Such a response is not about life escaping power or a retreat from life, but rather involves critical work on the conditions of production of population life (becoming collective). Going beyond lamentation at the horrors of biopolitical domination, the book develops a positive-critique of biopolitical experience: offering explanations as to the enormous appeal of biopolitical discourse and cultivating an affirmative, ethical and productive response to the technologies of biopolitical racism and securitization. It explores the relevance of what we might call 'biomentality' for understanding class and nationalism, neo-liberal education policy, cultural racism and 'the problem of racism' in the history of present 'western' feminism. In doing so, Agamben leaves those who would think alongside him stranded in a position where political action is adequate to the situation only insofar as it overcomes society and history, only insofar as it leaps into a messianic night in which all cows (as Hegel once put it) are black.īiopolitical Experience situates the idea of 'biopolitics' in the context of Foucault's earlier work on the historicity of life and in relation to a broad problematic of understanding structures, or foyers, of (limit) experience. It reduces history to a meta-narrative – a prolonged oscillation between metaphysical terms, with the occasional glimpse of apocalypse or the coming messiah – and it formulates politics as if it were so many permutations of a single paradigm (sovereignty). At the same time, this renewal of existentialism comes at the cost of historicity, on the one hand, and sociality, on the other. This chiasmic traffic between ontological spheres (between aesthetics and philosophy, politics and philosophy, politics and aesthetics) is extremely fruitful in a sense, reviving an existentialism in which life is wagered on its capacity to think its situation, and in which this capacity in turn depends on a commitment to politics.
In other words, it is not merely philosophy that finds its redemption in poetry but also politics. For, as I explain below, Agamben makes the test of politics its approximation of this reunion: he tasks politics with the mission of bringing thought and the cosmos back together again, and, in doing so, he measures the authenticity of politics by the degree to which it embodies a poetry of thought. In this essay, I argue that this orientation speaks to the power of Agamben’s thinking of the political but also to its fundamental limitations.
It lets itself be guided by this horizon in much the same way a ship’s captain sets her course by the glimmering light of the North Star. Agamben’s entire philosophical project is dedicated to this potential reunion between poetry and thought.
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