Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................2 Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................3 Agamben Answers Rights Good...................................................................................................................4 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers.......................................................................................................5 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers.......................................................................................................6 Agamben Answers Alternative Answers -- Singularity Fails........................................................................7 Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers.................................................................................................8 Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers.................................................................................................9 Agamben Answers State Action Good........................................................................................................10 Agamben Answers Doesnt Apply to Politics.............................................................................................11

SUFFERING MAY BE INEVITABLE, BUT WE MUST BE ABLE TO PRIORITZE VIOLENCE AS A UNIQUE FORM OF SUFERING THAT IS NOT INEVITABLE AND SHOULD BE STOPPED Weinhold 04 Author Jessica Weinhold is a second-year student at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. http://www.pcusa.org/ideas/2004fall/violence.htm This stark reality demands an unambiguous response on the part of all persons in the church community: clergy, educators, lay leadership, and the congregation. The response must be unambiguous because, as Desmond Tutu once said, If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.1 But just responsesfor victim and offender alikecan only occur when there is, at the very least, a basic understanding of the problem. It is important to note that different forms of suffering permeate our personal and corporate contexts. Thus, not all forms can be equated or responded to uniformly. In the case of domestic and sexual violence, this suffering is not inevitable (like natural disasters, for example); it is intentional and above all else unnatural. Therefore, this form of violence must be addressed on its own terms. It must be distinguished as a particular form of suffering that occasions a unique form of grief and demands a uniquely definitive response from clergy and congregation. While the word violence most often evokes words like brutality, cruelty, carnage, and force, the reality is that violence includes physical violence-both sexual and non-sexualverbal, emotional and economic abuse.2 The constitution of violence, therefore, resides not in the degree of physical harm inflicted but in whether the integrity of someones personhood (body, mind, and/or spirit) was maintained or betrayed. If betrayedwhether through the perpetration of explicit bodily harm or notviolence has occurred. This fundamental constitution is consistently overlooked because of the failure to recognize that violence is more about power and control and less about acting violently. This misunderstanding enables cycles of violence to continue without confrontation.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Rights Good

EVEN THOUGH RIGHTS HAVE NEGATIVE CONNATOATIONS, IT IS NECESSARY TO RENEW THEM TO PROMOTE HUMAN DIGNITY. THE ALTERNATIVE IS FASCISM Frances Daly, philosophy researcher, Australian National University, BORDERLANDS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm At its most fundamental, right is the right to something, and within the realm of natural rights or rights of the human being, it has been principally concerned with rights against oppression and inequality in order to realize a potential for freedom. Citizen rights have at their basis quite different values, namely, a range of political and property rights to be realized within and not against the State. This is not to say that law associated with human rights is not, at times, itself an external form of oppression - but natural or human right is also able to offer something quite different. The term needs to be used advisedly because of the problematic connotations it has but there is a tradition of natural right containing anticipatory elements of human dignity in which forms of justice as ethically-based community survive, and it is this tradition, I would argue, which needs to be renewed. We can see this in all struggles for human dignity in which unsatisfied demands exist for overcoming the lack of freedom of exploitation and constraint; the inequality of degradation and humiliation; the absence of community in egoism and disunity. And so too can we view this via the necessary reference point that a critique of right provides: by acknowledging the hypocrisy of law or the distance between intention and realization we have an important basis for distinguishing between the problem of right and its complete negation, such as we would see under despotic, fascistic rule. The use and abuse of right is not the same thing as a complete absence of right, and understanding this is vital to being able to comprehend where and in what ways democratic, constitutional States become, or are, fascistic. Natural right, or the right of the human being, occupies a space of interruption in the divide between law and ethicality that can, on occasion, act as to reintroduce a radical pathos within right. Agamben is unable to allow for any of this because, for him, rights are without any basis in human respect, their institutional representation guaranteeing the logic of only the police, the market and, ultimately, the 'extermination camps'.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Rights Good

RIGHTS CRITICAL TO CHALLENGE THE STATE Frances Daly, philosophy researcher, Australian National University, BORDERLANDS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm The context of rights is one that is frequently unstable, and, as such, it is important to clearly assess the place of rights within our present conditions of unfreedom. Often as a result of their denial, human rights currently act so as to allow a questioning of the assumed authority of the State. Indeed, without a sense of rights it would be difficult for us to understand the current absence of real freedom. If we consider the contemporary struggles of the 'Sans Papiers' in France, the several hundred thousand people whose refusal of the label 'illegal' and fight for documentation is premised on the basis that the undermining of rights is merely a way of attacking the value of dignity for all, we can see a clear example of the possibility that can be realized through right. The Sans Papiers are well-known for their questioning of the assumptions of immigration policies, such as the existence of quotas, detention camps and deportations, and they argue cogently for an end to frontiers themselves. Madjigune Ciss argues that the initiatives of those claiming their rights are basic to the survival of communities. This is done on the basis of an appeal to rights of justice and egalitarianism. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this emancipatory struggle outside a conception of rights. Agamben views all such setting out of rights as essentially reintegrating those marginalized from citizenship into the fiction of a guaranteed community. Law only "wants to prevent and regulate" (Agamben, 2001: 1) and it is certainly the case that much law does but within rights, I argue, we can also detect a potential for justice. In contrast, Agamben contends that legal right and the law always operate in a double apparatus of pure violence and forms of life guaranteed by a Schmittian 'state of emergency' (Agamben, 2000: 43). And although he recognizes the dire consequences of a state of emergency with the eradication of the legal status of individuals, he views this as the force of law without law, as a mystical or fictional element, a space devoid of law, an 'empty legal space', or 'state of exception' as Carl Schmitt refers to it, that is essential to the legal order (Carl Schmitt, 1985: 6). What is then eliminated here is any sense of how the appeal to rights brings into question institutionalized unfreedom and why this underlying insufficiency between the idea of right and real need is opposed by those attempting to expand the realm of human rights. The problem with this strategy for doing away with any distinction and placing the refugee in a position of pure potentiality is that, instead of liberating or revolutionizing the place of the refugee, it creates an eternal present that is unable to connect the very real reality of difference with a critique of the society that victimizes the refugee in the manner with which we are currently so familiar.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Rights Good

REJECTING RIGHTS UNDERMINES OUR ABILITY TO FIGHT OPPRESSION Jean-Phillipe Deranty, philosophy professor, Macquarie University, AGAMBENS CHALLENGE TO NORMATIVE THEORIES OF MODERN RIGHTS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernitys moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneths reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticize the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Alternative Answers

AGABENS ALTERNATIVE WILL PRODUCE COMMUNITIES AT WAR WITH THE STATE Kenneth Cmiel. Professor of Cultural History at Iowa, AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY, Spring 1986, p. 196. The Fate of the Nation and the Withering of the State
If community cannot be a closed thing, if it is forever open to the potentially new, then the dream of a national community is simply impossible. In Agamben's community. The idea of something being "unAmerican" makes no sense, for there is no defining essence in a "whatever singularity." Yet Agamben is also aware that capitalism the state will continue. Indeed, he recognizes that after the fall of Communism, they are sweeping the globe. Politics, in the future, Agamben argues, will not be community building but the perpetual project of communities against the state, "a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization I doubt Agamben's new community is actually coming. It remains far from clear that communities without identities arc emerging anywhere except in the febile imaginations of a few philosophers. It is not that I dislike the dream. It is for me the most attractive dream there is. It is that I am skeptical that such "whatever singularities" are possible on more than the level of personal behavior. Politics is too clunky for such subtlety. Even the new social movements seem far more down-to-earth and prone to defining themselves than Agamben's theorizing. Politics, alas, demands more leaden language. Still, the image of the state fighting communities is one worth pondering. Its distance from earlier welfare state thinking could not be more dramatic. Instead of the state embodying the will of the nation, we have a picture of numerous communities at war with the state. It is? And I say this with no relish, a far more plausible picture of our emerging politics than Walzer's happy pluralism. Just think of insurance companies. Perotistas, and gay and lesbian activists-all communities distrustful of the state, all committed to struggling with the state. Agamben does not ask what this perpetual warfare will do to government. Like Walzer, he assumes that the state will trudge on as before. Yet if this warfare between humanity and the state is constant. is it not plausible to surmise that hostility to the state will become permanent? With the fiction that the state embodies the nation's will dying. who will defend the state? Who will keep it from becoming the recipient of increasing rancor and from being permanently wobbly? Isn't that a good wav of understanding recent politics in the US? And as for Agamben's own Italy- the past decade has revealed a public far more disgusted with the state than even in America.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Alternative Answers

AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE DESTROYS DEMOCRACY AND LEADS TO STATE CONTRAL. Frances Daly, philosophy researcher, Australian National University, BORDERLANDS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm
There is much in Agambens analysis of contemporary society, particularly via his use of a Debordian critique of the spectacle, that forcefully restates some of the central problems of social life that we perceive in commodification, a fetishized distancing and an

perhaps the rather overstated or one-dimensional nature of Agamben's understanding of alienation reveals one of the problems with his use of this critique. He refers to the "absolutely banal man" who is tempted to evil by the powers of right and law (Agamben, 1993; 32); we have the 'falsification of all
alienation of the very nature of what it means to be human. But

production' and the 'complete control of social memory and social communication'; or the "absolute systematic falsification of truth, of language and opinion [] without escape" (Agamben, 2002). Because it is precisely in such a critique that one would expect Agamben to not merely acknowledge the "complete triumph of the spectacle" but to explain the relation between the spectacle and what 'positive possibility' there remains within conditions of alienation that might be used to counter these conditions. There would seem to be an enormous gap between Agamben's critique of this society and the state of simply being that

This state of death that Agamben would argue now colonizes all structures of power and that eradicates any experience of democracy might well still possess some kind of antagonistic clash, as Toni Negri
continues to be a possibility. argues, but it is difficult for us to see just where resistance to this state might emerge (Negri, 2003: 1). Certainly, Agamben calls for making all residents of extraterritorial space (which would include both citizen and non-citizen) as existing within a position of exodus or refuge, and in this we can perhaps see some basis for resistance. A position of refuge, he argues, would be able to "act back onto" territories as states and 'perforate' and alter' them such that "the citizen would be able to recognize the refugee that he or she is" (Agamben, 2000: 26). In this Agamben directs our attention usefully to the importance of the refugee today both in terms of the plight of refugees and their presence in questioning any assumption about citizen rights, and also in placing the refugee, or "denizen" as he says using Tomas Hammar's term, as the central figure

But he also reduces the concepts of right and the values they involve to forms of State control, eliding all difference within right and thereby terminating an understanding of the reasons for a disjuncture between legality and morality and of an existing separation of rights from the ideal of ethicality, in which liberation and dignity exist to be realized beyond any form of contract. . It is always possible to
of a potential politics (Agamben, 2000: 23). suppose that a self-fashioned potentiality is simply available to us, and in some senses it is, but not because a type of theory merely posits the social and the historical as completely open to our manipulation or 'perforation'. Likewise, we cannot merely assume that changing 'forms of life' necessarily amount to types of refusal. Such a claim would only make sense if it were put forward on the basis of an appreciation of an impulse to freedom from particular types of constraint and oppression. It would also require a sense of how this impulse takes place within a variety of conditions, some of which might be easily altered and some of which might not. In the absence of an engaged sense of what this impulse means, and of the context in which elements of freedom and unfreedom do battle, it is impossible to speculate on the nature of the

Agamben merely presumes that a strategy by which we all identify as refugees will renew a politics and thereby end the current plight of the refugee, as if no other reality impinges on this identification. This is also assumed on the basis that the State in Agamben's theorizing, the abstraction of an all-encompassing, leviathan State is equally, readily and easily liable to perforation. This contradiction is indicative of a wider problem where what we encounter is a form of critique that is oddly inappropriate to the type of issue it addresses. . Much can be said in criticism of the doctrine of right, of the limited nature of the understanding of freedom and rights in documents on rights, of the assumption of the place of citizen rights as the locus of the fundamental rights of the human, and most significantly, the absence of any sense of the undetermined nature of what being might mean. But what must be stated, I
subjectivity or potentiality which might be emerging or which might be in stages of decomposition.

feel, is that it would be a serious impoverishment of the ethical problem that we currently face to deny any potential value of rights in carrying forth traces of an impetus towards human dignity, of the ideals of freedom and equality, and to thus reduce rights to what might be termed an absolute politics. Rights cannot be reduced to citizenship rights as if the ideas of rights and citizenship are coterminous. What most critically needs to be understood is, firstly, why values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place within conditions of such inordinate legalism, and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which the cause of human rights inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any such rights. Without such an understanding we are left with a gestural politics that contains a posture of radicalism but one which fails to connect the aspirations of those who are struggling to achieve elementary rights with a vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Alternative Answers -- Singularity Fails

SINGULARITY CANNOT BE DESCRIBED AND IT WILL DESTROY POLITICS Jean-Phillipe Deranty, philosophy professor, Macquarie University, AGAMBENS CHALLENGE TO NORMATIVE THEORIES OF MODERN RIGHTS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm The conclusion is clear: if we want to move beyond biopolitics, beyond the violent politics of sovereignty, we have to develop an alternative ontology where the potential is not always already recaptured by its own potentiality and thus forced to relate to its opposite, actuality. We have to think potentiality as pure or absolute potentiality, "beyond every figure of relation" (1998: 47). Agamben thus connects Benjamins "politics of pure means" with the alternative ontology articulated by Heidegger on the basis of his reading of Aristotles metaphysics. In his 1931 lectures on the Metaphysics (Heidegger, 1981: 114), in his Nietzsche lectures (1980: 64-65), and in the Letter on humanism (1977: 220), Heidegger had tied the imperative of a "recovery of the question of Being" to a radical rethinking of the categories of modality in which Being is freed from the productivist paradigm of actualitas. Only through a questioning of the modal logic operating within the onto-theological tradition could a free "ethos" be prepared as a genuine dwelling. Agambens thought owes just as much to this fundamental inspiration as he does to Benjamin. How much Heideggers ontology of potentiality has exerted a fundamental influence on him is especially clear in the lectures at the Collge international de Philosophie published under the title Lombre de lamour (1988: 4446). The description of the radical politics that emerges from the ontology of pure potentiality can be found in The Coming Community, and it is here that the full consequences of Agambens problematic interpretation and reappropriation of Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt and Arendt become apparent. In the notes that Benjamin was writing in preparation for his Theses on the philosophy of history, one reads: "The messianic world is the world of overall and integral actuality" (Benjamin 1991e: 1235). The last expression is a self-reference to the 1929 essay on surrealism (1991d: 309, [1929]). Against Benjamins explicit equation of the "real state of exception" (the state of liberated humanity), with actuality, Agambens coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities (actualities that are the possibility of not-being, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and normative distinctions (between state of nature and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis, normal state and exception, etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and accessed only in the flight from all present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the assumed messianism of this radical politics is only a form of negative theology. Difficult not to think, also, that politics constructed as the "gigantomachy" (Agamben 2003: chapter 4) of an onto-theology of power does not lead to the evanescence of politics.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers

HUMANITARIANISM DOE NOT REDUCE TO BARE LIFE ITS ABOUT MORAL AGENCY. LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS SOLVE THE IMPACT Volker Heins, political scientist, Concordia, GERMAN LAW JOURNAL, May 2005, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/print.php?id=598 Giorgio Agamben and

the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy
According to this basic Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are caught up in violent conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this imply that classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare life" of nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that humanitarianism is itself an order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but conversely the protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization which prevent the exclusion of individuals from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human rights, of course. Agamben fails to appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric "bare life", but about the protection of moral agency. His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential distinctions. It may be legitimate to see "bare life" as a juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to derogate from otherwise binding norms in times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a mode of "effective factuality." Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner continues to function in the same way since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial structure of the state in question. This claim remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows how the humanitarian motive not only shapes the mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also serves to restrict the operational freedom of military commanders in democracies, who cannot act with impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state of nature. Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian degeneration of modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a rational self-interest which informs them that there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi episode in European history has shown that sometimes leaders do not spare the weak and the sick, but take extra care not to let them escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young. Classic humanitarianism depends on the existence of an international society whose members feel bound by a basic set of rules regarding the use of violencerules which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize. Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes dysfunctional when states place no value at all on their international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals not as useless and cruel, but as part of their very mission.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

Agamben Answers Humitarianism Answers

AGAMBENS THEORY IS TOO OLD MODERN HUMANITARIAN LAW APPLIES TO ALL INDIVIDUALS Volker Heins, political scientist, Concordia, GERMAN LAW JOURNAL, May 2005, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/print.php?id=598 The political/humanitarian divide is indeed a real one, but Agamben is inaccurate when he holds (a) that humanitarian law and human rights are essentially the same thing, and (b) that human rights are apolitical in the sense of being outside the scope of serious political conflicts or unenforcable outside the domestic jurisdiction of states. While Agamben places civil rights within the political realm, he simultaneously seems to attribute the acceptance of presumably apolitical human rights not to the salience of transnational legal norms, but to the contingency of humanitarian feelings. Even Hannah Arendt indicted in her own day the harmlessness of human rights groups and discovered "an uncanny similarity" between their language and that of certain "societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals." Today, however, we have good reasons to reject this rigid dualism of enforceable civil rights versus merely declaratory human rights as outdated. Agamben is certainly right to draw a broad analogy between humanitarianism and human rights law, although he skips the important issue of how the two relate to each other. Both bodies of law share the objective of protecting individuals under any circumstances. As Agamben seems to realize, the classic separation between the law of war and law of peace, which limited the applicability of human rights to the latter, was gradually replaced after 1945 by legal opinions and treaties containing clear stipulations regarding basic human rights obligations which cannot be suspended even in times of war or other public emergencies. Thus, both Article 27 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) and Article 15 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) list a number of "non-degradable" human rights, including the rights to life and the right of belief, which are to be applied without exception in all circumstances.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

10

Agamben Answers State Action Good

STATE ACTION IS CRITICAL TO BEAR WITNESS TO THE TRADITION OF THE OPPRESSED
Jean-Phillipe Deranty, philosophy professor, Macquarie University, AGAMBENS CHALLENGE TO NORMATIVE THEORIES OF MODERN RIGHTS, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognized as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.

Planet Debate 2007 Agamben Answers

11

Agamben Answers Doesnt Apply to Politics

AGAMBENS PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT APPLY TO POLITICS Paolo Virno, linguistics professor, INTERVIEW WITH PAOLO VIRNO, 2002, http://www.generationonline.org/p/fpvirno2.htm Agamben is a problem. 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 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 potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use 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 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.