The Obama presidency: wither Agamben?

One of the most widely-known academic literatures to emerge in from the “theory world” in the last decade or so has been that centered around Giorgio Agamben and his thought concerning sovereignty. Agamben’s output in this area has been extremely rich and complex (even if problematic in a lot of respects), and I know that I’m going to do it all sorts of violence here. But I think that the time has come to ask what the status of Agamben’s basic theses is given what promises to be a transformation in the exercise of American power. Some of Agamben’s basic theses include the following:

• Sovereign power always acts in a very strange way with respect to the law: on one hand, law is unimaginable outside of a sovereign framework, hence sovereignty is not itself “legal” in the usual sense of the word (because sovereignty and the entirety of the legal order are founded at the same “time”). That is to say, sovereignty is always founded on some sort of initial violence as well as a continuing threat of violence. On the other hand, sovereignty doesn’t really become “official,” so to speak, until a legal order declares it and “inscribes” it (to use a word that theorists use way too much). Hence, sovereignty is dependent upon a legal system, at least in the modern world, in which societies are simply too complex to be managed by fiat (Somalia might be an exception). Hence, sovereignty depends on the legal order but is never, at least in a conceptual sense, fully contained by it.
• The very concept of sovereignty holds that there is no intrinsic “limit” to sovereign power. While we like to think that we live under the rule of law—and in American history we essentially always have—we always have never experienced fundamental political crises that would demand our government to claim a totally exception power (as it likely would, for example, in the beyond-unlikely scenario that we were invaded by another country). Even more bizarre, for Agamben, as for Carl Schmitt, there is no “neutral” party or mechanism that can decide when an exception situation is at hand, due to the intrinsic ontological complexity of the world. Hence, sovereign power is always the power to decide when such a situation is at hand.
• The ideas expressed in Agamben’s State of Exception took academia by storm—I suppose to the extent that academic can by taken by storm by anything—during the Bush Jr. presidency because W. seemed to be a Schmittian president par excellence: echoing Nixon, who boldly stated that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal,” Bush’s continuous invocations of executive privilege and other such gestures seemed taken right out of the Schmittian playbook. For many, the ultimate symbol of the “state of exception” was the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which operating in a very murky, bizarre and likely unprecedented legal zone: not on American soil, supposedly not subject to the jurisdiction of the American legal system but also fully within American sovereign power, its detainees a priori excluded from Constitutional provisions like due process but also subject to someone’s jurisdiction (if the “jur” in jurisdiction even really applies here).
• The summation of Agamben’s fundamental argument: we’ve entered a new historical period, in which the state’s power to decide on the exception (the ambiguity of the preposition “on” should be clear) has reached unparalleled heights and will likely continue to expand. This means that the status of law in the world is fundamentally threatened, and although none of us (at least Americans) are living in concentration camps, our legal status may someday come to equal that of a concentration camp inhabitant: subject to sovereign power, claimed to exist well within its purview, but having no recourse against it.

Now, like I said, this is very hastily put together, and I’m open to criticism of my basic presentation here.  But my point here isn’t to give a good summary of Agamben’s work, but rather to ask whether the whole “biopolitics” discourse surrounding him is going to seem outmoded very quickly. Why? The answer should be clear from the title: Obama is already taking steps to close Guantánamo (which can’t happen quickly enough, IMO), is making conciliatory gestures toward the Arab world and beyond, intends to end the insane war in Iraq ASAP (although it’s not clear what “end” means) and despite a few foreign policy holdovers from the Bush Administration, seems intent on putting some of the more blatant Bush nightmares to rest. Now, as all of my friends know, I’ve been a huge Obama supporter from ? the beginning, quite honestly since 2004. But I figured he would be a Kucinich-esque candidate and that his victory was impossible. So this should make the seriousness of the following question more apparent. The question now, I think, is this: have Agamben’s worries been put to rest, or has the time come to be more on guard than ever? What I mean is that yes, it does look like the Bush years were in certain respects an exception historical spell that does not necessarily signal the ushering in of a new political era. But is that really the end of the story? Is the state of exception really going to go that quietly? Already, Obama’s rhetoric has signaled that what we may see in the coming years is a Bushian unilateralism mixed with Clintonian internationalism and “good intentions.” Now that people like us again, how is that political capital going to be used? For the foreseeable future, we can probably expect good things: an American president being cheered wherever he goes, small foreign policy victories here and there, etc. But how would an Obama Administration respond, say, to a terrorist attack, even a small one?

The end?

At the moment I don’t have a lot of evidence, beyond negative evidence of un-change, so to speak, to suggest that things aren’t really changing. For that, we will have to wait. My worry is ultimately that Agamben is more right about political power today than we want to admit. My recommendation for the meantime? Good ol’ fashioned Jeffersonian vigilance and Painean skepticism.

~ by sloggingtowardutopia on January 29, 2009.