. While power
still operates negatively in society through laws and other juridical mechanisms, the
importance of such mechanisms, Foucault theorized, has been superseded by more
productive forms of power. In the modern era, Foucault contended, there was a virtual explosion of
be taken up by individuals in such a way that it is possible for them to subjectify themselves.

numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, thus
forcing juridical forms of power into a subordinate role (1978, 140). These productive controls depend primarily
upon knowledge: knowledge of populations and the individuals that comprise them. It is such knowledge (and the
application of such knowledge) that, for Foucault, essentially constitutes modern power.

PermSovereignty
Making the system of sovereign power more equitable and just
is the only alternative to complete submission to its violence.
Edkins & Pin-Fat 04 (Jenny University of Wales Aberystwyth international
politics professor, Veronique University of Manchester IR lecturer, Sovereign Lives:
Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p. 13-14)
The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over
where the lines are drawn. While, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed
as a form of resistance, it is not a resistance to sovereign power per se as it still
tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and
preferably more inclusively). Christine Sylvester's exploration of what she calls
"fictional development sovereignties" in this volume can be read as testimony to
this. Nevertheless, strategies that address where lines are drawn are,
undoubtedly, crucially important and often seem the only possibility for
resistance. Indeed, in Chapters 2 and 9 both William Connolly and Karena Shaw
offer compelling arguments and illustrations as to how and why this can and should
be done. For example, Connolly proposes the notion of an "ethos of
sovereignty" by which he means "a modified ethos of constitutional action
[that] would nonetheless incline the effective range of court decisions and
popular responses in a different direction" such that, despite the
paradoxes of sovereignty, such an ethos could alter its course. Furthermore,
Shaw suggests that the discourses and practices of sovereignty that take
the form of a sovereign state can be "a terrain of power and resistance"
mobilized by "those seeking to resist or delegitimize assertions of
sovereignty over them." Shaw unpicks the complex ways in which a Hobbesian
grammar of a "shared ontology as the precondition for legitimate authority" is
reproduced by indigenous peoples but yet offers (albeit precariously) possibilities of
critically reconfiguring both what that shared ontology might be and the constitution
of legitimate authority. The promise of the arguments both Connolly and
Shaw make is an active demonstration that the grammar of sovereign
statehood (distinct from sovereign power) is not fixed in a timeless
configuration. As Connolly puts it, resistance is possible within a logic of
state sovereignty transformed by an appropriate ethos such that"old ideas
[old practices of sovereignty, territory, property, capital, mastery, nationhood, and
faith] provide new sites for possible metamorphosis today."

PermLaw
Permutation do both-- endorse a legalistic invocation of
sovereignty that emphasizes borders and governmental
authority to challenge exclusion
Tran-Creque 13 Bard College, interdisciplinary research, education and art
community working to understand unmanned and autonomous vehicles. By bringing
together research from diverse academic and artistic perspectives which have, up
until now, remained fairly silent on the issue, we aim to encourage new creative
thinking and, ultimately, inform the public debate. We want to encourage dialogue
between the tech world and the non-tech world, and explore new vocabularies in
diverse disciplines. This is an online space for people to follow the latest news,
encounter disparate views, access good writing and art, find resources for research,
and engage a diverse community of thinkers and practitioners with the shared goal
of understanding the drone. (Steven, Center for the Study of the Drone, The
Forever War is Always Hungry, July 5, 2013, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/theforever-war-is-always-hungry/ //SRSL)
Whenever someone mentions sovereignty, its pretty easy to come away with the
impression that all thats at stake is the law: questions of territory, jurisdiction,
violations of airspace, and so on. Consider, for example: Two months ago, Pakistan accused the United
States of violating its sovereignty with drone strikes, demanding that their own
government be granted control over strikes within their borders. Addressing recent drone
strikes in Yemen, Glenn Greenwald noted that killing a person without trial is not only
extrajudicial, it also violates the sovereignty and dignity of the entire tribe to which
the slain person belonged. Most recently, writing for Foreign Affairs in the emerging genre of drone sinomania,
Andrew Erickson and Austin Strange voiced concern about how China is following the United States
example in disregarding the sovereignty of other nations as the Chinese drone fleet
has rapidly caught up to American military and surveillance capabilities. And so on. In both
popular discourse and the policy press, pundits and commentators have overwhelmingly adopted the same familiar blueprint : a
legalistic invocation of sovereignty that emphasizes borders and
governmental authority to the exclusion much else. There is a dangerous intellectual poverty
in this. We are not, as Trevor Paglen recently observed, moving toward a surveillance state: we live
in the heart of one. This is the era of total surveillance and extrajudicial killing, of
public austerity and mass incarceration, of permanent unemployment and global
warming: what Jakob Augstein recognized last week in Der Spiegel as nothing short
of totalitarianism. The extraordinary measures of rendition, black sites, secret laws,
black budgets and retroactive legalizations that have accompanied the vicious
internal targeting of Muslims, protesters and whistleblowersall of this has become
the new normal, and coming decades will reap the whirlwind. This is what Paglen has dubbed the
terror state: not merely the possibility of turnkey tyranny one step away, but its virtual inevitability. As the War on
Terror now transforms into the forever war, I think we must begin by asking how
exactly we ever got here. Of course, at first glance, the connection between all of this and
the question of whose legal jurisdiction prevails in Waziristan seems faint at best.
Certainly, no matter how broadly one reads the term war, one struggles to find in this
anything like the strangely resilient imagery of nation states battling each other

with state of the art weaponry, no matter how much this continues to dominate the
way we think of war. In none of the usual accounts can one find something like Jean Bodins definition of
sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of the republic, one of the
principal influences from which Carl Schmitt famously drew his definition of the
sovereign as he who decides on the exception to the law . But I would insist: these are not
esoteric historical or theoretical concerns. I want to offer a very different approach here to the question of what sovereignty means.

Sovereignty has never been an anodyne policy question of whose jurisdiction

applies, of who controls drones, or of how visible such clandestine military programs
will be. Rather, following Eyal Weizman, one should begin by asking how sovereignty came to be exercised as the economistic
management of death. In the strangest of places, David Graebers historical critique of an old anthropological debate over the divine
kingship of the Shilluk of Southern Sudan offers what I find to be the most compelling explanation for the forever war. That is, that

the War on Terror is better understood as an unusually visible example of the

constitutive principle of sovereignty: a permanent war between the sovereign and
everyone elsethe only kind of war there is. This is why, as Teju Cole once remarked, the forever war is
always hungry.

A2 Rights L Universal; k2 Pwr

Our deployment of rights does not employ universalism and is
critical to alter power relations.
Patton 2k5 (Paul - Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales, Foucault, Critique and Rights,
Critical Horizons 6:1, p. 269-270)

This preference for the particular over the universal, for the event-like character of
both the systems of power and knowledge through which we are governed and the
forms of contestation to which they give rise, appears to rule out any appeal to right
or to rights, since these are typically understood to rely upon universal features of
human nature or the human condition. Foucault is well known for his reluctance to
rely upon any such universalist concept of human nature or human essence. By
contrast, the predominant approach to the nature of rights in contemporary moral
and political philosophy supposes that these inhere in individuals by virtue of some
universal rights bearing feature of human nature, such as sentience, rationality,
interests or the capacity to form and pursue projects. In this manner, for example,
Alan Gewirth argues along Kantian lines that the capacity to form and pursue
projects ensures that all humans have a right to freedom and well being since these
are necessary conditions of such agency.7 My aim in this paper is to argue that the
apparent tension between the particularism of Foucaults preferred form
of critique and the universality supposedly implied by the appeal to rights
disappears once we abandon the universality condition and understand
rights as historical and contingent features of particular forms of social
life. I argue that not only is this way of understanding rights implicit in Foucaults
historical and naturalistic approach but that it finds support by in elements of the
externalist understanding of rights defended by a number of Anglo-American
political philosophers. In contrast to the attempts to ground rights in a particular
feature of individual human beings, these theorists take the view that whether or
not a body (individual or collective, personal or corporate) possesses rights will
depend on facts about how that body is able to act and how it is treated in a given
social milieu.8 Despite his reticence with regard to concepts of human nature and
despite the initial impression that genealogical critique is inconsistent
with appeals to any kind of right, Foucault makes frequent use of the
concept of right. For example, in What is Critique? he defines critique as
the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to
question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its
discourses of truth.9 In interviews and political essays, he often called for new
forms of right or for reliance upon rights that are not yet widely
recognised or established. For example, in a 1982 interview on the issue of gay
rights, he advocated the creation of new forms of relational right that would
recognise same sex relationships.10 In a 1983 interview on Social Security, he
endorsed the idea of a right to the means of health and also a right to suicide.11
Finally, in a 1984 speech in support of non-governmental organisations attempting
to protect Vietnamese refugees being attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, he
spoke of the right of international citizens to intervene in matters of international

policy hitherto reserved for governments. He further suggested that the suffering
of individuals founds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those
who hold power.12

Alt Fails

Alt Links**
Agambens call for the total transcendence of the logic of
sovereignty reproduces divisons between forms of life and
forecloses effective partial projects in resisting domination.
Connolly 04 (William E. Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, The Complexity
of Sovereignty, in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and
Shapiro, p. 29-30)
Agamben retains one habit of several theorists that
he criticizes: he acts as if an account of the "logic of sovereignty" reveals
ironclad paradoxes, paradoxes that could be resolved only by transcending
that logic altogether. His mode of analysis engenders the eschatological gesture through which
3) The "logic" of sovereignty:

it closes. I doubt, however, that politics or culture possesses as tight a logic as Agamben delineates. If I
am right, biocultural life displays neither the close coherence that many theorists
seek nor the tight paradox that Agamben and others discern. Biocultural life
exceeds any textbook logic because of the nonlogical character of its materiality. It is more messy,
layered, and complex than any logical analysis can capture. The very illogicalness of its materiality
ensures that it corresponds entirely to no design, no simple causal pattern, or no simple set of
paradoxes. Agamben displays the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses political culture
within a tightly defined logic. Some social theorists, again, express this hubris by

presenting a tight model of causal explanation, others by displaying a

closed model of historical realization, and others by dissolving the first
two images into tightly defined paradoxes. All three stances overstate the
extent to which the complexity of biopolitical culture is resolvable into a
consummate logic. The attraction of these perspectives of coherence, realization, and tight
paradox is that, if accepted, they allow social and cultural theorists to assume the role that
ecclesiastical authorities once played in Christian states: that of definitive public visionaries who
articulate the larger picture of the actual, the possible, and the desirable in which sovereignty, law,
and politics are en-cased. Kant, for example, participated in such a political drive. He sought to replace
ecdesiological authority with the public authority of academic (Kantian) philosophers who continued
the Christian tradition by other means. The continuing attraction of the Kantian problematic in
academic philosophy is bound to the authoritative standing that it bestows upon academic
philosophers in biocultural life. Agamben, of course, translates Kantian antinomies into paradoxes.
But just below that facelift beats the heart of another scholar who reduces cultural life to a

logic.

Not S Inevitable
Biopolitics are inevitable. They have been present to some
degree and cannot be eliminated.
Connolly 04 (William E. Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, The Complexity
of Sovereignty, in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and
Shapiro, p. 29-30)
(2) Biopolitics and sovereignty. Agamben contends that biopolitics has become
intensified today. This intensification translates the paradox of sovereignty into a
potential disaster. The analysis that he offers at this point seems not so much
wrong to me as overly formal. It reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian
assumption that there was a time when politics was restricted to public
life, and biocultural life was kept in the private realm. What a joke. Every way of
life involves the infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the
affective life of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of
life is biocultural and biopolitical. Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Augustine,
Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel, writing during different periods, all appreciate the
layering of culture into different layers of biological life and the concomitant mixing
of biology into culture. They treat the biological not as merely the genetic or fixed,
but as zones of corporeality infused with cultural habits, dispositions, sentiments,
and norms. Biocultural life has been intensified today with the emergence of new
technologies of infusion. But the shift is not as radical as Agamben makes it
out to be. In late-modern life, new technologies enable physicians, biologists,
geneticists, prison systems, advertisers, media talking-heads, and psychiatrists to
sink deeply into human biology. They help to shape the cultural being of biology,
although not always as they intend to do. Agamben's re-view of new medical
technologies to keep people breathing after their brains have stopped functioning
captures something of this change, showing why a sovereign authority now has to
decide when death has arrived rather than letting that outcome express the slow
play of biocultural tradition. Numerous such judgments, previously left to religious
tradition in predominantly Christian cultures, have now become explicit issues of
technology and sovereignty in religiously diverse states.

Not S No Political Alt

Agambens analysis is overly formalistic and precludes real
political alternatives
Brannstrom 8 (Leila Brannstrom is an assistant professor and member of the Lund University
Faculty of Law How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument 2008)///CW

Agambens diagnosis and his prescription. One of the troubles with

is its deadlocked and overly formalistic
understanding of how law operates and of how it might be used and transformed .2
Surely Agamben insightfully points out certain dangerous trajectories in contemporary
law and politics, but I believe that the rigid way in which he analyses law and politics
forecloses the most promising ways of responding to and acting upon the problems
that he outlines. There is a more general rationale for scrutinizing Agambens analysis of law and of the
state of exception and the implications of his analysis. Agambens understanding of law as a mechanism that
In this article, I will argue against both

his line of reasoning, the one that I will focus on,

puts limitations to our political potential and imagination and his conviction that law cannot be used for
emancipatory purposes, is shared by many engaged in the field of critical legal and social studies who assume
that exposing the repressive character of law and legal practices is the only possible way of conducting critical

overlooks the possibility to raise legal

arguments and to engage in legal practices for pursuing emancipatory politics, a possibility
that in many cases would be both forceful and productive. Sometimes, as in Agambens case,
studies of law. Such an assumption is problematic as it

these assumptions are built on a perception of law as a machine whose workings, effects and possibilities are

The objectification of law, in turn, induces fear and aversion

which often leads to political, social and legal analyses that suffer, like Agambens analysis
does, from an overemphasis on, and an overestimation of, the legally authorized power of
the state which nourishes the persisting, but misleading, idea that the major threats to
our freedom and to a better future are to be found in repressive state-practices .
given beforehand once and for all.

Agamben cedes the political --- his theories are consolatory

and insufficiently supported
Virno, June 2002 italian professor of philosophy teaching the University of Rome
(Paolo, Interview with Paolo Virno for Archiplago number 54,
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm)//roetlin
Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker
with no political vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to
Agamben is a problem.

transform it into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my
opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the
concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government
over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I
say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a
book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into
a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this

biopolitics in a historically
determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the
biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for
founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical
can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an
instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with
an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought
potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use

instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a
child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics,
biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the
term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use , like the cry of a child, when what serves us are,
in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

Not S Sovereignty
The alternative cannot escape the logic of sovereignty and
forecloses the best avenues of resistance.
Connolly 04 (William E. Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, The Complexity
of Sovereignty, in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and
Shapiro, p. 26-27)
Nowhere in his book, however, is a way out of the logic actually disclosed.
The response of Hannah Arendt-to pull the state out of biopolitics-is considered and
appropriately rejected as unviable. But nothing else is offered to replace it.
Agamben thus carries us through the conjunction of sovereignty, the
sacred, and biopolitics to a historical impasse. This combination is almost
enough to make you return to Rousseau. Indeed, Agamben helps us to see the
persistent attraction to the Rousseauian idea of the nation, in a world where its
preconditions of attainment are even less propitious than that in Rousseau's day. For
Rousseau tried to conceal from many the paradox he encounters, while Agamben's
analysis exacerbates a paradox that he cannot imagine how to transcend. Perhaps
it is possible both to resist the fantasy to return to a past that never was
and to slip past Agamben's insistence that the paradox must be overcome
in a new way. At any rate, I want to suggest that while Agamben's analysis is
insightful in identifying three critical elements in the paradox and in pointing to
dangers that flow from it, the formalism of his analysis disarms the most
promising ways to negotiate it. To show this, I reconsider three key elements in
his account: the meaning and role of the sacred, the relation between biopolitics
and sovereignty, and the "logic" of sovereignty.

Not S State of Exception

No alternative and Agambens theory of the law is flawed
even Guantanamo isnt a state of exception
Brannstrom 8 (Leila Brannstrom is an assistant professor and member of the Lund University
Faculty of Law How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument 2008)///CW

Agambens characterization of the situation at Guantnamo is marked by his objectification and

overestimation of law. His presentation of law as a monolithic object makes it difficult to
see that the reduction of the detainees to infrahumans is to a large extent a work of
making distinctions through law. The prisoners at Guantnamo have been treated as
objects of law rather than legal subjects by the US executive, legislative and, to a lesser extent, by
the Supreme Court who has been willing to leave the detainees to military justice or other kinds of alternative

what is at stake regarding

legal protection might not necessarily be a matter of inclusion or exclusion but a
matter of different, and more or less pleasant, ways of being included. The alternative
justice.42 The different attempts to do alternative justice show clearly that

legal designs outlined by the different branches of US government are reminiscent of colonial legal practices and
maybe it is only within that context that the dehumanizing treatments of people at Guantnamo can be

We can see Agambens overestimation of law in his analysis of the

interactions between detainee and detainer as a matter determined by the (lack of)
law. It is as if the brutality and racism at work at Guantnamo could be explained by
the absence of legal protection. An example that William Connolly brought up to illustrate his
understood.43

argument that sovereignty is the end product of political acts at the micro level, is illuminating also in this
context.44 Connolly argues that the ethos infusing sovereignty in the American society in the 19th century was
primarily agricultural and protestant Christian. He points out this ethos, illustrated as a play of forces between the
multitude of people, the traditions infused in the people and the state authorities, as the main reason for why
American Indians were excluded from the new settler society. Even though a Supreme Court decision had ratified
the autonomy of the Cherokee people in the southeast, the sovereign ethos of Christian superiority personified by
settler vigilant groups and the refusal of President Jackson to enforce the decision of the Supreme Court overturned
the authority of the Court and American Indians were pushed outside of legal protection. Connolly argues,
however, that if there had been a strong and successful political movement drawing on another aspect of the
Christian faith to change the ethos in which Presidents made their decisions and the settlers acted, events could

it is the forces that animate law and state sovereignty,

rather than the structure of law and sovereignty, which explain the brutality
demonstrated at Guantnamo. As these forces are not all pervasive and unchallengeable, it is
possible to change the situation of the detainees through political action . Agamben
have taken another direction. Similarly

presents the situation of the detainees at Guantnamo as the result of the onward march of history, turning it into
something of an ontological necessity rather than the outcome of specific political actions and decisions that can
be reversed. These actions and decisions are grounded in a certain political mind-set that can be rebutted. In
Agambens theory on the state of exception, however, political actors and struggles are conspicuous by their
absence. His frame of description and line of reasoning depoliticizes, in Jacques Rancires words, matters of
power and repression [] setting them in a sphere of exceptionality that is no longer political, in an
anthropological sphere of sacrality situated beyond the reach of political dissensus.45 As the quote introducing
this section indicates, Agamben posits law as the opposite of political action in the true sense and in so doing
forecloses the possibility of political contestation through legal arguments and actions. One available form of
political action with regard to the situation of the detainees is, however, to remind of, and make tangible, the
humanity of the prisoners.

Asserting the legal subjectivity of the detainees is one way of

doing this. The possibility of performing this political action is open to all of us since the question of who
is a legal subject and what that subjectivity should entail is not owned by superior powers as Agamben seems to
suggest. As Rancire argues the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and
have the rights that they have not (Rancire 2004, 302), which reminds us that if rights were authoritatively
defined by supreme powers, nobody would ever need their rights. The gap between the letter of the law and its
actualization, or between law and fact, which Agamben takes to be signs of the fraud of law, might not be there to
be closed the gap sustains the possibility of interpretation. The reach and meaning of legal rules and rights, and
of law itself, is never ultimately given, but developed through meaning-inducing legal, political and moral

performative acts. Absolute identity between law and factual circumstances will never come about and neither is
it desirable because law is a living practice whose performance involves engagement in political and ethical
struggles about its formulation, interpretation and application. The position of the Bush administration which
acknowledges that both domestic and international law place limits on the exercise of power while maintaining
that these limits are not applicable to the detainees at Guantnamo, expresses the kind of simultaneous validity
and non-application of legal rules providing protection that Agamben points out as characteristic of a state of
exception. The attitude of the Bush administration towards law a tactic to be used instrumentally and
strategically is however, despite Agamben, not the final authoritative interpretation of law regarding the situation
of the detainees at Guantnamo. The Bush administration does not own the meaning of law; accepting their legal
position as the final word, as Agamben does, is to represent them as more or less omnipotent, thereby intensifying
the sense of despondence, and the attendant political paralysis, that is already widespread among those wishing

Legal arguments and legal action are admittedly not useful, or even desirable,
in all situations, and there is no doubt that the story of how law curbs power is not
the whole story, but the step that Agamben takes, in more or less wiping out the
differences between law and lawlessness and between rights and domination, does away with
much of the grammar of the field of justice . As it remains extremely vague what his
suggestion that we should reach beyond law might entail in practice, Agamben
leaves us less well equipped in our pursuit of justice.
for a change.

means of political action

Sov GoodNatives

AFF - Natives DA to ALT

Rejecting sovereignty and identity devastates indigenous
struggles against ongoing colonialism.
Connolly 04 (William E. Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, The Complexity
of Sovereignty, in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and
Shapiro, p. 29-30)
People do protest vocally about inalienable property rights when the question of distinctive forms of
governance over lands previously wrested from indigenous peoples comes up. But they can be offered
these examples of previous creativity in the property form within capitalism to loosen them up a little. And be reminded that, in
the past, the most creative embellishments have been reserved for those who already control major economic resources.
Recall, for instance, that Tocqueville worried about the future effects of the "new manufacturing aristocracy" on the agricultural
form of property that he considered to be indispensable to American democracy. But he did not follow that concern with a call to
dismantle the aristocracy of capital; he reserved that conclusion for those Amerindians who lacked Christianity and, at least he
thought, agriculture. To chart plural practices of property and governance within capitalism is to

encourage support for the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples to govern large stretches of
territory previously wrested from them. Such practices are being pursued today in large areas of Canada and
Australia. New strategies are being proposed for indigenous peoples to participate in world capitalism
in ways that stretch and pluralize the paradigmatic practices of capitalist property, ownership,
territory, and sovereignty. Indigenous casino capitalism might become a way to generate capital for other productive
activities. Such changes neither overturn global capital nor remain within its most familiar forms. Such modes of
governance enable indigenous peoples both to reject the coercive demand that they be stationary
peoples with unchangeable customs and to fold traditional elements of spirituality into new
practices of territory, property, capital, and governance.

Ks of Agamben

Race K
Alt doesnt solve and TURN: Depicting the modern
constitutional state as camp is not enough biopolitics can be
ruptured through correcting abandonment by the state along
racial and class lines.
Giroux 2k6 (Henry A. Professor at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department, College Literature 33.3, Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, p. 181-182)
Given the Bush administration's use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of "detainees"
illegally and indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance,
kidnapping, and torture of alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil
liberties in the United States, Agamben's theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the
dangers of a government in which the state of emergency becomes the
fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben's claim that
the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault's panopticon) is now the
model for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical
commitments that have less to do with preserving life than with reproducing
violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too narrow and fails in the end to
recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is not the only
form of biopower in contemporary life. The dialectics of life and death,
visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that
now constitute the biopolitics of modernity have to be understood in
terms of their complexities, specificities, and diverse social formations. For
instance, the diverse ways in which the current articulation of biopower in the
United States works to render some groups disposable and to privilege others within
a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed, any viable rendering
of contemporary biopolitics must address more specifically how biopower attempts
not just to produce and control life in general, as Hardt and Negri insist, or to reduce
all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the
"death camp," as Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over others. The
ongoing tragedy of pain and suffering wrought by the Bush administration's
response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a biopolitical agenda in which the logic
of disposability and the politics of death are inscribed differently in the order of
contemporary powerstructured largely around wretched and broad-based
racial and class inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that
neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of
the mid-twentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market
fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of
capital accumulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush
administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics.4 While the
murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection
of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has
long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more

dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned

violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and
disposability. As William DiFazio points out, "the state has been so weakened
over decades of privatization that it . . . increasingly [End Page 181]fails to
provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive
percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract has been
suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has
been virtually abandoned. Under such circumstances, the state no longer feels
obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death.
The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizensthey are
already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political
framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics
in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral
to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were
marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support
from the government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced
social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of
unemployed labour. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is
conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which
"vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them
the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global
media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and
dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole
populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social
homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States
maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of symbolic and material
capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to
those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the
increasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it
is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism
and the simultaneous rise of security states organized around cultural (and
racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction,
politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Psycho K
Agamben fails to provide a realizable alternative the
affirmatives utopian fantasy of playing with the law inevitably
fails to create a real political solution
Sharpe 9 (Matthew Sharpe is author of Slavoj iek: A Little Piece of the Real, coeditor of
Traversing the Fantasy, and the author of numerous pieces on political theory, psychoanalysis, and
critical theory. He currently teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University Only
Agamben Can Save Us? 2009 The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3)///CW
Jacques Derrida qualifies his recourse to a messianicity without messianism. Alain Badiou looks to Pauls
messianism to illustrate a logic allegedly characteristic of any political subjectivity. By contrast, we have seen in
Part I how Giorgio Agamben is far closer to an open recuperation of kabalistic messianism. Yet, I want now to
contend that critical theorists should definitively not lose our (human) heads, faced by such extraordinary

psychoanalysis one of earlier critical theorys

should at least put us on our analytic guard about to a position whose idea
of redemption invokes infancy, boredom, the fantasy of playing with the law (Agamben,
formulations as those which close The Open. Thinking of
decisive sources

2005b, 64), an Edenic sexuality without mystery (Agamben, 2004, 9092), a community without any discernible
symbolic identity nor founding prohibitions, and an in-humanity characterized by what Heidegger precisely calls
the nowhere without a no of animals prediscursive captivation by their disinhibitors.15 Gershom Scholem, who

Agamben frankly diagnoses Sabbatai Zevi as a manic depressive (Scholem, 1971, 60), is
escapist and extravagant nature of such utopianism,
Scholem writes of the kabalistic messianism Agamben rejoins in The Open: [a utopianism] which
undertakes to determine the content of redemption without having experienced it in fact,
does of course subject it to the wild indulgence of fantasy (Scholem, 1971, 1314).
by contrast with

characteristically more sober. The

Keeping our analytic heads, I want to ask now firstly about the form in which the content of Agambens messianism

Agamben presents his thought in the recent texts

as meaningfully political, or as pointing towards what he calls another, coming or new politics. And,
is proffered, and in which it has been received. For

given the timely political subjects that Agamben analyses in Homo Sacer and State of Exception which both
addressed executive exceptionalism Agamben has been widely received in the post-Marxian left as a political
theorist or philosopher. One stylistic peculiarity of these more ostensibly political texts, certainly, is the interruption
of Agambens erudite analyses of the history of ideas with invocations of this new politics. The content of these
political invocations is cut from the same messianic cloth as the claims Agamben presents in The Open:
namely, desoeuvrement or worklessness (Agamben, 2000, 141), pure mediality, inoperative community, the

whatever singularities, or however else they might be called [sic.] ... (Agamben, 2000,
Agambens claim to speak authoritatively concerning the political , on the
strength of his readings of philosophical and religious texts, seems principally to be founded on the following
non sequitur. Versions of this non sequitur frame The Open, Means Without Ends, and Homo Sacer: i. At the
coming people,
117118)

beginning of political philosophy, the opening book of Aristotles Politics defines human beings as both political
(zoon politikon) and speaking animals (zoon logon echon). These traits single humans out as living animals who
are yet beyond (meta) their physical, animal being (zoe). We are animals capable of qualified forms of life:

Agamben
feasts immediately upon the questionable conclusion that: ii. the most needful, if not the
only, political thing left to do (at least in our allegedly ultrahistorical cul de sac) is accordingly to
theoretically question this Aristotelian framing of the political realm. Any more mundane
especially the bios theoretikos and bios politikos. Given this true exegetical premise, the problem is,

disputation within this political realm would by implication fall above or beneath, but in any case outside, the
scope of political thought. So, for example, The Open advises us: We must learn to think of man as what results
from the incongruity of these two elements [of man and animal], and investigate the practical and political
mystery of separation It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way within man has man
been separated from non-man than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and
values (Agamben, 2004, 16). The hidden premise is evidently the ultra-idealistic idea that: iii. Politics, or at
least what is of significance in political life, is determined in advance by the framing ontologico-philosophical
categories that would delimit the political realm. In the most open variants of this position,

Agamben strays

very close to what could be termed a political Platonism. By Platonism, we mean here that

lineage of Western thought that accords un-tethered priority to theoria over praxis or else as in Agambens type
of case simply forgets the theoretico-practical difference, by directly collapsing praxis into theoria. The false
conclusion, pleasing only to theoreticians, is that true theoria would itself be equated with progressive political
action. Does Agamben really sponsor such a Platonism? To answer, we can consider how in Means Without Ends,

Agamben invokes the idea of a political form-of-life which would lie, as we now know,
beyond all Law and its founding violence (Agamben, 2000, 312). What does this form-of-life
involve? Disappointingly for the practically oriented critical theorist,
Agamben explains that it involves neither action nor considerations of any
higher justice. No: it involves thought: I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in
an inseparable context as form-of-life an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and
of human intelligence. To think does not mean merely to be effected by this or that thing, but rather to be
affected by ones own receptiveness and to experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure power of
thinking (Agamben, 2000, 9).16 However unencouraging or simply opaque this reads, Agambens recourse to
Heidegger in The Open (see I) indicates, Agambens Platonism does need to be situated in its specific modern
philosophical heritage. In particular, it cannot escape the reader that the characteristic form of argumentation
Agamben proffers us in all his texts is transcendental in the technical sense this term acquired after Kants critical
philosophy. Whether he is analyzing how words refer to things17 , the distinction between human and animal, or
as in Homo Sacer the relations between law and life, Agambens aim is always the disclosure of the condition[s]
of possibility of the phenomena or separations in question. We saw in Part I above, for instance, how Agamben
contends in The Open that the Western distinction between man and animal has been framed by way of deciding
on an exceptional liminal figure. We now need to qualify that, for Agamben, this decision is a transcendental
datum. Agambens claim is that it made possible the Wests succeeding understandings of how human beings can
be speaking and also living animals. In other words, the form of Agambens argument in The Open replicates that
of Agambens earlier treatments of the relation between language and being in Language and Death where
indexicals and the voice are what make possible languages ability to refer and also of the political realm,
wherein Carl Schmitts theological conception of the sovereign decision on the state of exception (cf.
Agamben, 2005b, ch.1) is elevated to what trans-historically makes possible: the creation and definition of the
very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity the fundamental localization (ortung) which
makes the validity of the juridical order possible (Agamben, 1998, 19 (my italics)). So Agambens critical

Our
principal concern, by contrast, is with his positive political statements. What of these?, the
descriptive analyses of existing phenomena are avowedly transcendental in their logic and their intent.

supporter of Agamben might still rejoin with justice. Do they not have a different argumentative form? And how
might this form relate to the extra-political messianism into which he is drawn? To answer, let us now consider the

in Homo Sacer in which Agamben comes closest to an identifiable,

political prescription: i. chapter 3 of Homo Sacer opens by addressing the distinction between constituting
two chapters (3 and 4)

and constituted political power. This distinction is central to Schmitts 1921 Die Diktator and his 1928
Verfassungslehre. In a way that literally paraphrases Schmitts reactionary critique of legal positivism and / as
parliamentarianism, Agamben complains that today the general tendency in the liberal West is to regulate
everything by means of rules. Against the background of these claims, Agamben turns with praise to Negris 1992
work, Constituting Power. Negris text, Agamben argues, interrupts todays insipid liberal consensus. Against the
grain, Il Potere Constituente: undertakes to show the irreducibility of constituting power (defined as the praxis
of a constituting act, renewed in freedom, organized in the context of a free praxis) to every constituted [already
established, legalized] power ... (Agamben, 1998,.43). Like Benjamin, whose Critique of Violence aims at
conceiving a pure violence outside of the horizon of law-preserving or law-constituting violence (cf. Agamben,
2005b, ch. 3), Negris aim is to conceive of a constituting power that cannot lose its [creative or constituting]
characteristic in creating. (at Agamben, 1998, 43) The problem is that Agamben has to confess in Homo Sacer
that he cannot see that Negri succeeds in this attempt. Negri does not, in Agambens words: find any criterion,
in his wide analysis of the historical phenomenon of constituting power, by which to isolate constituting from
sovereign power (Agamben, 1998, 43).18 Why then does Agamben turn to Negri here? The strength of Negris
book, Agamben now qualifies, lies elsewhere than in its analysis of the categories of constituted and constituting
political powers. Where does this different significance lie? Here, Agamben says without blinking, the problem is
moved from political philosophy to first philosophy. (Agamben, 1998, 44) Negri allegedly opens up a theoretical
perspective given which constituting power, despite appearances and history, ceases to be strictly a political
category and necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology. (Agamben, 1998, 44) In order to weigh Negris
notion of constituting power, Agamben contends, we need to recur to Aristotle not however to the Politics or
Ethics, but to Book Theta of the Metaphysics concerning the categories of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality
(energeia). In this way, Agambens analysis of constituting power in Homo Sacer issues directly into ontology, and
finds its messianic pitch there: Only an entire new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and
necessity, and the other pathe tou ontas will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to
constituting power (Agamben, 1998, 44). Book Theta of the Metaphysics stands in unlikely opposition to those
politicians today who want to reduce all constituting power to constituted power, for Agamben (44). It does so as

it allegedly allows us to glimpse the possibility that dynamis can be thought by itself, without relation to the
energeia (actuality) we might have assumed it was there to actualize. Just as a tradie will keep his ability to ply his
trade if he is retrenched, down-sized or downs tools (cf. Franchi, 2004, 3637), so Agamben specifies: if
potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that
potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to do
or be (Agamben, 1998, 45). ii. chapter 4 of Homo Sacer (The Form of Law) sets out from an analysis of the
comportment of Kafkas man from the country in the famous parable of the door of the law. Within the
contemporary period wherein Agamben has told us that the state of exception has become the norm, so that all
todays laws are allegedly in force without significance, the enigmatic passivity of the man in Kafkas fable is read

Kafkas unlikely
political hero undertakes nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy to have the
door closed in order to interrupt the laws being in force without significance
(Agamben, 1998, 55). In what would this passive and patient politics consist? Again it is
difficult to say. For in answering, Agamben almost instantly reconfigures his analysis of the
man at the door around an ontological inquiry (firstly) into the meaning of Jean-Luc Nancys
by Agamben as an eminent instance of a new, passive politics. In his assessment,

notion of abandonment which in its turn issues (secondly) into the ruminations of the later Heidegger. The State
of Exception controversially asserts that Benjamins pure violence the extreme thing of politics is the
counterpart to Heideggers Being (Agamben, 2005b, 5960). In similar ontological clip, chapter 4 of Homo Sacer
remarkably announces the political importance of rethinking the relation of Law to life through Heideggers
thought of ontological difference. According to later Heidegger, readers will recall, Sein is not an entity. This is
because it is the condition for the possibility of any such entities intelligibly appearing to us. In giving seindes over
to presence, Being itself as it were withdraws, abandons or dissimilates itself behind what it makes possible. If
this much is well and good, less immediately clear is what any of this could have to do with the enigmatic praxis
of Kafkas man from the country. Agamben is once again clear. The bridge that would span the apparent gulf
between fundamental ontology and a reflection on the (non-)relation of subjects to sovereignty and law is, he
argues, to be located directly on the side of ontology: If Being in this sense is nothing other than Being in the ban
of being, then [sic.] the ontological structure of sovereignty fully reveals its paradox it is necessary to remain
open to the idea that the relation of abandonment is not a relation [what is required is] nothing less than an
attempt to think the politico-social factum no longer in the form of a relation ... (Agamben, 1998, 60). Once again,
that is, politics is abandoned in a philosophical analysis whose logics explicitly point away from
the political realm to a reflection on the transcendental conditions for any such realm.

Fem K
The concept of play is inherently exclusionary of gender
difference Agambens concept of Playland and biopolitics
only apply to males which turns the case and makes biopolitics
inevitable
Mills 8 (Catherine Mills is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics in
the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. I was previously employed at University of
Sydney, Australia, and have been Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New South Wales, and the
Australian National University. I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Australian National University.
My main research interests lie in the areas of biopolitics and bioethics. Playing with Law: Agamben
and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice, The Agamben Effect p. 23-24)///CW
As I have argued elsewhere, to the extent that relationality enters into Agambens thought, it does so early in the
form of autoaffection. But this radical rejection of relationality appears to be premised on the elimination of alterity
altogether, including the alterity internal to and constitutive of autoaffection. The question that can be asked here,
then, is what the cost of this would be. To make clear the weight of this question let me briefly consider one way in
which this neglect of alterity and difference plays out. As I mentioned previously, Agamben takes his initial
inspiration for his conception of play as an interruption of calendrical time from Collodis description of Playland in

Agamben passes over in silence is that

Playland is populated entirely by boys. Without taking this issue up in detail, the question that
poses itself here is to what extent this idyllic conception of play is actively premised on the
exclusion of gender difference. In what way would the presence of a girl or girls
disrupt, interrupt, or undo the cacophonous, indifferent play of boys? Not dissimilarly,
Agamben is silent on issues of gender in reference to Aristotles distinction between
the life of the oikos and politics, even though it is insistently present in the designation of the oikos as
Pinocchio. One notable characteristic of this description that

the domain of reproduction that necessarily precedes and supports the life of politics. As Derrida sharply remarks,

the distinction of bios and zoe is not as straightforward as Agamben takes it to be.
The point here is not that "girls" or "women" should, as if they could, simply be added to
the scene of the play or biopolitics in such a way that the scene itself and the
conceptual framework built on it would remain without substantial change. Nor is the point
to simply note the exclusion of women from Agambens philosophical lexicon at an
explicit textual levelthe consistent use of gender-specific pronouns as if their reference
were universal may sill be indicative of a philosophical blindness or amnesia, but it does
not reach to the depths of the problem in itself. For what would it be to ask the question of
gender within the messianic framework that Agamben proposes? Indeed, can such
questions he asked within that framework?

Derrida K
The basis of Agambens philosophy is based on a false
dichotomy between bios and zoe found in Aristotles text this
paradoxically turns the case because Agamben attempts to
posit himself as the first to discover the truth which makes his
work a form of sovereignty
Swiffen 12 (Amy Swiffen is a professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University.
She has a PhD from the University of Alberta. Her intellectual background is in socio-legal studies and
social and political theory. Her areas of expertise include sociological theory, deviance studies,
criminology, ethics, biopolitics, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of law Derrida Contra Agamben:
Sovereignty, Biopower, History 9/30/12 Societies)///CW
Derridas issue with this conception of sovereignty is multi-layered. As mentioned above, he begins by pointing out
how it involves the naming of firsts:

Agamben Wants to be the first to announce an

unprecedented new thing () and also to be the first to recall that in fact its always been like that, from
time immemorial ([1], p. 332). Indeed, Agamben claims both that the Production of a
biopolitical body [is] the originary activity of sovereign power , and that the politicization of
bare life in the state of exception is the Decisive event of modernity ([2], pp. 4, 6). That is, he claims to be
uncovering the essence of sovereignty in the state of exception, while at the same time identifying
the entry of bare life into the polis as distinguishing of modernity. Derrida insists that the confusions
and contradictions inherent in this formulation are obscured by the naming of firsts .
To illustrate, let us turn more closely to the attribution of the zoe/bios distinction to Aristotle and scrutinize whether

For Agambens theory to hold, the difference

between zoe and bios must really be present in Aristotle. However, Derrida points out several
instances where Aristotle seems to use the term zoe in a way that contradicts the
interpretation that Agamben puts forward . One significant exception would seem to be the
famous definition of the human being as politikon zoon (political animal). With the term
politikon zoon, Aristotle seems to be describing a zoe that is political . In fact, Derrida points out
that zoe, or zen (to live), is used repeatedly by Aristotle in the Politics to describe the human
as a political animal, and each time he Never fails to specify that the human zoon is political By nature
(physei) (Aristotle quoted in [1], p. 315). This specification implies that the descriptor political
refers to how humans live naturally, and is thus a qualification of their animal life. Being political is a
it can indeed be found in his ancient text.

natural attribute of human life and their specific difference from other animals. The definition of the human as
politikon zoon, therefore, would seem to be a glaring exception to the zoe/bios distinction. Agamben addresses the
issue by claiming that there is no contradiction if one interprets the meaning of the qualifier politikon properly.
Here is the passage: It is true that in a famous passage of the same work [the Politics], Aristotle defines man as a
politikon zoon (Politics 1253a, 4). But here (aside from the fact that in attic Greek the verb bio nai is practically
never used in the present tense), political is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather as a specific
difference that determines the genus zoon ([2], p. 2). Agamben is arguing that there is a difference between an
attribute of a living being and a specific difference that defines the living being. Yet, Derridas position is that this
difference is neither certain nor clear. The phrase politikon zoon implies both: The specific difference or the
attribute of mans living, in his life as a living being, in his bare life, if you will, is to be political ([1], p. 330). There
is no clear difference between the two notions. They seem to be Perfectly reciprocal and complementary ideas

Derrida insists that Aristotle did not oppose zoe and bios as Agamben
suggests. The concept of politikon zoon implies there was never any such distinction in his concept of
([1], p. 330). Thus,

the political; for Aristotle, Man is that living being who is taken by politics: he is a politically living being, and
essentially so ([1], p. 348). Thus, Derrida claims that it is obvious that Aristotle is already Thinking of biopolitics
([1], p. 349). However, the division in life that apparently structures sovereignty is not based in his ancient text in

The distinction is of Agambens own making much

more than the argumentative gesture he deploys would suggest . It is evident
that Derrida agrees with Agamben that biopower is an important concept in the
the way that Agamben implies.

there is
an issue concerning the conceptual strategies relied on to characterize these
novelties ([1], pp. 330, 326). Derridas reading of Aristotle demonstrates the zoe/bios distinction, which is The
contemporary moment. He notes the Incredible novelties in bio-power that must be addressed, but

frontier along which Agamben constructs his whole discourse, does not go deep enough to function as an

the insistence on seeing historical and

philosophical origins, exemplified by the reading of the bios/zoe division in Aristotle
is, in effect, producing the very sovereign form of exclusion that Agamben
criticizes in his work. This is not to suggest that Derridas position is that ancient texts are not relevant
originary political relation ([1], p. 321). Moreover,

to contemporary politics. On the contrary, they are indispensable for understanding the Bio-powers or zoopowers of what we call the modernity of our time ([1], p. 333). The issue however is how to conceive of the
relationship between these texts and our time, how to think history neither in terms of diachronic succession

Agambens approach involves thinking history in

terms of A decisive and founding event ([1], p. 333). Derridas criticism intends to
compel a reconsideration of this way of Thinking history, of doing history, of articulating a logic and a
nor synchronic simultaneity ([1], p. 333).

rhetoric onto a thinking of history ([1], p. 332). The difference in conceiving history corresponds to a difference in

Derrida rejects
conceptualizing sovereignty in terms of an essential relation. The readings in The Beast and
the two thinkers positions on the future of sovereignty. On the one hand,

the Sovereign suggest instead that sovereignty has More than one ground () more than one solid and single

Derrida leaves us with an abyssal void or groundless depth

suggests that there are multiple forms of partition,
division, and condition that broach a sovereignty that is imagined to be indivisible. If this is
correct then it is not possible to oppose sovereignty because sovereignty is not one
thing.14 For instance, to unconditionally oppose sovereignty would mean opposing classical principles of
threshold ([1], p. 334). This is not to suggest
underlying the concept; rather, it

freedom and self-determination. There is no way to conceptualize freedom without a certain sovereignty. Thus, it is
impossible to reject sovereignty without also threatening the value of liberty. The issue is therefore not a choice
between sovereignty and non-sovereignty but among ways of sharing, transferring, translating, and dividing
sovereignty.15 In contrast, Agambens formulation conceives sovereignty in terms of an essential relation to bare
life. The idea of an essential political relation implies that it might be possible to overcome sovereign politics, if
only the relation were discarded.16 Sovereignty could be abandoned and a coming community ushered in, in
which there would be no exception of the fact of living from the form of life [20].17