Skip to main content

Agamben's Homo Sacer completed by The Kingdom and the Glory


The recent publication of Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is a milestone in his work, completing as it does Homo Sacer, and in contemporary political theory.  Unfortunately the text is long, for Agamben, and mostly made up of archival and philological observations on theology from the 2nd century on.  Dotted through the text innumerable brilliant observations on our politics but I am not sure how many will get through the text to find those. 

Not to worry.  My forthcoming book, Agamben and Indifference, has a whole chapter that weeds out the theological detail and concentrates on its political significance.  Not through some hatred of theology, just because it is the politics that most of us are interested in.

This chapter should appear as a separate article in Madrid soon.  Will post link.  Until then here is a taster...

To say The Kingdom and the Glory is an advance on Homo Sacer suggests something about the earlier text lags behind the later work, which is not the case, rather what I mean is that Homo Sacer was never designed to be read in isolation but a part of sequence of texts.  At this point, more than a decade later, due to the full availability of the method by the time it was composed, it can be asserted without controversy that The Kingdom and the Glory (Homo Sacer II, 2) is therefore a significant and perhaps predictable corrective development of Homo Sacer I, 1 in at least three senses.  The first is that it presents an articulation of Power missing from the earlier study of sovereign power, an articulation that not only suggests that Power is two-fold but that Power is not merely to be presented as articulated into two contesting elements, kingdom and government, but that said articulation defines the operativity of Power as a signature.  The second is that the use of paradigms in Homo Sacer, often its most controversial moments, is superseded to some degree by the development of the theory of signatures in this later work.  In that the method is made up of an interpenetration of paradigmatic logic, signatory distribution and archaeological messianic reconstruction, the lack of any mention of the signature in Homo Sacer is certainly a limitation.  This is particularly the case in relation to the later work where the signatures pertaining to Power in the form of oikonomia, Secularization, Glory, Order and so on, present a much more complex and radical formation than those to be found in the paradigms of the earlier piece.  The third and final difference is the development of the Agambenian method of indifference.  Indistinction, one of the key synonyms for indifference in Agamben’s work, is central to Homo Sacer of course, but by the time of the publication of The Kingdom and the Glory, the centrality of indifference to the method is fully developed.  By this I mean specifically the suspension of historically imposed oppositions wherein one element plays the role of the common, the other that of the proper, and thus where the common element then functions as sovereign foundation of the singularities it makes intelligible but, without which, it itself would be entirely unintelligible (the first clear definition of indifference in Agamben, to be found in The Coming Community).  But I also mean that through this method of indifference, while the complete articulation of power becomes available to view through our current access to the history of its operations and the recent period of indiscernibility between its two key elements, kingdom and government already impossible to discern from Homo Sacer, the real purpose of the text is the role of inoperativity as such, specifically through the signature of Glory.  In that The Kingdom and the Glory takes us, in its final pages, towards a possible suspension of inoperativity, it marks a significant advance in Agamben’s use of indifference, constituting in effect the inoperativity or indifferentiation of indifference as such.

Tags: Agamben, Homo Sacer, Political Theory, Theology, Indifference

[i] Usually I capitalise signatures b

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an

Postmodern Poetry (2)

Postmodern Poetry, A Definition Postmodern poetry is an international phenomena of aesthetic multiplicities as is typical of many postmodern cultural products. It also operates self-consciously, even foundationally, within a philosophical and/or ideological context where categorisation and closed definition are rejected in favour of investigation and free play. A definition, therefore, can only ever be of a general nature and it must always be accepted that such a definition is closer to a strategy or better, as it is poetry of which we speak, a pattern into which the rangy, tireless energy of the poetry has settled for an unspecified but limited period of time. I could, at this point, pass the buck entirely and suggest that postmodern poetry exceeds definition but this would not be true for it operates within an environment still constituted by modernist values of summation and fixity for which definitions are essential. If I do not impose a definition some other agency will perha

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977) First Published (New York: Viking, 1975) Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Introduction: · Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive. “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2 · Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet reli