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ARENDT AND FOUCAULT ON MARKET LOGIC:

Security, Violence and Superfluousness

Zeynep Gambetti

Bogazici University

Abstract

Foucaults last lectures probe into the nature of a new type of power that he ends

up naming biopower. Although several aspects of the phenomenon Foucault was tryingto grasp are now being explored, one peculiar dimension of biopolitics did not yetreceive the scholarly attention that it deserves. In 1976, Foucault noticed that the powerto make live hinges upon its sinister opposite, the practice of letting die. Likefascism, this new regulatory power cannot have life as its main object withoutdesignating a portion of the population as a threat to that life. In 1978, he categorizedthis under the generic name security. Like market economy, security works by deducingthe norm from life processes via normality curves, sacrificing those lives that falloutside. Fascism, biopower and neoliberalism seem thus to converge. Much earlier,

Arendt confronted a similar problem. The distinguishing characteristic of totalitarianismis the transformation of human beings into superfluous bodies. But totalitarianismbecame possible partly through capitalisms imperialist motives. This insight was laterdeveloped by Arendt, with a focus on what she called the victory of animal laborans. Inthe cyclical logic of modern consumption, all ends turn into means for the sake of life.

This paper claims that focusing on sovereignty as Agamben does tends to obscure therelation between violence and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism, andproposes instead to follow the path that Arendt and Foucault have opened.

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The central thesis of Giorgio Agambens political philosophy, as expressed in

Homo Sacer, is that the politicization of bare life as such [] constitutes the decisive

event of modernity (Agamben, 1998, 4). Drawing among others upon Hannah Arendtsanalysis of the totalitarian concentration camp and Michel Foucaults conceptualization

of biopolitical power, Agamben seeks to remedy a lacuna that he detects in both: that of

the exact relation between the camp and biopower. To this end, he turns to other

thinkers, notably Carl Schmitt, from whom he borrows the theory of sovereignty. This

allows Agamben to reframe the question of biopower in such a way that it reveals the

hidden ground of politics and finds its paradigmatic example in the camp. 1 As such

Agamben hopes to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time,

return thought to its practical calling (5).

As challenging and meaningful such an enterprise may be, it nevertheless falls

short of accomplishing its avowed goal. Agamben obscures the relation between

violence and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism, a matter of much concern for

anyone heeding the practical calling of thought. The overpoliticization of bare life in

Homo Sacerin turn conceals the complex and intricate relationship between the economic

and the political.

The problem with Agambens analysis has to do with the ontological status ofpolitics. Organicism pervades the whole of Homo Sacer. The language of

incorporation discloses what remains explicit in Agambens political metaphysics:

politics is conceived as an ordered body, a whole, an identity and a determination. The

outside of this body is not negativity as such but another body, a biological one. The

identity-thinking that this construal is grounded upon (Norris, 2000, 42-43) cannot have

an outside, since antagonism is built into it: the political is political because it is not bare

life, or rather, the political defines itself at the same time as it defines what it is not, bare

life. Politics is reduced to a dichotomous system of relating that comprises a project, a

nomos, which can never be stabilized once and for all. It does not come as a surprise,

then, that Agamben should use Aristotles teleological construal of politics as the tending

towards the good life as an argument upon which to ground his metaphysics of the

exclusion of bare life from the political (Agamben, 1998, 7). The only exception that can

be imagined in his universe is indistinction, not aufhebung. Since politics is a self-reflexive

form-giving, it exhausts itself in pure positivity, the negation of the negation is a

1 Agamben also draws upon Benjamin, Heidegger, Nancy and Bataille, but the focus of this paper isexclusively on Arendt and Foucault.

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moment that never comes. The sovereign exception, the figure in which singularity is

represented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable (Agamben, 1998,

24), is what Agamben paradoxically tends to represent throughout his analysis, beginning

with the figure of homo sacer, passing through the Mselmann, and ending with Karen

Quinlan. Thus, as Andrew Norris strikingly underlines, Agambens decision to erect the

camp into the exemplary norm that characterizes the modern is itself an act of

sovereignty that puts him in the position of deciding upon the camp victims one more

time, thereby repeating the gesture of the ss [sic] in precisely the way he says we must

avoid (Norris, 2005, 278). As such, he is unable to conceptualize singularity, but only

antagonism in the sense Laclau and Mouffe use it (1985, 122-127).

The trouble is that by conflating politics with sovereign form-giving and,

subsequently, sovereignty with every distinction that may exist in the humanlyconstructed world (language, body, life, form, fact, right, law, exception, example,

decision), Agamben has indeed already rendered indistinct any distinction to be made

between politics and other phenomena. The circle is squared with the concept of

biopolitics, since Agambens account of sovereignty is already biopolitical it hinges

upon a conception of the political that defines itself in relation to life, only if to exclude

it. Thus, what appears to be the politicization of life in the modern era cannot be

grasped in Agambens perspective since life is construed as always-already defined by a

political decision. As such, the difference between the Greekpolis and the modern

nation-state, the nation-state andEmpireis effaced.

As a matter of fact, there is a huge inconsistency in Homo Sacerthat reveals itself

as soon as we move into the third part of the book on biopolitics. The indistinction

between zoeand biosis to have been caused by a crisis in sovereignty such that the whole

earth is now functioning on the basis of states of exception. Yet, the capacity to decide

upon states of exception is still construed as a sign of sovereignty there seems to be no

crisis, after all. In fact, while it seems that the only difference between classical politics

and biopolitics is the expansion of domains of sovereign decision, the latter already

comprises the most fundamental activities of human existence such as speech since time

immemorial. The metaphysical account of sovereignty makes it impossible to grasp what

is at stake in biopolitics proper, i.e. in specifically modern politics in such a way as to

make sense of the Agambenian rendition of biopolitics as the destabilization of the

otherwise stable border between life and death (Agamben, 1998, 122). It may well be that

sovereignty has been dissolved in such a way as to dissolve along with it any criteria for

judging whether a situation is an exception or not.

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For if borders are dissolved or, to put it more powerfully, if the metaphysics of

the border is obsolete then there is no reason to believe that an outsidestill continues to

exist. Biopolitics is the exact solution to the problem of sovereignty that Agamben is

seeking. In a biosthat is nothing other than its own zoe, the self-reflexivity of the political

(the sovereign) disappears as does any identity and its other.

This is why we need security and superfluousness not sovereignty as

conceptual tools with which to comprehend the overdetermination of the political by

life. It is my contention that Arendt and Foucault may be brought into dialogue with each

other to account for the convergence of fascism, biopower and neoliberalism in the

present era. Instead of confining our thought to the single (and ahistorical) plane of the

political, as Agamben tends to do, probing into what Arendt calls the victory of animal

laborans would reveal an alternative story of the relationship between the camp andmodern society. If a periodization of Western history into epochs characterized by

paradigmatic concerns is legitimate at all, then the emergence of life as the principal

object of politics must be apprehended within the context of transformations relative to

our epoch. To this end, Arendts notion of superfluousness provides a more intricate

theoretical ground than Agambens figure of homo sacer.

According to Arendt, the distinguishing characteristic of totalitarianism is the

transformation of human beings into superfluous bodies. But totalitarianism became

possible partly through capitalisms imperialist motives, succinctly expressed in the

formula expansion for expansions sake (Arendt, 1976, 126). This self-reflexivity or

boundlessness, as it were, has obvious links to the circular logic of modern production

and consumption. ReadingOrigins of Totalitarianismtogether with the chapters on labor

and animal laborans in The Human Conditionwould cast doubt upon Agambens claim as

to the total absence of a consideration of biopower in Arendt (Agamben, 1998, 4 ,120).

Likewise, the suggestion that the link between totalitarianism and biopower is

missing in Foucault is at best an oversight. Several of Foucaults recently published

lectures probe into the nature of a new type of power that he ends up naming biopower.

In his 1976 lectures (Society Must be Defended), Foucault notices that the power to make

live hinges upon its sinister opposite, the practice of letting die. Like fascism, this new

regulatory power cannot have life as its main object without designating a portion of

the population as a threat to that life. In his 1978 lectures published as Security, Territory,

Population, he categorizes this power under the generic name security. Like market

economy, security works by deducing the norm from life processes via normality

curves, sacrificing those lives that fall outside. From this vantage point, biopower appearsintricately linked to a peculiar type of violence, one that cannot be subsumed under the

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juridical imperatives of sovereign power. Notwithstanding the divergence that the notion

of security represents within Foucaults work (Bigo, 2008), the path opened up by

these analyses merits closer inspection, for they do in fact point to some of the

ramifications of biopower that Foucault did not have either the time or the intention to

develop further.

My aim, then, is to explore salient connections between superfluousness and

security with the hope of revealing a logic other than sovereignty to ground the nomos

of the modern. I start by questioning the possibility of a politics of the subject in

Foucaults rendering of biopolitics. The second and third parts of the argument will

relate the Arendtian notion of superfluousness to totalitarianism and to market economy.

As a final move, I will discuss the example of the camp, to show that what might be at

stake is more than the political as such.

Who is the subject of biopolitics?

One of the central causalities constructed by Agamben in Homo Sacer is that

biopolitics is what sovereign power conceals, that it is the obscure side of sovereign

power. As a correction to Foucault, Agamben detects a politics of the will in the

workings of biopower. This is a form of decisionism that, despite Agambens injunctions

concerning the lack of a hierarchically superior subject imposing its will on others

(Agamben, 1998, 26), nevertheless implies a politics of the subject. Sovereignty, after all,

is a decision, a cut in the etymological sense of the term (Norris, 2005, 262) and it

entails a willful insertion that decides the status of the object upon which it exerts itself.

The question remains as to who the willful subject of biopolitics is and according to

what criteria decisions on life and death are made.

As is well known, Foucaults three-fold conceptualization of power begins by

distinguishing between sovereign and disciplinary power. Sovereign power introduces a

split between state and society in such a way that the state becomes the privileged locus

of the sovereign decision over life and death. The main mode of insertion of sovereign

power is through laws that prohibit, that set the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Sovereign power can achieve this because it concentrates in the hands of the state the

means to control those boundaries. Punishment is the successful employment of a

judiciary and technical dispositifof enforcement.

Disciplinary power, in contrast, arranges the field of the social in such a way that

control hinges on a different set of techniques. The surveillance, categorization,systematic selection and rationalization of bodies in compliance with a multiplicity of

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norms pertaining to particular fields (school, factory, hospital, barracks) divides power in

such a way that its locus is no longer a single institution. While law operates on a dualistic

plane (permitted/prohibited, licit/illicit, legal/illegal), discipline introduces a complexity

that cannot be grasped by law: if it is true that the law refers to a norm, and that the

role and function of the law therefore the very operation of the law is to codify a

norm [], the problem that I am trying to mark out is how techniques of normalization

develop from and below a system of law, in its margins and maybe even against

it (Foucault, 2007, 56).

What is being played out in the distinction between sovereign and disciplinary

power is the dispersal or redistribution of the sovereign capacity to set the norm among

different social fields in such a way as to undermine the singularity of the act of

constitution. The constitution of disciplined bodies and the subjectivities that areproduced by it cannot operate ex nihilo. Within the inside/outside of the regularized

surface created by law lies a multiplicity of other surfaces in which various other norms

are being applied in conformity with the specific requirements of the particular fields in

question. The source of disciplinary norms is not an outside that will be included

through its exclusion, but also an inside that relates to and charts the movements of the

bodies to be controlled. Indeed, norms carry an affinity with sovereign power in so far as

they are models of behavior whose validity cannot be grounded from within the models

themselves. Nevertheless, they are at the same time constructed from below, according

to the particular needs and aims of the social fields to which they apply. The gaze is no

longer oriented towards the sovereign, but towards society.

And yet, in his 1975-76 lectures, Foucault detects not one, but two types of

power that were beginning to de-center the sovereign in the 18th century. He first

distinguishes between these, calling them disciplinary and regulatory power, according to

their respective objects, the body and population (Foucault, 2004, 250). These are two

poles of control, situated at the extremes of a line going from the individualized

surveillance of each and every body to the incitation of certain modes of behavior in

whole populations. The emergence of biopolitics signals the final possession of life by

power in the 19th century. In other words, power has thanks to the play of technologies

of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in

covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between

body and population (253).

Agamben fails to see that no sovereign incision may account for this surface

whose regularities it has to construct. As far as Agamben is concerned, what constructsregulatory surfaces is the law; law must first of all create the sphere of its own reference

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in real life and make that reference regular (Agamben, 1998, 26). As such, law and fact, the

quaestio iurisand the quaestio facticoincide. This over-stretching of the concept of law may

seem plausible at first sight, especially given the espousal by Agamben of the fact of

biopolitics, but nowhere does Agamben account for the conditions of possibility of the

coinciding of law and fact. Obviously, biopower could not have functioned without the

multiple set of dispositifsthat Foucault alludes to. Agamben cites the Arendtian theme, to

which I will subsequently return, of the collapse of the nation-state and of the regime of

rights, but this is a rather slim account of the modern extension of the power over life

and death to the minutest spheres of life.

Not only does the concept of sovereignty fail to grasp the dispersed and at times

conflicting mechanisms of Foucauldian biopower, but Agamben also glosses over the

criteria for stamping some lives as bare life as opposed to others. At first glance, thefigure of homo sacer seems to correspond to one of the characteristics of biopower, as

described by Foucault. In Society Must Be Defended, the paradox of biopower is succinctly

summarized as follows:

Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and somber absolute

power that was sovereignty, and which consisted in the power to take life, we

now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this technology

of power over the population as such, over men insofar as they are living

beings. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a

power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists

in making live and letting die. (247)

At the same time that power acquires as its object the life of the living being, it

paradoxically (and necessarily) begins to let die. The crucial phrase here is the letting,

as will be demonstrated below.

Not content with the evacuation of sovereignty implied in biopolitics, Agamben

defines homo sacer as the body that is, in its capacity to be killed but not sacrificed, a

living pledge to his subjection to the power of death (Agamben, 1998, 97). No ritual

accompanies the death of homo sacer; he is thus not to be sacrificed, since sacrifice would

imply that he is more than bare life, that he is included into the normative field whose

boundaries are set bylaw. And yet, through a sovereign decision, he is subjected to death,

thus included through his exclusion into the field of the factof power. Once again, as

plausible as this depiction may seem given the use Agamben makes of zones ofindistinction where bodies are kept without any legal protection (174), it fails to provide

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any account of the logic that constitutes certain bodies into homo sacer while retaining

others within the law.

Instead of conflating politics with one of its forms, Foucault follows a different

path. He first relates biopower to fascism in a striking passage on racism in Society Must Be

Defended. Biopower operates on population, not on people as construed by the

nation-state. The consequences of this nuance are not slim. Control over the biological

not only meant the development of dispositifsof health, sanitation, hygiene, and the like,

but also a preoccupation with procreation and heredity. It is within this context that

race as opposed to nation becomes a category that regulates the field in which

biopower functions. As opposed to a legal inscription into the sovereign body, racism is a

biological belonging, a species-life. Foucault makes sure to distinguish the logic of racism

from older forms of adversity among races, since the latter retains the logic ofdesignating enemies of which only sovereignty was capable. Put differently, the will to

destroy the adversary would follow a militaristic logic proper to relations of war. What is

at stake in racism is not my life as opposed to the others, but life in general. Racism

transforms the adversarial relation beyond recognition because the human being,

considered as a species, has become self-referential: being human is a matter of

belonging to a specific branch of biological life available on earth. The justification of a

division of races between friends and enemies cannot come from within the category of

life itself. What distinguishes biopower from a sovereign act of power is the internality

of the justifications needed for excluding segments of biological life from the right to

live: the fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his

death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the

inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in

general healthier: healthier and purer (Foucault, 2004, 255).

Obviously, we are far removed from Agambens homo sacerwho is subjected to a

sovereign decision that operates from beyond the domain of life, since the norm that

racism sets is located within the biological field, within a field of savoirsconstructed by

means of techniques that enable the observation and classification of species, the

measurement and subsequent control of the distribution and combination of genes, the

detection of anomalies and defects, etc. As such, specific expertise becomes the criteria

of decisions to be made on life that is worth living.

But this is not all. In his 1977-78 lectures, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault

aims to clarify a concept that he thinks remained ambiguous a year ago. Reconstructing

the analysis he began in Society Must Be Defended, he seeks an answer to the question ofwhether there is an economy of power that is dominated by the technology of security.

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His motive is the following: For some time now, for a good dozen years at least, it has

been clear that the essential question in the development of the problematic of the penal

domain [] is one of security. Basically, the fundamental question is economics and the

economic relation between the cost of repression and the cost of

delinquency (Foucault, 2007, 9).

Foucaults contention is that biopower is not the regulatory power that he

classified alongside disciplinary power a year ago. In Security, Territory, Population, the

operations of sovereign and disciplinary power seem closer to each other when

compared to security. If sovereignty is a power that employs the legal system to say no

to subjects, disciplinary power uses techniques of control that say yes (46). Law

prohibits certain behavior; discipline singles out certain others as the norm that needs to

be desired. Both set limits and define boundaries; they are similar in that they partake ofthe logic of boundaries. They operate by first defining a model and imposing it on

bodies, either through law enforcement or through a series of arrangements that allows

nothing to escape (45). Neither of these forms of power welcomes risks or anomalies.

Foucault goes as far as to claim that their mode of relating to reality is similar: We

could even say that the law works in the imaginary, since the law imagines and can only

formulate all the things that could and must not be done by imagining them. It imagines

the negative. Discipline works in a sphere that is, as it were, complementary to reality []

Within the disciplinary space a complementary sphere of prescriptions and obligations is

constituted that is all the more artificial and constraining as the nature of reality is

tenacious and difficult to overcome (47). Ontologically speaking, disciplinary power

works at a level closer to facts, but is still poised against them. It is still in a relation of

externality with respect to the objects to which it is applied.

As opposed to both, construed in this manner as falling within the same

paradigmatic relation to reality, security is a technique of power that centers on the

question of how to determine and maintain optimum levels of functioning in any given

social domain. Instead of meting out a punishment for theft or establishing the

conditions for interiorizing a mode of behavior respectful of private property, for

instance, security differs in three respects:

Putting it in a still absolutely general way, the apparatus of security inserts the

phenomenon in question, namely theft, within a series of probable events.

Second, the reactions of power to this phenomenon are inserted in a calculation

of cost. Finally, third, instead of a binary division between the permitted and the

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prohibited, one establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand,

and on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded. (6)

It is such a relation to reality that prompts Foucault to construe security as exactly the

opposite of discipline. Instead of the norm being prior to the practices that it arranges

and in reference to which it categorizes as normal and abnormal, security starts out

from standard distributions of phenomena, trying to measure normalities and to

establish their interplay: The normal comes first and the norm is deduced from it, or

the norm is fixed and plays its operational role of the basis of this study of

normalities (63). This is normalization proper; disciplinary power can only produce a

normation since it is inherently normative. While discipline remains instrumental,

security is strictly utilitarian.The paradigmatic example of the dispositif of security is the free market,

encapsulated by the motto laissez faire, laissez passer. Obviously, risk emerges as a vital

element of security, such that security not only admits of risk, but is also nurtured by it.

In passages where Foucault discusses the economic differences between the three

modalities of power, sovereignty is shown to operate through absolute price controls,

discipline corresponds to a mercantilist regulation of exports and imports, and security

to the abandonment of all controls, as defended by the physiocrats (33). The reason why

security is a power mechanism, despite the freedoms evoked in its endorsement, is

what we call today risk management and social engineering. The aim is to make use of

risk in a way as to secure the well being of the population, taken as a whole. In other

words, normality curves are what need to be secured. The technique of security requires

responding to social phenomena by playing one force against the other such that this

response cancels out the reality to which it responds nullifies it, or limits, checks, or

regulates it (47).

A striking example is the way scarcity would be dealt with. Within both the

sovereign and the disciplinary paradigms, scarcity would constitute a problem to avoid

at all costs. In contrast, the logic of security would construe it as a risk that could be

beneficial for the population at large, if managed properly. It would let the invisible hand

of the market incite owners of stock to hitch up food prices. This rise would encourage

foreign food producers to export their goods to that market. Within a given time span,

the importation of food would remedy the problem of scarcity and prices would come

down to normal.

What needs to be underlined here is that the logic of security necessarily requiressacrificing a portion of the population in view of the well being of the whole. Lets

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reconsider the example of scarcity. By the time supply and demand curves move back to

normality, not only will big fish have swallowed up small fish, but also a portion of the

population would have died of hunger. Foucault refers to an absolutely fundamental

caesura between a level that is pertinent for the governments economic-political action,

and this is the level of the population, and a different level, which will be that of the

series, the multiplicity of individuals, who will not be pertinent (42). In this sense,

security is absolutely dependant on the availability of anomalies that, according to the

problem at hand, will be impertinent read expendable.

Obviously, the caesura that Foucault has in mind has little to do with the

sovereign right over life and death depicted in Agambens ahistorical account of the dark

underside of politics, even when the decision pertains to specific domains of expertise.

Security is not a technique that a sovereign state has at its unique disposal; it is autilitarian relating to life that governs the daily motions of all individuals within the

population. Significant in this respect is how Foucault, who had related biopower with

racism and fascism a year ago, establishes its affinity to market economy in Security,

Territory, Population. Neither the natio, nor for that matter racism are indispensable for its

working. Something that appears to be etymologically or politically unrelated to bare

life the market provides the criteria of selection for the homo sacer.

By transforming the subject into population (and into species), biopower alters

the modalities of subjecthood. Biopolitics is indeed new as Foucault claims, because its

modalities of action are new. Population is not a subject, but is an entity subjected to

statistical curves and standard deviations. Its space of existence is no longer defined by

law, but by normalization.

The regularity of the surfaces that Agamben attributes to law are instead

produced by the letting to itself of the market mechanism. Yet, these surfaces must

necessarily be composed of anomalies irregularities such that their elimination would

set normality curves back into desired levels when needed. Thus the sovereign incision

that has only itself as a point of reference is blurred beyond recognition. As preoccupied

as he is with the notion of sovereignty, Agamben cannot but miss the novelty

encapsulated by Foucaults formulation of biopower. Instead, he constructs a

dichotomous relation between law and life, sovereign and homo sacer, private and public.

In this relatively two-dimensional plane, the social components of biopower either

disappear or are subsumed under one of the two poles. The metaphysical concept of

bare life assumes a status akin to the essence of man, some thing (Ding) that is

ahistorical and immutable and thus unrepresentable. The more politics seeks to excludeit, the more it persists as its constitutive outside. Agambenian biopolitics is the disclosure

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of the politics of sovereignty in such a way as to render indistinct law and life. This

conceptualization goes against the grain of the Foucauldian analysis of biopower.

Foucaults non-metaphysical mode of theorizing is precisely an attempt to historicize

sovereignty.

Most significantly, subjectivities constructed by Foucaults disciplinary and

biopolitical techniques are different from what sovereign power takes as its object, i.e.,

the subject. The legalistic voluntarism implied in sovereignty points to the limits of

this type of power: the limit of the law is the subjects disobedience; it is the no with

which the subject opposes the sovereign (Foucault, 2007, 71). The politics of the will

inherent in the juridico-political power constructs man as the subject, as an entity that

is equally in possession of a will. In contrast, Foucaults account of the emergence and

modalities of biopower are much more complex. There is no straight line leading fromlife to law and back. It must be first shown how biopower reconstructs the space of the

social in such a way that law becomes redundant. The decisionist perspective of law that

Agamben borrows from Schmitt cannot account for the workings of biopower; on the

contrary, biopower creates its own dynamics such that positive law (the law of the

sovereign) is supplanted by a series of other laws market laws, demographic laws, the

laws of evolution. In other words, Adam Smith, Malthus and Darwin supplant Leviathan.

The camp is the outgrowth of this process, as I will argue below.

Foucault refuses to theorize the state as the privileged locus of biopower since

administration (or government) does not operate according to a vision of order that has

been established a priori, that is, before it begins to function. What Agamben calls

zones of indistinction is not what Foucault means when he refers to the flexibility of

practices of normalization. Society has started to function beyond positive law, it has

created its own dynamics that render law more inoperative than indistinct. Society has

taken over, so to speak, the domain of the juridical. The state is not excluded from the

novel dynamics of normalization thus it no longer retains the power to declare states

of exception. What is normalized is not exception for exception presupposes positive

law. The social domain does not function within the borders of an inside/outside, but

between normality and abnormality. The difference lies in the principle of determination

of what constitutes the normal. No pre-ordained model of formal law may predict it.

Normality is determined by the movement of the population itself. Statistics, not laws,

set the norm. The norm is embodied within population or rather, the norm is what

emerges from population, not from some power beyond it. As such, the state is not a

commanding instance; it too is embodied within this movement. If there is a zone ofindistinction, it engulfs the state as well in such a way that no decision is sovereign, i.e.

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beyond and above the movement. This self-reflexivity of biopower escapes the

Agambenian notion of sovereignty.

The camp is indeed a special case within what I have described as the proper

portrayal of Foucaults biopolitical paradigm. Arendt refers to the camp as a laboratory

where total domination can (finally) be actualized. What needs to be shown, then, is how

the camp relates to the process that began with what both Arendt and Foucault would

term the societization of politics.

Totalitarianism and superfluousness

The camp seems indeed to be the space in which sovereign power and biopolitics

converge, but does the relation between the two correspond to what Agamben claims,namely that the bare life effectively concealed as the condition of possibility of

sovereign power, has erupted into the political domain as its central category, thus

instituting the state of exception, whose paradigmatic example is the camp, into the rule?

For if, in contrast, it can be shown that Arendts critique of founding a body politic upon

the necessities of life rests upon the inconspicuous relation between totalitarianism and

modern society, then superfluousness would be what erects the camp into the nomosof

the modern.

After Margaret Canovans perceptive study (1992) on Arendt, the connections

between TheOrigins of Totalitarianismand The Human Conditionhave become all the more

apparent. Singling out some of the analyses made in the second and third volumes of

Origins, and especially in dispersed passages in TheHuman Conditionallows us to detect the

traces of biopower in the workings of both totalitarianism and market society. Foucaults

passing remarks on fascism find their full exploration in these traces, which for being

unsystematic and implicit, require several detours in order to be constructed into a

meaningful whole.

To make a much longer argument short, it needs to be said that for Arendt,

totalitarianism is that regime which sets life into perpetual motion. As such, it is not so

much a total state than a non-state. Arendt, in this respect, follows Franz Neumanns

analysis of Behemothrather than a more Schmidtian Leviathan. Behemoth, in contrast to

Leviathanwhich, despite its authoritarian character, is based on the generality of law, []

is the chaotic element, understood as a total absence of predictability for the subjects and

as a permanent situation of war (Iakovou, 2009, 433). For in the eyes of Neumann, the

total state remains within the paradigm of Western history and politics, whereas the Naziregime displays two novel traits: (i) it negates the nation-state by grounding it on race,

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thus undermining the nation-based notion of sovereignty; (ii) it puts primacy on

movement, not stability. (434-435) The regime is structurally irrational as Arendt will

argue, of the several layers of authority within the regime, none are actually functional.

Indeed, the shapelessness of the system owes to the fact that any stable structure is an

obstacle to the movement (Arendt, 1976, 398).

Nazism, for instance, escapes the instrumental logic of means-ends: For the

movement it was more important to demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate a race

by annihilating other races than to win a war with limited aims (412). The implications

need to be underlined. This points to an unmediated and unsituated performativity in

which there are no relational conditions that must hold for the performative to take

effect in Austinian terms (Austin, 1976). Arendt expresses this well through the example

of Trotsky if the objective laws of history dictate that Trotsky is an enemy of thepeople and not one of the leaders of the revolution, then history will also prove it by

altering all images and texts relating Trotsky to Stalin and subsequently of physically

eradicating Trotsky from the face of the earth (Arendt, 1976, 353, 362).

As such, the laws of motion replace positive law in such a way that fact and law

coincides: totalitarian rule is quite prepared to sacrifice everybodys immediate interests

to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of Nature. Its

defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitimacy which, since it is

inspired by the sources themselves, can do way with petty legality (461). There are no

limits, no boundaries to the operations of totalitarian power at least, this is where the

regime tends. Imperialism and not the nation-state, as Agamben would have it, is the

true rationale behind this totalization: Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the

essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its

executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness

which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial

revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism and social traditions in

our time. (475). Origins of Totalitarianismonly hints at the loss of the world caused by the

rise of the social as depicted in The Human Condition, but is clear in its verdict concerning

the fatal blow: what definitely marks superfluousness as the central category of the

modern is imperial capitalism. Arendts position is indeed that totalitarianism at least

its National Socialist manifestation is a product of conditions proper to capitalism

for instance, superfluousness is first understood as its immanent tendency to produce

superfluous people and money (Iakovou, 2009, 433).

Let us look closer into the argument on imperialism. In the chapter entitled ThePolitical Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie of Imperialism, Arendt relates the struggle for

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power of the bourgeoisie as one that pitted the capitalist economy against the framework

of the nation-state. Imperialism had its origin in the realm of business speculation, but

elevated expansion to the rank of the permanent and supreme aim of politics (Arendt,

1976, 125). The increasingly expansionist needs of the economic structure could not be

sustained by the nation-state because the latter, in Arendts view, was based on the

consent of the governed, and could only continue to govern lawfully those men that

were its citizens. Imperialism and subsequent colonization brought about an inner

tension between conquest and the nations political framework. In fact, what imperialists

actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body

politic (135). The financial speculation of the 1870s saw the emergence of what Arendt

calls superfluous money capital that could no longer be invested in the saturated

markets of the West. The export of money to the colonies was followed by the export ofpower. This alliance between money and power, she says, is responsible for lifting the

obstacles in the way of the unlimited accumulation of capital. Even the law of the

national market could not check the expansion of capital when the latter was backed by

state power: Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited

accumulation of capital (137).

Curiously enough, Arendt does not hold the nation-state responsible for this new

alliance, but cites Hobbes, going as far as to claim that Hobbes had to wait for three

centuries for his dream to come true. In her account, Hobbes Commonwealth uniquely

addresses bourgeois man whose sole object of desire is power. The transfer of powers,

not rights, constitutes the Commonwealths monopoly over the power to kill. No consent

and no standard of right or wrong are needed for its laws to hold, since the state is

erected out of necessity. Yet, the state so constituted is inherently insecure since it is the

only source of stability in a society where private interest reigns. The plea for security

that founds the state is a contradiction in terms, since Leviathan can only provide for

safety by instigating fear, that is, by producing criminals. But the bourgeois logic of

competition also produces outcasts who are not legally but economically condemned.

Thus, the difference between the pauper and the criminal disappears both stand

outside of society (142). To quote at length:

Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society the unsuccessful, the

unfortunate, the criminal from every obligation toward society and state if the

state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their desire for

power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to kill, thusrestoring that natural equality which society conceals only for the sake of

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expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts organization into a

gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisies moral

philosophy (ibid).

The distinguishing characteristic of the modern state, it seems, is to conceal not bare

life but the equal ability to kill characteristic of the bourgeois man. Competition to the

grave is the specific trait of bourgeois society. In other words, what Hobbes foresaw was

that no state form could hold in check the type of society created by the rising

bourgeoisie in its hunger for endless accumulation: the state would either have to follow

the movement of its members and seek unlimited expansion of its power in a hopeless

effort to guarantee the status quo; or it would have to dissolve itself back into the state

of nature. In Arendts account, it opted for the first option. Under the guise ofprogress, caught up in the wind like Benjamins angel (which Arendt duly cites), the

alliance between political power and the laws of the economy turn into an irresistible

force that sweeps away the boundaries that the concept of citoyen intended to erect:

Private interests, which by their very nature are temporary, limited by mans natural span

of life, can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from them that

infinite length of time which is needed for continuous accumulation (145).

Arendt suggests that it is race-thinking that provides for the otherwise lacking

political unity once the bounds of the nation-state have been forced open by class-

thinking (159). Race-thinking was already inherent in the body politic of the nation; it

would eventually defeat the self-contained nature of the nation-states notion of

citizenship. For both race and bourgeois class politics stretched beyond the nations

bounds. Preceding Timothy Mitchell, Arendt explores how bureaucracy was discovered

in the colonies as a consequence of the needs of administrating the savages (207).

Bureaucracy, in liking to race and class, is ruled by nobody it is the rule of nobody.

Only through this long detour does she end up discussion the decline of the nation-state

and the collapse of the Rights of Man.

The idea that needs to be underlined here is that lawlessness became the only law

of conduct through the crystallization of a series of developments spurred by a specific

type of power that corresponds to a specific mode of production. When everyone

becomes a cog in the power-accumulating machine that incessantly devours the weak,

every man must either be victorious or face death (146). The modern homo sacerdoes not

reveal the paradox of the political as much as it reveals the nature of the material

organization of life in the present era. Superfluousness is indeed related to bare life,

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but capitalist economy, imperialism and totalitarianism seem all to be imbricated in a

conspicuous manner in its production.

As opposed to this complexity, Agambens legalistic thinking attributes the

emergence of Nazism and fascism (two properly biopolitical movements that made of

natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision) to the devastation of

Europes geopolitical order after WW1, when the hidden difference [scarto] between

birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis (Agamben, 1998, 129, sic). It is as if, the

only game being played out is between the political and its indigestible opposite, natural

life. As such, he fails to grasp the meaning of the following Arendtian claim: To be a

slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society more than the

abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific

rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rightswhatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people.

Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality

as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from

humanity (Arendt, 1976, 297).

For Arendt, the difference between the French and American Revolutions is that

the former founded its power on the so-called natural rights, while for the latter they

were assumed to indicate the limits of lawful government. Two logics of universalization

seem thus to be at work here. The Americans were actually proclaiming that those rights

which up to now had been enjoyed only by Englishmen should be enjoyed in the future

by all men in other words, all men should live under constitutional, limited

government (Arendt, 1973, 148-149). What was being politicized was a model of

government, a form of body politic that could provide an example. In the French

Revolution, however, rights were considered to be prior to and outside of the body

politic as such. Man quaman was assumed to possess pre-political rights instead of a

right to rights.

This naturalization of humanity, as it were, seems to have obscured what

Arendt considers as the fundamental artificiality of man: mans nature is only

human insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly

unnatural, that is, a man (Arendt, 1976, 455). If the distinctive characteristic of the

concentration camp was to reduce man to an existence that was nothing but human, it

must be because in it the structures that give man the possibility of constructing an

artificial life no longer exist. To be sure, the camp itself is an artifice, a structure. And

yet, there is something in the camp that makes it a structure within which no structurecan provide man with an option to exit nature. Arendts is concerned with the loss

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of a possibility a capacity in the absence of which a person becomes homo sacer.

Without a space into which his words and deeds could fall, without even an in-between

that could qualify him as a what, the inmate is nothing but human.

In the Arendtian perspective, law is an artifice that is made in the same way as

objects are fabricated. It is not political, but serves to protect the political from itself, i.e.

from the instability inherent in the capacity to act and to break established boundaries.

But Montesquieu was the first, according to Arendt, to have discovered that laws are

nothing but formalizations of the modalities of action among a people. Arendt suggests

that laws, being pre-political as they are, are not prior to modes of organization of the

people, generating as many powers as there are spheres of acting together. Laws frame

and protect these experiences, which are the sources of power. As such power and laws

spring from different origins. Laws are but a framework within which people move andact, as the stabilizing factor of something which by itself is alive and moving (Arendt,

2007, 724). Power or rather, the phenomenon of action is the central category of the

political realm (723). What is simultaneously expressed in the laws of a country is a

basic experience of men living and acting together (725). This conceptualization of law

was lost, according to Arendt, as a result of a tradition that defined the primary task of

government as the enforcement of law: At the end of this tradition, we find Kants

political philosophy, where the concept of law has absorbed all others. Here the law has

become the criterion for the whole realm of politics to the detriment of all other

political experiences and possibilities (721).

If Arendt is against a theory of absolute beginnings (Kalyvas, 2008, 223) and

claims that mans capacity for change is not boundless, she is not speaking about

tradition, culture or laws, but rather about the presence of others and of a world of

objects that form webs of intersubjectivity and objectivity impossible to eradicate by

pure will. Only in the concentration camp did any sovereign succeed in coming close to

an absolute beginning: Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and

fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism

strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are

superfluous (Arendt, 1976, 457).

As Anne Marie Roviello also points out, totalitarian domination manifests itself

by an over-determination of objects, of gestures, of the most humdrum, insignificant

situations, and by a correlative destruction of the stability of meanings in the

surrounding world (2007, 928). Nothing escapes the super-sense thus constructed

whereby the most familiar objects end up becoming suspicious precisely because theyare familiar (929).

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The initial signs of the loss of the web of relations are inherent in what Arendt

calls the rise of society. Coupled with imperialism and capitalism, this loss provides the

ground upon which Arendts critique of the victory of animal laborans is justified and

to which we shall turn to complete the above analysis.

Market economy and superfluousness:

Arendts fundamental theoretical work, The Human Condition, differs from Origins

of Totalitarianism in terms of methodology as well as principal concerns. Arendts

phenomenology of the three categories of the vita activa labor, work, and action is

historical only in the sense of a history of political thought. Yet, a social history emerges

from between the lines, especially in passages concerning the transformation of the threecategories throughout the modern age. Arendt imbricates phenomenology, political

theory, and history, without caring to systematize any of the different grounds upon

which she builds her arguments. A careful reading does, however, point to affinities with

the Frankfurt School, especially concerning her apprehension of mass society, and with

Foucault, regarding the central importance of life in the present era. As a matter of fact,

my contention is that the entire book can be read as a critique of the engulfment by the

life processes of the vita activa.

Despite references to Christian thought, Arendts main target is Marx when she

claims that there has been a decisive shift in the way human affairs are organized in the

modern age:

Socialized mankind is that state of society where one interest rules, and the

subject of this interest is either classes or man-kind, but neither man nor men.

The point is that now even the last trace of action in what men were doing, the

motive implied in self-interest, disappeared. What was left was a natural force,

the force of the life process itself, to which all men and all human activities were

equally submitted [] and whose only aim, if it had an aim at all, was survival of

the animal species man. None of the higher capacities of man was any longer

necessary to connect individual life with the life of the species; individual life

became part of the life process (Arendt, 1958, 321).

Defined in this manner, the victory of animal laborans erects life to the rank of the

highest good, thereby destroying even the instrumentality of homo faber, the artisan. Thisis a point that is often missed in Arendt scholarship.

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Politically speaking, homo faber corresponds to the statesman who rules over a

well-ordered domain, and whose mastery of the contingencies arising from human

action owe either to his force or to the stabilizing artifice of law (222-225). The principle

of domination deriving from the capacity to rule oneself as well as from the master-

slave relationship peculiar to the household (the oikos) is at the same time the principle of

archein, in the sense of founding, ruling and legislating. Clearly, Arendt wants to

distinguish the utilitarianism she finds inherent in animal laboransfrom the instrumentality

of homo faber. The means-ends category assumes a model that springs from a source

outside the fabrication process but that shapes and dictates the rules of the latter. This

logic also encompasses the notion of sovereignty. It is not difficult to detect the

Foucauldian paradigm of sovereign power in Arendts account of the relationship

between homo faberand politics.The social transformations that lead to the actual defeat of homo fabermay appear

frustratingly detached from each other, but the destruction of the category of means-

ends emerges as a thread to guide the perplexed reader. We are first told that society,

which Arendt equates to housekeeping emerges from the obscurity of the private

domain into the public sphere (38). She speaks of conformism through normalization

and a kind of egalitarianism that first absorbs individuals under one enormous family,

and subsequently dissolves all social groups into larger masses. Bureaucracy, i.e., the rule

of nobody (45) is the political institution that corresponds to this transformation.

Coming strikingly close to Foucaults socio-historical account of governmentality, Arendt

claims that economics could only be elevated to the status of a science, through the use

of statistics, when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain

patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered

asocial or abnormal (42).

What makes modern society so treacherous is the perversion of ends and

means, which appears to have its roots in the emancipation of the laboring classes and

in the factual situation of laboring, according to Arendt (145). Yet, in Arendts

thought, neither labor, nor work represents mere instances of the production process.

Nor are they sociological categories that denote actual laborers or artisans. They are

existential conditions whose fundamental logic applies to other spheres of society as

well. Any activity that is cyclical and necessary, and that does not exteriorize itself in a

durable product can be understood as laboring. The specific location of such an

activity does not affect its inner logic. In fact, the structure of consumer society is the

paradigmatic example of the kind of functioning Arendt has in mind when defininglabor: Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and

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which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of

means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labor

or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption (145).

Upon a closer reading, however, Adam Smith turns out to be more blameworthy

than Marx or the working classes, since market economy appears to be one of the main

culprits of the rise of society. Arendt is dead serious when she attributes the

communistic fiction not to Marx but to Smiths invisible hand. Liberal economists

assumed that there is one interest of society as a whole which with an invisible hand

guides the behavior of men and process the harmony of their conflicting

interests (43-44). She takes care to distinguish the manufacturing or commercial society

from the laboring society, a term she uses interchangeably with consumer society.

The exchange market is one in which men meet as producers of objects and is [h]istorically, the last public realm (162). Consumer society, in contrast, is defined by

exchange as the sole public activity. It is as Marx claims, a society geared towards the

production and exchange of commodities. This, in the eyes of Arendt, reduces all things

human, artificial or natural into values (164) In a highly dense passage, Arendt argues

that [u]niversal relativity, that a thing exists only in relation to other things, and loss of

intrinsic worth, that nothing any longer possesses an objective value independent of the

ever-changing estimations of supply and demand, are inherent in the very concept of

value itself (166). Exchange value has supplanted use value, which could still retain the

means-ends dichotomy. With the disappearance of ends in the double meaning of

purposefulness and finitude nothing can be stabilized in an objective manner;

everything is caught up in a circularity for which no criteria of evaluation exists other

than the process itself.

Pace Agamben, Arendt indisputably relates this account with elements of

totalitarianism. After referring to how the triumphal victory of exchange value over use

value, first introduced the principle of interchangeability, then the relativization, and

finally the devaluation, of all values (307), she claims that this development was coupled

with transformations in the scientific and philosophical domains to result in the

following:

man began to consider himself part and parcel of the two superhuman, all-

encompassing processes of nature and history, both of which seemed doomed

to an infinite progress without ever reaching any inherent telosor approaching

any preordained idea (ibid).

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Obviously, Arendt is referring here to the analysis she is making in Ideology and terror:

a novel form of government, first published in 1953 in Review of Politics, and

subsequently integrated into The Origins of Totalitarianismas its last chapter. It is true that

in The Human Condition, the idea of superfluousness is expressed through the terms of

interchangeability and reversibility. Interchangeability introduces an indistinction between

end and mean, between object and subject: The split between subject and object,

inherent in human consciousness and irremediable in the Cartesian opposition of man as

a res cogitansto a surrounding world of res extensae, disappears altogether in the case of the

living organism, whose very survival depends upon the incorporation, the consumption,

of outside matter (Arendt, 1958, 312-313).

Although a series of displacements and conceptual short-circuits burdens the

discussion of the rise to eminence of life as a central category of collective existence,two ideas retain their importance throughout the text: interchangeability and

expendability. Politically speaking, the logic of labor corresponds to the particular set of

administrative (Foucault would have said governmental) structures set up to guarantee

the well-being of society. When happiness, security and quality of life become the most

significant political concerns, the effect is akin to what Marx termed commodity

fetishism. This imposes on individuals a life whose sole purpose is to reproduce life

through consumption.

What are the stakes involved? Why is Arendt so preoccupied with expendability?

This is not because totalitarianism is the exact same ordering of the social as market

economy. Surely not. Rather, the stake is captured in the term worldlessness.

Worldlessness is the concept that corresponds to the lack of actual, tangible relating. It

has two fundamental dimensions: (1) loss of the stabilizing effect of the world of

objects, including objects of culture and art; (2) loss of the web of relations that

provides human deed and speech with a tangible or memorable quality. Both in-

betweens, as Arendt construes them (the objective in-between and the intersubjective

one), are required for there to be a community in the double sense commonness and

collectivity. The sense emanating from objects does not exhaust itself in use; they are at

the same time what we are used to. They give us a sense of belonging to a familiar

world, one that constitutes are culture, so to speak. The web of relations, on the other

hand, constitutes the common space into which we exert ourselves as more than merely

cultured or socialized beings. It singles us out through our actions, the term that Arendt

reserves for those deeds that make a difference.

It is not the place here to elaborate on the peculiarly Arendtian rendering ofdifference or uniqueness. I have dealt with this at some length elsewhere (Gambetti,

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2005). But suffice it to point out that difference is neither construed as a property of

language, nor as a subjectivating reiteration that subverts established meanings (as in

Butler). It is an event that breaks out of structure in such a way that a trace is left.

Instead of simply being-in-the-world, action performatively creates an actor who

imposes himself on the world, becomes a conditioning factor, and touches the lives of

others. It creates a being-of-the-world as Taminiaux notes (1992, 161-162).

The common-ness conferred by being ex-posed to the same objects, the

common-ication of the possible significations (in the active sense) arising within the

public constituted through this exposure, the relative stabilization of meaning and

relevance within this public creates what Arendt calls a home which is not a

belonging to an ideal or a social group or a process, but is actively and relationally

created. A world is objective only insofar as it is common; it stands against solipsistic ortotalitarian denial of facticity only insofar as it is objectified intercourse.

World alienation is not an easy concept to grasp. It is evident from Arendts

objection to Marx that the world has and should have an existence independent of

human subjectivity. The world is what constitutes a home, beyond any particular uses and

meanings attributed to it. Our interest for the world cannot be abridged into the

advantages we individually or collectively derive of it. It is not ours to be possessed,

appropriated, even collectively and in an egalitarian way. The world is, rather, an

existential condition that not only conditions us, but also through its very opacity is

ungraspable except through a plurality of perspectives. Arendt introduces a pathos of

distance between the world of actors and the objective world, moving close on this

account to the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School. What is can never be

exhausted by the concept, by what the human mind makes of it. Arendt writes. That I

cannot resolve reality into thought becomes the triumph of my potential

freedom (Arendt, 1994, 184).

The conflation of objective reality and subjective activity robs the world of that

power it has to limit our sovereignty and control over what is. What Arendt always has in

mind in her phenomenological distinctions, as a terrible admonition, is the totalitarian

contempt for the independent existence of facts and of the human artifice that has

resulted in the horrendous enterprise of proving that everything is possible. Not only

do we lose our intersubjective yardsticks, but also the familiarity of the artifices and

objects we have produced. Capitalist society no longer produces objects but exchange

values, meaning that objects have lost their durability and are consumed in the same way

as bread is consumed. But this only foreshadows something even more "valuable,"namely, the smoother functioning of the machine whose tremendous power of

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processing first standardizes and then devaluates all things into consumer

goods. (Arendt, 1958, 163).

Thus, the following claim in Homo Sacerturns out to be utterly untenable: what

escapes Arendt is that the process is in a certain sense the inverse of what she takes it to

be, and that precisely the radical transformation of politics into the realm of bare life

(that is, into a camp) legitimated and necessitated total domination (120). Has Agamben

not read The Human Condition? It is conspicuously absent from the bibliography of Homo

Sacer. What is worse is that this neglect induces Agamben to propose as a solution what

Arendt considers as the problem, namely, foundingbiosupon zoe.

It seems obvious that something else is at stake here. We thus need to turn to the

camp to ground the argument that Agamben cannot propose to correct either Foucault

or Arendt, but might need to reconsider his own position instead.

The camp as the nomosof what?

The relationship between biopolitics and totalitarianism is tense and complicated,

as I tried to show elsewhere, in a paper that was not yet this critical of Agamben

(Gambetti and Guremen, 2005). Total power produces bare life the zoe of mere

living, as opposed to the biosof a relational individual but its aim (or rather, its inherent

direction) is to suppress the biosbecause onlybiosopens up the possibility of opposition

to sovereign power in the form of a counter-bios. What totalitarian regimes discover

this is their novelty is that zoecan be coerced into producing a bios. It is not so much a

matter of excludingzoe, neither of including it, but building a biosupon zoe.

Totalitarianism is indeed that regime where the sovereign is engulfed and

dissolved byzoe. In other words, there is no sovereign other than zoe; onlyzoedecides.

We cannot be further removed from the logic of the decision, in fact, since no cut is

operated in a decisive manner. The circularity of the Arendtian logic of labor thus

acquires heightened importance. Labor is circular precisely because there is no cut, no

end in the double sense of goal or finitude.

Let us take a closer look at this. In Arendtian terms, totalitarianism has the

power of presenting, to animal laborans, its worldlessness as its world proper (Gambetti

and Guremen, 2005, 641). The lack of mediation between life and sovereign power (the

elimination of the juridical, ethical and political poles) transforms both power and its

object: Power no longer operates with reference to an external symbolic framework but

becomes truly performative that is, identical with its own operations (642). In fact,what Hardt and Negri celebrate as Empireticks in exactly the same way as a totalitarian

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regime. Their quite Nietzschean affirmation of life hits a hard rock in the experience of

the camps. Totalitarianism is the sovereign organization of zoe into a bios, a way of life,

that produces its own dynamic and follows what Arendt calls the iron laws of history

and of nature and, more significantly, the law of the market, the invisible hand.

In this account, Agamben is perfectly right in refuting the possibility of seeking

salvation in the economy of the body as suggested by Foucault: The body is always

already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure

seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign

power (Agamben, 1998, 187). And yet, he fails to see that the solution he himself

proposes is part and parcel of what constitutes the problem in the first place: the

biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the

constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and abiosthat is only its own zoe (188). This, I claim, is exactly what totalitarianism attempted

to do.

It is Arendts contention that the so-called leader principle can only spare the

leader; it turns everybody else into either the embodiment of the leader or into homo sacer:

the absence of any authority or hierarchy in the totalitarian system is shown by the fact

that between the supreme power (the Fuehrer) and the ruled there are no reliable

intervening levels, each of which would receive its due share of authority and obedience.

The will of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he himself is

not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might establish himself (Arendt, 1976,

405). In Stalins USSR, for instance, even the chief of the NKDV could become a homo

sacerovernight. The regimes enemies are objective; they are not selected according to

some decisionist pattern, but are generated from within the unpredictable movement of

the laws of history. Thus, it is not so much the figure of the inmate that reveals the

totalitarian paradox, but the leader, the egocrat. Big Brother is himself is only an agent

of the impersonal, all-powerful laws of movement. Sovereignty can no longer apply as a

concept or tool of analysis to this regime. As it were, totalitarianism is the totalization of

the lack of sovereignty its total absence.

The living corpse in the camp is the manifestation of the fact that, in the camp,

being-in-the-world is suspended, hence all the worldly qualifications of being human

also are suspended (Gambetti and Guremen, 2005, 643). The loss in question is not a

right a point Agamben fails to grasp. It implies losing ones place in the world, ones

sense of belonging to a concrete, worldly context. The Mselmann does not become a

living corpse because there are no rituals according to which he will be killed. To be sure,the camp is where law is suspended, and so is morality. Martyrdom is impossible when

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one is also forced to become the borough. But the lethal blow, as it were, is dealt when

the Mselmann has lost all spontaneity. In other words, his capacity to reconstruct a

world within the camp has been annihilated. Even before his body, the Mselmann loses

that one trait that qualified him as part of a structure of belonging and gave him the

capacity to single himself out of species or mass.

It may be said, then, that the Mselmann is he who has lost his capacity to re-

symbolize, either by manipulating and resisting power through tactics, or by subverting

power through reiteration, narration or incorporating the norm. As such, he is trulyhomo

sacer, bare life without any further qualifications or any being-in-the-world.

Thus, it is not the underside of law that is let loose in the becoming totalitarian

of biopower; it is, rather, the limits set by law that are effaced and rendered indistinct.

While the boundaries of liberal law were always ambiguous and open to contestation, thelaw set an inside and outside such that unlimited capital accumulation, expansion or

power were checked. But law, as it were, is not the only boundary that is lost, so are the

non-political pre-political structures upon which being human depended: such artifices

as material objects, culture, relatedness, structures, norms, but also forms of hegemony,

domination, oppression, make them contestable, negotiable, resistible. In the absence of

these artifices, nothing remains to oppose, to symbolize, to resymbolize.

As Arendts at best ambivalent relation to law indicates, law cannot curb

biopower, since law, moving between crime and virtue, cannot recognize what is beyond

it (Arendt, 1973, 84). The problem has more to do with the conditions of possibility of

inserting oneself through action into the world than it has to do with having rights. If

Norris is correct in claiming that Agamben sees biopolitics as a dissolution of the

Aristotelian distinction between mere life and good life (2000, 40), then it is

understandable that he cannot grasp the camp as a fateful construction the

construction of worldlessness that eliminates all the mediating levels of sociality and

relationality between mere life and good life.

This is not to claim that the camp is the true outside of identity (conceived as

finitude, determination, order, body) a true chaos.2 The camp is, in contrast, full

identification, that is, a total domination which has succeeded in eliminating any possible

contingency by subsuming all existence under one pole that of biopolitics in so far as

this is the total overlapping of life and law, subject and object, nature and artifice. The

camp is the total implosion of all distances be they temporal or spatial that might

2 Neither Schmitt, nor Agamben can account for contingency or chaos, for that matter, because of the

absolutely normative structure of their political philosophy (Cf. Norris, 2000, 46). For chaos orcontingency would immediately be subsumed under the sovereign decision that defines itself as orderwhile defining disorder.

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have allowed for any of those within its fences (the SS as well as the inmate) to be

anything other than merely human. As such, it is pure positivity. Agamben notes this

(Agamben, 1998, 159), but doesnt take account of it. What is lost in the camp is not the

law that would otherwise make the killing a crime, but the possibility of law.

In other words, death is not the end, oblivion is. The camp is indeed that space in

which death becomes ungrievable, not because it is not worth grieving, but because the

conditions of possibility of grievance are eliminated. To resort to an example, it is

neither death that would have killed Polyneices, nor Creons refusal to accord him a

proper burial, but Antigones not taking the risk to bury him. Or, rather, the risk that

Antigone daring could not be transformed into memory (either through being objectified

in a play or being talked about within a public space) would have spelled the death of

Polyneices to the human world.Physical death is thus not a limit in Arendt, an end, a mystical or mythical end-of-

being, in the double sense of termination and telos. What makes her revolt against her

master, Heidegger, is in fact the significance of death in the Heideggerian philosophy of

Being, which, according to Arendt, fails to overcome metaphysics (Arendt, 1994).

Indeed, it is possible to read The Human Condition as Arendts effort to contextualize

death-thinking into its proper phenomenological context: that of biopolitics. When life

becomes the central category of politics, so also must death, its negation. Arendt refuses

to be ensnared by the two-dimensional plane of thesis-antithesis, but instead operates an

aufhebungthat will encompass both without negating either. She proposes beginning as

a counterpart to life, sublated to the level of spontaneity and unpredictability, and

mortality as a counterpart to death, which becomes the risk that propels human beings

to leave a trace other than mere life upon this earth. Death is not denied; on the

contrary, its inevitable presence is the pre-condition that makes the story of who one

was possible. It is only when life has effectively ended that the unpredictability of the

actor is exhausted and can thus be turned into a story that will be remembered. To

repeat, death is not the end, oblivion is: The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does

not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are those of

his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he

destroys a life, but he does not destroy the fact of existence itself (Arendt, 1976, 442).

But just when Agamben is about to grasp this death to the human world, he

once again falls back upon physical death. Consider the following claim: The camp is

the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and

application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides betweenthem (Agamben, 1998, 173). He insistently hangs on to the idea that politics is still

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operative in the camp in the way he construes it. As such, he dismisses Arendts

premonition as to where the camp is pointing to, even if no actual camp historically

succeeded in getting there: reducing human life to a total identification with itself such

that human nature is at stake.

Agamben is right in insisting that totalitarianism was made possible by biopower.

Arendt and Foucault would surely agree. But while the camp is indeed the paradigmatic

example of the zone of indistinction, the transformations that brought biopower about

should not be taken slightly if only not to misplace the calling of the political. If

hospitals, laboratories, zones dattentes in airports, Guantanamo are where decisions over

bodies are made; banks, stock markets, factories and sweatshops are where the

conditions of possibility of such decisions are constructed. This form of power that

does not necessarily kill by physical death but rather resigns to oblivion cannot bethought from within the metaphysics of the political. It might well be that the modern-

day sovereign is not commanded by the political, but inversely, the political is rendered

obsolete by the very functioning of a law that is beyond the sovereign.

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