Living a la mode : Form-of-life and democratic biopolitics in Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies

The publication of The Use of Bodies, the final volume in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, makes it possible to take stock of Agamben’s project as a whole. Having started with a powerful critique of the biopolitical sovereignty as the essence of modern politics, Agamben concludes his project with an affirmative vision of inoperative politics of form-of-life, in which life is not negated or sacrificed to the privileged form it must attain, but rather remains inseparable from the form that does nothing but express it. The article begins by reconstituting the non-relational logic that Agamben develops in order to render inoperative the existing apparatuses of ontology, ethics and politics. We then address the dimension of lifestyle as a new key domain of Agamben’s work, in which biopolitics may be recast in an affirmative key of form-of-life. While Agamben is better known for sceptical and scornful statements about contemporary liberal democracies, we shall argue that his affirmative biopolitics, characterized by destituent power, resonates with Claude Lefort’s understanding of democracy as structured around the ontological void and epistemic indeterminacy. In the conclusion we question the viability of this biopolitical democracy, focusing on Agamben’s example of the Nocturnal Council in Plato’s Laws.Peer reviewe

The Management of Anomie : The State of Exception in Postcommunist Russia

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Foucault and Soviet Biopolitics

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault’s own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault’s reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault’s genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the ‘counter-historical’ discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project.Peer reviewe

Ex Nihilo in Mundum : A Reply to Paipais

In this reply to Vassilios Paipais’s review of my Void Universalism books I focus on two main points of my disagreement with Paipais. The first concerns the possibility of deriving universalist axioms of world politics from the ontology of the void discussed in the first volume, Ontology and World Politics. While Paipais rejects such a possibility and posits a contentless ontology of the political, I argue that it is possible to derive from void ontology the political axioms of community, equality and freedom understood as attributes of indiscernible ‘whatever being’. The second pertains to the limitations on the world-political subject addressed in the second volume, Theory of the Political Subject. While Paipais is entirely correct in arguing that my notion of political subjectivity combines purism on the level of content with prudentialism with regard to form, I demonstrate that this combination is not a contradiction but is rather the precondition of politics as free praxis, whereby the politicisation of particular worlds in accordance with universal axioms always remains up to the subject.Peer reviewe

What is the 'World' in World Politics? : Heidegger, Badiou and Void Universalism

This article addresses the ontological presuppositions of the discourse on world politics in political and international relations theory. We argue that the ambivalent status of world politics is due to the understanding of its central concept, that is, the world, in terms of totality or ‘the whole’. Drawing on Alain Badiou's set-theoretical ontology, this article demonstrates that such a concept is logically inconsistent, which leads the discourse on world politics to a perpetual oscillation between the presupposition of a universal totality and the unmasking of its impossibility. We then proceed to the particularistic concept of the world as a limited totality with no pretense to universality, as developed in Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and Badiou's objective phenomenology. Although this approach affirming the existence of the infinity of infinite worlds appears of little use to the universalist problematic of world politics, it provides us with a pathway to the third concept of the world as the void, in which a plurality of positive worlds coexist and which is their ontological condition of possibility. We argue that only this concept of the world enables a logically consistent notion of universality as non-totalizable and immediate. The final section addresses the implications of this concept for rethinking world politics as a practice of transformation of particular worlds in accordance with the universal principles derived from the disclosure of the world as void.Peer reviewe

The Biopolitics of Stalinism : Ideology and Life in Soviet Socialism

Western theories of biopolitics focus on its liberal and fascist rationalities. In opposition to this, Stalinism was oriented more towards transforming life in accordance with the communist ideal, and less towards protecting it. Sergei Prozorov reconstructs this rationality in the early Stalinist project of the Great Break (1928–32) and its subsequent modifications during High Stalinism. He then relocates the question of biopolitics down to the level of the subject, tracing the way the ‘new Soviet person’ was to be produced in governmental practices and the role that violence and terror would play in this construction.Peer reviewe

Powers of Life and Death : Biopolitics beyond Foucault

Editor's IntroductionPeer reviewe

The Artist of Not Being Governed : The Emergence of the Political Subject

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The Katechon in the Age of Biopolitical Nihilism

The article addresses the ‘messianic turn’ in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing on the concept of the katechon as the restraining force that delays the advent of the Antichrist in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. While Carl Schmitt held the passage on the katechon to ground the Christian doctrine of state power, Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Pauline messianism rather posits the ‘removal’ of the katechon as the pathway for messianic redemption. In our argument, the significance of this text goes beyond the persistence of a vestige of the theological in modern politics. On the contrary, the logic of the katechon only comes into its own under modern nihilism as the resolution of the problem of social order in the absence of the eschatological dimension. The article focuses on the lethal paradox of the logic of the katechon, whereby the function of protection and restraint is converted into violence and anomie, and global political order becomes indistinguishable from global civil war. We conclude by outlining the conditions for suspending the katechonic function in a critical engagement with Agamben’s messianic politics.Peer reviewe

Pussy Riot and the Politics of Profanation : Parody, Performativity, Veridiction

The article addresses the performances of the Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot as a paradigm of the politics of profanation developed in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on Agamben's genealogies of the concepts of parody, blasphemy and profanation, the article challenges the depoliticising interpretation of Pussy Riot's scandalous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012 as a blasphemous parody of religious rituals. Instead, we argue that their ‘punk prayer’ exemplifies the logic of profanation that reclaims the performative force of prayer by wresting it away from the conventions and rituals governing its possible use. While not conforming to J. L. Austin's conventional ‘felicity conditions’ of the performative act, practices of profanation resonate with the experience of performativity as ‘veridiction’, analysed by Michel Foucault with reference to the ancient Greek parrhesia and by Agamben in the context of Pauline messianism. The article concludes with the discussion of implications of this profanatory performativity for political subjectivation and wider social transformation.Peer reviewe