Agamben forward not back
How old is Ashlee Simpson? Too young, some might think, to be singing about wanting to la la on the kitchen floor. But surely that’s wrong; it’s absurd to think there’s something wrong with 19-year olds (which is what the internet reveals she is) talking about sex. What I _can_ see people objecting to is a young woman singing about sex _in a commercial pop song_; the perceived problem is commodification. But this is still wrong; isn’t it what Foucault objects to in the History of sexuality, the idea that sexuality is a non-produced, personal ‘core’ that must be protected from the operations of power (see also this thread at LBO-talk)?
Arguably, a problem with Homo sacer is that it’s too depressing. Because he concentrates on the horrors that arise when biological life is entirely captured by politics, it’s easy to recoil and think that therefore we must liberate biological life. But of course this is a mistake, because, as Agamben emphasises, biological life is not a given that precedes politics, but is constructed by the political processes that ensure its capture within biopolitics.
In the light of this, we can see why it’s a mistake to construe the disagreement between Agamben and Negri on the progressive potential of biopower as being a simple pro/anti Spinoza dispute, with Negri arguing for a Spinozist mechanism of productive _potentia_ , while Agamben, expressing hostility to the mechanistic aspects of biopolitics, advocates something outside the machine, a spark of life that is protected from biopolitics. Agamben points to Spinoza, along with Nietzsche, as one of those who has come closest to finding a way of thinking beyond biopolitics (it would be interesting to consider how Deleuze’s emphasis on the virtual fits into this problematic). The challenge, then, is not to repudiate Spinoza, but rather to take his work _further_.
Maybe, the way out is in part _through_ biopolitics. Wendy Brown points out that part of the mechanism of sovereignty in Agamben is a remorseless blurring of boundaries, a creation of the zones of indistinction that allow the force of law to operate. It’s no coincidence that the full horror of biopolitics is unleashed when sovereignty has finally developed to the point where there are no boundaries left to erode. The state of exception is the operation of law after its suspension, a law evacuated of any limit or purpose. This leads to the terrible consequences that occupy Agamben in Homo sacer; but the law’s suspension is also just a hair’s breadth from the law’s _deactivation_ — as Agamben says:
> If the connection between pure violence and juridical violence, between state of exception
> and revolutionary violence, is thus made so tight that the two players facing each other
> across the chessboard of history seem always to be moving a single pawn — force of
> law or
> pure means — what is nevertheless decisive is that in each case the criterion of their
> distinciton lies in the dissolution of the relation between violence and law.
>
>
— State of exception, p. 62f.
(Note: I don’t think that the propriety or otherwise of Ashlee Simpson dressing as a French maid is the most significant issue raised by this post).
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