This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. (...) In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that Kant’s moral philosophy is prophetic of legal nihilism and modern totalitarianism. In doing so, he draws an implicit parallel between Kantian ethics of respect and autonomy, and the authoritarian constitutional theory of Carl Schmitt. This paper elucidates and evaluates this claim through an analysis of Agamben’s assertion that the legal condition of modernity is a nihilistic law that is ‘in force without significance’. I argue that the theoretical continuity between totalitarianism and (...) the Moral Law is the problem of the undecidable, which arises when the empty ground of normative judgment comes to light. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (shrink)