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-In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55). |