The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from (...) the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitt's thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as (...) singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world. I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotle's Metaphysics, and is driven by Agamben's concern with the impact of Aristotle's thought on ontology and politics. (shrink)

In Kingdom and Glory, Agamben analyzed the dual perspective of the void, through the metaphor of the empty throne, in the governmental machine in the West. I engage with the ambiguous question of the void with regard to the concept of sovereignty through my reading of two Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period, Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan. This paper therefore addresses the question of sovereignty and the void in the discourse of nation in early modern China, an issue (...) that is related to the problem of the political economy or the politics of life. I argue that the rhetorical move in Liang Qichao’s argument for the birth of a new nation and new people was to move from the not-having to the there is in support of the formation of a new nation-state and a restricted logic of sovereignty, while Zhan Taiyan’s position was to affirm the dynamitic re-composition of the void by constantly negating the given fixated state, and thus proposing a different and radical vision of nation and full sovereignty of the lives of each and every one of the people who are co-inhabiting in the polis. (shrink)

This article tackles Giorgio Agamben's critique of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality in two ways: first, by presenting an alternative model of the relations between pastoral and theological economy and, second, by conducting a genealogy of the former as revealed in the state of exception, when canon law is suspended. Following the author's genealogy of oikonomia in the state of exception, he argues that politics and economy are distinct from one another by virtue of the fact that the primary relation (...) of the latter is one of inclusion while that of the former is one of exclusion. Finally, the author traces three of oikonomia's prolific qualities in the operation of governmentality in civil society and of market economy: its inclusiveness; the constant representation of the irreconcilability of law and authority; and its operation by accommodating to the ways of the governed. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject whose potentialities (...) exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)