"Bare Life" and Politics in Agamben's Reading of Aristotle

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Thanks to John David Rhodes, Verena Erlenbusch, to the editor and to several anonymous referees of this journal. Especial thanks to Jane Elliot and Christian Skirke.

Attribution of Epigrams: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, trans. R. D. Hicks (London: Heinemann, Loeb Editions, 1970), 57. The words attributed to Diogenes of Sinope are "ou to zen alla to kakos zen" and Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978-1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 24.

To someone saying that life is bad, Diogenes said, "not life itself, but the bad life."

C'est une fois qu'on aura su ce que c'était ce régime gouvernmental appelé libéralisme qu'on pourra ... saisir ce qu'est la biopolitique.

I

Since the publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and three related works, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, and State of Exception, the social and political ideas of the Italian literary critic and philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, have spread rapidly.¹ In the last decade or so, Agamben's intellectual stock has risen sharply in literary theory, comparative literature,² sociology,³ international relations theory,⁴ history,⁵ law, and critical legal theory.⁶ His work now commands attention in the highest citadels of European and North American academia.⁷ Citations of Agamben abound, as do references to his concept of bare life and to two related distinctions: the distinction between bare life and political life, and the distinction between zoe and bios.⁸

No doubt, the current fascination with Agamben's work has something to do with the intoxicating nature of his conclusions. Homo Sacer concludes with the assertion that "[t]oday it is not the city but the camp that is the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West."⁹ Agamben's thesis is that a "biopolitical paradigm" is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Nazi concentration camps, and that it provides the hitherto concealed common link or "inner solidarity" between Nazism and liberalism.¹⁰ According to Agamben, the same "paradigm" can explain or illuminate why the post-Second World War period, in spite of the dark shadow cast over it by totalitarianism,...