This briefing document summarizes Jessica Whyte's analysis of Giorgio Agamben's political thought, particularly the complex relationship he identifies between contemporary catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. Agamben argues that Western politics, since its origins, has been based on a separation of life and politics, resulting in a system of "biopolitics" where life itself becomes the object of control and management. He sees this tendency culminating in the "normalization of the state of exception," where law is perpetually suspended, and politics is reduced to the "technocratic, yet nonetheless bloody, management of survival." Agamben distinguishes his perspective from traditional eschatology, arguing that redemption is not a future state but a potentiality present in the catastrophe itself. He finds this potentiality in the exhaustion of traditional political categories (sovereignty, citizenship, rights) and the resulting "emptiness" of law and social forms in the "society of the spectacle." Whyte critically examines Agamben's reliance on this paradox, suggesting that while his analysis of the present dangers is incisive, his tendency to see catastrophe as a precondition for redemption risks overlooking possibilities for political praxis in the present and may lead to a problematic passive or apocalyptic view. **Key Themes and Ideas:** 1. **The Abandonment of Messianic Vocation and the Crisis of Politics:** Agamben contends that both the Church and contemporary governments have abandoned their respective "messianic vocations." For the Church, this means the loss of a focus on ultimate things and salvation, resulting in its reduction to a worldly power. For governments, it signifies the abandonment of genuine politics for the "eternal government of this world," focused on mere survival. - "An evocation of final things, of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the Church," he told the assembled listeners, "that it has been said, not without irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window.” - Lacking a redemptive horizon, he argues, all politics is “imprisoned and immobile”—reduced to a technocratic, yet nonetheless bloody, management of survival. - “The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim,” Agamben told his audience, “are in reality a secularized parody of the Church's incessant deferral of the Last Judgment.” 2. **Biopolitics and Bare Life:** Agamben's thought is rooted in the idea that Western politics, from its Greek origins, is fundamentally "biopolitics." This involves a fundamental "caesura" or separation between "political life" (bios) and "natural life" (zoē). Political power constitutes itself by excluding and capturing this "bare life" – a life exposed to sovereign power and the threat of death, existing at the threshold between inclusion and exclusion. - While the reception of his thought is, in part, a result of its resonance with contemporary events—from the invention of new biotechnologies to the militarization of humanitarianism—his understanding of political life today stems directly from his analysis of what he sees as an “aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics.” - By bare life Agamben means a life that is politicized through the fact of its exclusion. Neither simply natural life nor political life, bare life is the threshold of articulation that enables the passage from one to the other. - Agamben uses the term ban—borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy...—to signify the exposure through which life is at once excluded from the political community and captured in the realm of sovereign power. 3. **The Normalization of the State of Exception:** A central concept for Agamben, borrowed and reinterpreted from Carl Schmitt, is the "state of exception." Unlike Schmitt, who saw it as a necessary juridical mechanism to restore order, Agamben views its normalization as a catastrophic present reality. This involves the permanent suspension of law, blurring the lines between law and life, and serving as the mechanism by which sovereign power captures life within the legal order. This normalization also signals the exhaustion of traditional juridical and political categories. - In State of Exception, Agamben suggests that this border zone between law and life can best be understood as the reverse of the state of exception, which has more commonly been understood as a juridical mechanism that ensures the law can be suspended in times of necessity to preserve the legal order. - A “theory of the state of exception,” he thus argues, “is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same hand, abandons the living being to law.” - Agamben's central claim in State of Exception was that the exception has become the norm, and is now nothing less than a permanent paradigm of government. 4. **The "Catastrophic Nature of Redemption":** Agamben, influenced by figures like Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, explores the idea that catastrophe and redemption are intimately linked. He doesn't see redemption as a future escape from the present danger, but rather as a possibility inherent _within_ the catastrophe itself. The very exhaustion and breakdown of traditional political categories and social forms create the conditions for a "new politics" or a "form-of-life" that escapes the hold of sovereign power and law. - The central claim of this book is that there is no irreducible antagonism between this redemptive moment of Agamben's thought and his damning account of the present as catastrophe. - It is in the very exhaustion, or bankruptcy, of the categories through which the West has understood politics since its inception that he sees both catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. - Scholem draws attention to the belief in the “catastrophic nature of redemption,” which accompanies acute messianism. 5. **The Figure of the Muselmann:** The Muselmann, a figure from the Nazi concentration camps reduced to a state of "staggering corpse," represents for Agamben the ultimate outcome of the biopolitical production of bare life. This figure is a zone of complete indistinction between the human and the inhuman, the living and the speaking being. The production of the Muselmann reveals the fundamental danger inherent in the metaphysical separation of the human from animal life and the arcana of power. - I suggest that the Muselmann—that figure of the Nazi Lager who was deprived of all linguistic and relational existence and reduced, in Jean Améry's words, to a “staggering corpse”—is the paradigmatic figure of this danger. - For Agamben, in contrast, the Muselmann is the limit figure of the human, a zone of complete indistinction between “vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics” where the border that purports to separate the human from the inhuman breaks down. - According to this account, the production of the Muselmann is less a contingent occurrence resulting from the policies and practices of Nazism, than the final figure of a biopolitical operation that has defined the human since Aristotle. 6. **Law as Empty Form ("Nothing of Revelation"):** Drawing on Kafka and Scholem, Agamben views contemporary law as an "empty law," a "nothing of revelation." It retains its force and validity but has lost its substantive meaning and transcendent authority. This empty form, particularly evident in the state of exception, is an "organization of potentiality" detached from its act, remaining in force without finding fulfillment. This vacuum, however, also presents a possibility for escape from its grasp. - The law that remains in force after the messianic event, in Barth's reading, is an empty law, a vacuous law devoid of life and content. - In Agamben's view, such vacuity and emptiness characterize the law in the state of exception that has become the norm—a law stripped of transcendent authority and with no substantial claim to legitimacy. - What Scholem termed the “Nothing of revelation” ... is an organization of potentiality, which is detached from its act and remains in force, unable to find fulfillment. 7. **Potentiality and Actuality:** Agamben engages deeply with Aristotle's concept of potentiality, particularly the idea that potentiality must include the "potentiality not to be" (adynamia). He links this to sovereignty, arguing that the sovereign maintains its power through the ability to suspend law (potentiality not to apply). His goal is to think potentiality outside of this sovereign framework, aiming for an "actuality of potentiality" or a "politics of means without ends." - Agamben's account of potentiality proceeds through a reading of Book Theta of Aristotle's Metaphysics... - This means, Agamben suggests, that for Schmitt, “the state of exception represents the pure and originary form of the enforcement of the law.” It is this ban structure—through which law's application is secured by way of its suspension, which subjects life to law's power not to apply—that Agamben traces to Aristotle. - Only this indistinction, in his view, makes it possible to conceive of the actuality of potentiality, and to move from an instrumental account of praxis toward a politics of means without ends. 8. **The Society of the Spectacle and a New Use:** Agamben sees the contemporary "society of the spectacle" (borrowing from Guy Debord) as a key site where the eclipse of "use value" by "exchange value" has led to an "absolute impossibility of using things." While bleak, this also opens a space for a "new use"—a non-utilitarian relation to the world freed from fixed ends and instrumentalism. This "new use" is analogous to the "fulfillment" of law and the "coming community." - It is, it seems, amidst the vacuity of this commodified world that he sees the potential of a new form of life. - If such a new relation would not be found in a return to use value, then where would we locate it? In line with his rejection of utilitarianism in Stanzas, Agamben's later works locate this possibility within the extension of commodification, in the very destruction of natural use through which, in Debord's words, “exchange value became identified with all possible use.” - “The creation of a new use,” he writes, “is possible only by deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.” 9. **Profanation and Inoperativity:** Agamben proposes "profanation" as a praxis that can enable this new use. Profanation involves returning something that was once sacred or separated to common human use. This practice is closely linked to the concept of "inoperativity"—rendering something operative or functional, including human works and identities, inoperative in order to open them to new possibilities. - What Agamben terms “profanation” is this praxis, or procedure, through which things are given a new, nonutilitarian use. - By deactivating the communicative and informatic functions of language, the poem opens it to another, noninstrumental use. “What the poem accomplishes for the power of saying,” he writes, “politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting?” 10. **The Global Petty Bourgeoisie and the "Coming Community":** Agamben controversially sees the "global petty bourgeoisie" as a potential harbinger of a new life. Their existence, characterized by the erosion of traditional identities and vocations, embodies a "singularity without identity" or a "whatever being." This figure points towards the possibility of a "coming community" not founded on exclusionary identities or essential conditions of belonging, but on a "new use of the self" or a life lived "as not" (hōs mē), as described by Paul. - In outlining the possibility of this new life, he offers a task that, in its apparent modesty, echoes Benjamin's version of the Hassidic tale: “Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself— this,” he writes, “is the political task of our generation.” - Agamben terms such a singularity—which is neither universal... nor particular...—“whatever being” and sees it as marking the possibility of a human community free of any essential condition of belonging... - In this “as not” (hōs mē), Agamben sees “the formula concerning messianic life” and the model for a nullification that revokes factical positions in the same act as maintaining them. 11. **Salvation in Abandonment and the "Ungovernable":** Agamben's conception of salvation is not one of being rescued by an external force or achieving a perfect future state. Instead, it is found at the point where traditional notions of salvation and identity collapse. Being "unsavable" in conventional terms opens the possibility of a different kind of redemption. This relates to the concept of the "ungovernable"—something that cannot be subjected to the logic of governmental apparatuses (oikonomia) and that offers a potential escape from subjectification and sovereign control. - In the Coming Community, Agamben offers a description of salvation that can help shed light on this: the “innermost character of salvation,” he writes, “is that we are saved only at the point when we no longer want to be. At this point, there is salvation, but not for us.” - What remains, in the wake of this process of nullification and expropriation is what he terms “the un-savable that renders salvation possible, the irreparable that allows the coming of the redemption,” that is, a life in which there is nothing left to save— the life of the global petty-bourgeoisie. - In the Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben makes the enigmatic suggestion that it may be possible today to “think an Ungovernable [un Ingovernabile], that is, something that could never assume the form of an oikonomia.” **Critiques and Limitations (as presented by Whyte):** Whyte's analysis also highlights potential criticisms of Agamben's thought: - **Overemphasis on Catastrophe:** Whyte suggests Agamben is "too prone to see the intensification of catastrophe as the precondition of redemption," potentially leading to a passive waiting for disaster rather than engaging in present political struggles. - **Dismissal of Existing Praxis:** Agamben's focus on the "juridical contamination" of contemporary politics can make him "overly dismissive of forms of political praxis that do exist in the present." - **Lack of Attention to Agency:** Agamben's account can sometimes appear to describe automatic processes (like commodification) without sufficiently accounting for the role of political agency and resistance, as seen in his analysis of sexuality and the women's movement. - **Risk of Pessimism and Optimism:** His view is seen as both "too pessimistic about the avenues for political transformation that are still open to us in the present" and "too optimistic about the redemptive consequences of catastrophe." **Conclusion:** Jessica Whyte's analysis presents Giorgio Agamben as a complex and challenging political thinker who sees the contemporary world as a site of profound catastrophe, particularly in the normalization of the state of exception and the dominance of biopolitics. However, he also locates the possibility of redemption and a new politics precisely within this catastrophe, arguing that the exhaustion of traditional forms opens the door to a life freed from the sovereign ban and the logic of law and instrumentalism. While acknowledging the power of Agamben's critique of the present, Whyte also raises important questions about the potential limitations of his emphasis on catastrophe and his perceived neglect of existing forms of political resistance.