Bite-sized book reviews: Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben (1998)
What Agamben offers in the form of his landmark Homo Sacer cannot help but be impressive - “impressive” across the various shades of meaning attached to the term. The breath-taking sweep, and formidable erudition marshaled in defence of his thesis, are, irrespective of the myriad ways in which a critical reader may diverge from his conclusions, impressive, “impressive” in the sense of making a forceful impact upon the reader beyond a favourable appeal to critical faculties, impressive in the air of gravitas and Delphic portentousness it cultivates, which is more than merely visceral, yet not of a rational character, belonging most rightfully to the sphere in which the arcana of sempiternal religious riddles make their indelible impressions. As impressive - as in original and encompassing as an academic treatise - as Homo Sacer is, it is arguably more impressive for its intangibles, for the features extraneous to meticulous exegesis which instead play with, and at, the level of, affect. Indeed, it may be fair to say that the stratospheric ascension of Agamben's conceptual cache and lexicon in the period since publication lends credence to this construal. Homo Sacer, maybe “subtextually,” occasionally rather explicitly, is an oblique work of political theology, in the same potent, palpable, yet never quite narrowly classifiable as such vein of much contemporary Italian theory (like Vattimo, Cavarero, Muraro, etc.)
These “two types” of impression are hardly independent, yet they also equally cannot be said to operative in a necessarily conjunctive manner, in some productive harmony. They are inseparable without being indistinguishable, both indispensable in the success of the larger project, and yet their continually present, intermittently manifest fraught coexistence cannot help but also bog down and blunt efficacy that isn’t contingent upon or native to the province of awe-inspiring opacity which pretends to ageless mysticism. I can appreciate an argument advanced vigorously and with panache, but any denial that the rhetorical excess – alternating declamatory pyrotechnics with solemn, gnomic intimation, Benjamin’s felicity with the elegantly hermetical, sinuosity which “convinces” via enchantment, and Schmitt’s gift for formulating austere, irresistibly striking aphorisms that can stop a reader cold – obscures the potential cogency, at least here and there, is untenable. Typically, an extended excursus on stylistic peccadilloes is something I am loath to indulge in, but the centrality of “impressiveness” of the performative type seemed to warrant this exception.
As for Agamben’s fundamental “point,” I find it to be undeniably cogent at a fundamental level, while also being emblematic of a pervasive melancholic/tragic fug that has hung over Leftist discourse for decades, (intensifying in the late 80s/early 90s) making the atmosphere an oppressive and unproductive one, dare I say one of onanistic commiseration proper to second-rate melodrama. As far as I am concerned, there is simply no denying that liberal-democratic so-called rights are fissiparous if not phantasmic things, rhetorically touted as a cohesive and/or galvanizing device, and permitted in an imperiously discretionary, provisional way that tenaciously disavows both this naked condescension and irreducible contingency at the same time. Agamben did not just blindly fumble into his reputation, his popularity owing to the simple fortuitous formula of the intersection of happenstance and opportunism, anomie and showmanship. If he has been hailed as a visionary, it is at least in part because his visions have not only been, abstractedly, judged keen and plausible, but vindicated by happenings, trends, and tendencies which shortly thereafter materialized. I cannot help but wonder if dismissals of Agamben as a crude and/or hyperbolic would-be Cassandra are, in some cases, a visceral backlash to his eschewal of the attenuations so many others make for the sake of palatability, so as to retain their perception as being adequately grounded and not one more fungible, expendable Lefty cheerleader for doom and gloom, unmoored from reality and marooned in a crumbling castle in the air which only they themselves have built.
At the same time, and I would posit that this is a consequence of his being bound up in the trappings of pseudo-Christianity at its esoteric, misanthropic worst, Agamben, even if he tacks on the de rigueur “positive” injunction to break from the dour and desiccated to instantiate a new mode of politics, comes off as not sincerely believing in the point of such a struggle. Anything affirmative comes off as a begrudging capitulation to a prerequisite for serious reception and consideration, and sits uncomfortably amidst the whole, feeling like a rapid bipolar oscillation from airless fatalism to hackneyed, substance-free “optimism of the will” that makes a last-minute cameo in virtually every article of critical political philosophy, a credulity-straining whiplash. My gripe is that dead-end, no-future cynicism is cheap, easy, and numbingly commonplace. Even festooned with quasi-theological ornamentation, given that capitalism is but a babe on this planet, it is unlikely to be true over a long enough timeline. If modernity is indeed a camp, pray tell how we are to assert ourselves? John Holloway has written that all potential revolutionary movements begin with “The Scream,” conceived as a bellowed “No,” akin to Marcuse’s “Great Refusal.” Giorgio Agamben complicates matters, demonstrating that while subjectivation may presuppose it, such a scream does not necessarily engender political agency. Within the camp, screams are howls of anguish and despair, of dignity and power in shambles.