1.
This course is probably more in need of an
introduction than most as the concept of “mere life” is my own coining, or at
least I thought this until I read Benjamin’s Reflections of Violence where the term appears, if not quite in the
sense I intended for it. Lecturers frequently put on Hons/PG courses that are
closer to their own research topics and this is the case for this course.
However, the themes of the course, which have now been floating around the
contemporary cultural scene for some time should go under the general heading
of biopolitics. It is the ever increasing contemporary interest of these themes
and authors that convinced me it might also be of interest to you.
2.
Another unusual feature of this course is that
begins with some literary texts. The rationale for this is personal. Several
years ago I started reading novels again. I say, again, because when I was your
age I read quite a lot of novels mainly in the area you might call European
classics like Scott, Melville, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,
Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann-- that sort of thing. At that time I was under the
impression that that was what an educated person should do. However, when I
turned seriously to philosophy, although I still enjoyed novels and although I
have always thought that philosophy and other cultural forms are intimately
woven together and mutually illuminating as “expressions of their age” in the
Hegelian sense, I nevertheless always had such an never-ending pile of books
from the history of philosophy to read that I rarely ever had time to pick up a
novel again for a couple of decades. I don’t mean by this that in this time I
only read philosophy books but the width of my reading did not get me back to
literature or at least not often.
3.
In any case, a while ago I realised that my list of
philosophy books, however much I read, was not really getting any shorter. My
own personal library has many more books than I will ever be able to read—not
that that is a bad thing! But I realised that if I wanted to return to
literature again I needed to do it soon before its too late. By chance the
first novelist I read was W. G. (Max) Sebald. I became so enchanted with his
books that I not only read them all (of which there are not too many) but also just about all the
secondary material then available. It was around the same time that I came upon
Eric Santner’s book on Creaturely Life
which attempts to locate Sebald’s work within a mainly Jewish tradition of
thinking about the “creaturely” dimension of life that includes, according to Santner,
Rilke, Kafka, Benjamin and Adorno. Santner explains what he means by the
concept “creaturely” in the following terms:
By “creaturely” I do not
simply mean nature or living things or sentient being, or even what the
religiously minded would think of as the whole of God’s creation, but rather a
dimension specific to human existence, albeit one that seems to push thinking
in the direction of theology. It signifies a mode of exposure that
distinguishes the human being from other kinds of life, not exposure simply to
the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our mortal, finite
lives, but rather to an ultimate lack of foundation for the historical forms of
life that distinguish human community…. Creatureliness is thus a dimension not
so much of biological as of ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that
permeates human beings as a being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life
that are, in turn, contingent, fragile, susceptible to breakdown (RR p5-6)
4.
Not
long before this I had already started to read the works of Agamben, which
placed the concept of “bare life” taken over from Foucault’s biopolitics,
at the center of his analysis.
“Bare life” is that politically excluded category of humanity that by its
exclusion designates the bounds of the politically acceptable social body. It seemed to me that there where certain
commonalities and differences between these two notions of “creaturely life”
referred to by Santner in and that of “bare life” in Foucault and Agamben. As a
first approximation I would say that both have political and moral implications
and significance and yet the latter has less in the way of metaphysical
commitments, it is not so much concerned with the theological in the sense that
seems to preoccupy Santner. One might say it is more explicitly immanent,
materialist and political, whereas the notion of “creaturely life” allows for
broader and more challenging metaphysical commitments from the perspective of
contemporary science like questioning the divide between the living and the
dead or linear understandings of time. Obviously the implication of such
speculative, metaphysical openness would be a broader/deeper project in
cultural, moral and political terms. In any case, I use the concept of “mere
life” as a sort of umbrella term to bring together both of these interpretative
paradigms of life as a single current. But whether this division exists or is useful is a question
that is obviously still open and in need of further exploration and I will
leave this to you to think about.
5.
It was soon after this that again purely by chance I
stumbled on J. M. Coetzee’s early novel The
Life and Times of Michael K and was immediately struck by the way in which
the character of Michael K was the perfect embodiment of the notion of
“creaturely life”. Subsequently I read all the novels and most of the other
works by Coetzee. In his novels the idea of creaturely life is a constant
theme, although it undergoes certain changes, the main being the shift to a
more explicit focus on animal rights in his latter Australian works under the
influence of Peter Singer. But for me the most interesting period and the one
that produced his greatest work was the decade of the eighties from Waiting for the Barbarian through Michael K to Foe and The Age of Iron.
I have chosen to look at Waiting for the
Barbarian in this course partly because it is relatively short but also
because I think it is Coetzee’s greatest novel.
6.
Aside from the pure enjoyment of reading good
literature, what I found most interesting in this little episode was that I
found the literary representation of “creaturely” or “bare” life much more persuasive
instantiation of an anti-humanist philosophical position than I had ever encounted
in philosophical literature. One of the features of both these traditions of
thinking about life is that they abandon all normative or idealized notions of
the human on the grounds that the latter is complicit in various regimes of
oppression, from colonialism to the disciplinary society and beyond. Now while
I had come across this fairly standard postmodern position in my own reading of
people like Foucault and Derrida amongst others, I had never found it
especially compelling. I have always thought of myself as a humanist and was
quite happy to defend this position by pointing to the normative problems
confronting those like Foucault who choose to reject humanism. However, I found
in the works of Coetzee and especially Sebald a much more convincing
representation of an explicitly anti-humanist position. I don’t want to say
that as a result I have abandoned my erstwhile philosophical consciousness but
these literary works represented a more compelling challenge.
7.
Two questions arise from this episode. One is the
question of the comparative virtues of literature and philosophy as conveyors
of truth and conviction. Of course, this is a very big question with a very
long profile in the history of philosophy that goes back to Plato and his
rejection of poetry. Nevertheless, I thought it worthwhile raising it as
something to think about as we read through the novels in the course. The
second question concerns contemporary defenses of the humanist position in the
current philosophical landscape. On this score I will turn to Tzvetan Todorov
who, sadly, died quiet recently. I think he is the most formidable contemporary
representative of the attempt to reinstate the emancipatory credentials of
humanism by offering a reinterpretation of the French humanist and
Enlightenment tradition going back to Montesquieu. We will read just two
chapters from his very many works in the last part of his career. Todorov began
as a defender of literary structuralism but subsequently turned to questions of
cultural encounter between civilizations and the resulting questions of
historical ethics and has expounded a version of what he calls “critical
humanism”.
8.
You
might call this the existential background to this course and the theoretical
issues and motives behind its conception. In the time that remains I want to
say something a little more specific about the readings chosen and where they
fit into the overall schema. I say this purely for your orientation, not to
create any sort of “iron cage” of interpretation. Let me say at the outset,
that although this course issues directly from my own research interests, none
of my conclusions are hard and fast. At best this is just a tentative research
outline and I’ve only written a few papers in connection to it.
9.
In elaborating the philosophy of “mere life”, my
intention was to propose a new philosophical topic. Since that time I think the
concept of biopolitics has become hegemonic. Nevertheless, there are still
issues like, how we understand this concept, and what it involves or should
connote. The concept of “mere life” as I chose to understand it derives from
the common critical intentions shared by two previously unrelated traditions of
thinking about life associated with the concepts of “creaturely” and “bare”
life. Both these concepts register a growing disquiet over the dynamics of
modernity. They express both the systematic exclusions required by the logic of
these dynamisms and the potentially disastrous consequences of their unfettered
sway. It is this critique of modernity and its potentially totalising logics
that bring the concept of “mere life” into the proximity of contemporary debates
over humanism and “human rights”. In this debate, the spirit of modernity is
typically viewed as the spirit of a modern humanist standpoint according to
which humanity has usurped the position of God to become a sort of collective
“master of all things” and for whom “everything is possible”. Whether this is a
fair interpretation of the humanist position will be canvassed explicitly as we
proceed. However, it is vital to understand at this stage that the critics of
humanism view this philosophy as the inspiration and source of both the
hyperbolic ambition of modernity and its most barbaric consequences. If the
onto-theology of collective humanity as the ascribed motor of the modern system
and its processes is the villain in this anti-humanist critique, it is not
surprising that the theoretical and political expression of this modern
colossus should also be tainted.
10. The political
instantiation of the collective human is most clearly expressed in modern
social contract theory and its idea that the modern liberal democratic
political system itself is an expression of the freedom of the individual
citizens who collectively activate their human rights by contracting to create
political society. The Leviathan of the modern state is the expression of the
citizens’ collective wills that require both internal welfare and external
protection. However, the human rights that ensure the citizens’ welfare claims
against the state and defense against external harm also exclude all those who,
for whatever reason, are not deemed parties to the contract or at least
retrospectively granted admittance. It is this linkage of modern humanism to
the original doctrine of liberal freedom and human rights with its political
logic of exclusion that augments the anti-humanist accusation of complicity in
the crimes and omissions of modernity and designates “human rights” as part of
the problem rather than the solution.
11. The charge of
complicity that the anti-humanists raise against both the humanist tradition
and the social contract understanding of natural rights compounds a further
criticism of formalism that has haunted the liberal tradition from, at least,
the time of Hegel and Marx. According to this critique, the formal freedoms
afforded to individuals on the basis of their natural rights are empty unless
they also enjoy the material means to operationalise them. A global reality of
violent injustice and growing social and economic inequalities around the world
feeds such theoretical doubts about the justice of the liberal democratic
tradition that fuel recent groping towards a new ethics that goes beyond formal
rights to focus on the ethical experience of the suffering of others. Simon
Critchley’s recent book Infinitely
Demanding expresses this skepticism well when he speaks of the stimulus to
his own work: a motivational
deficit at the heart of secular liberal democracy that is essentially moral and
that can be derived from the felt inadequacy of secular humanism. For
Critchley, the way beyond the impasse of this liberal democratic moral deficit
is a focus on the ethical experience where the face of the other constitutes a
moment of asymmetry and exorbitant moral demand for infinite responsibility.
Critchley’s analysis points to the contemporary cultural sources from which the
philosophy of “mere” life is drawing sustenance. The concepts of “creaturely”
and “bare” life also speak to the experience of asymmetry, of violence and
acute human suffering that in its somatic quality announces both a limit and a
demand for responsibility that bridges all divides and relations of exclusion.
12.
So the
concept of “mere life” suggests a point of historical and cultural juncture. It
refers to a constellation of problems in modernity associated with its internal
economic, technological and political dynamics manifest in phenomenon like
globalisation, increasing social and political inequalities, medicalisation of
life, mass refugees and questioning of “human rights”. The concepts of
“creaturely” and “bare” life articulate a sense of suffering, violence and
exclusion that is alleged to reside in a normative understanding of humanity
and life. Both concepts focus on a politics of exclusion that reduces life to
its somatic and spiritual limits which, nevertheless, remain recalcitrant to
definition and resistant to repression. The “creaturely” explicitly challenges
the scientific monopoly on the question of life by questioning the distinctions
with which it operates and keeping its metaphysical commitments open. “Bare
life” is more political, focused on the question of exclusion and its consequences.
It avoids overt metaphysical commitments and frames its analysis in explicitly
historical and political terms.
13.
As I’ve mentioned the paradigm of “creaturely” life
comes to the forefront in the novels J M. Coetzee wrote in the context of the
collapse of South African apartheid policy during 1980s, before the resistance
to apartheid was politically radicalized by a new generation in the townships
under the political leadership of the ANC. In all the novels of this decade,
from Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) to Age
of Iron (1990), the figure of the “creaturely” plays a central role: from
the blind and disabled young barbarian girl in Waiting, through Michael K and Foe’s
Friday to Mrs Curren’s unlikely confessor, the social outcast Vercueil in the
latter. It is hardly surprising that the theme of excluded life should assume
prominence for a novelist dealing with the most extreme deformations of
European colonisation harnessed to the economic and technical imperatives of
modernity: the Apatheid policies of the South African government up to the
release of Nelson Mandala. Coetzee’s exploration of the ethical and political
issues raised by rampant “civilisation” beyond the European metropolis and of
the complicity and moral responsibility of its white bearers and accomplices
finds its focus in “creaturely” figures like Michael K who, while living all his
life in various camps, institutions and entangled in the events of history that
are completely meaningless to him, finds the internal, “creaturely” resources
for non-compliance and escape. For our purposes the focus will be the dialectic
of “creaturely” life and “civilisation” as it is played out in Waiting For the Barbarian.
14.
Coetzee’s investigation of the contradictions of the
modern humanist civilisatory mission at the periphery is complemented by
Sebald’s narratives of “emigrants”, misfits and the marginalised in the heart
of Europe. His encounters with the heart breaking human dimension of the
Holocaust and the pervasive destruction of the natural world registered in
resource depletion, pollution and ecological destruction throughout Europe and
its environs builds a truly apocalyptic vision of the dialectic of modernity
and its humanist aspirations demonstrated as tragic folly. In Sebald’s novels,
the specifically creaturely understanding of life is revealed at the point
where the normal run of social and political life is exposed to traumatic
transformation and violence under conditions of modernity. A new dimension of
creaturely human existence is called into being where the dual possibilities of
life as normative structure and suffering, natural organism and mute relic,
co-exist. In the Sebaldian world, withdrawal from the human world, madness and
mourning, close proximity and affinity with animals and nature, and corporeal
pain and suffering, serve as switch points where human meaning is destabilised
and the inherent duality and ambiguity of life offers unique aesthetic and
cognitive potentials to awaken moral reflection and community with other
creatures. In the two chapters I will ask you to read, the consequences of
forced immigration and displacement of life, home and memory will serve as an
example of Sebald’s excavations of European history and memory with moral
intent.
15.
The apparently odd person out in this selection is
Hannah Arendt. Although a number of interpreters like Dana Villa and Bonnie
Honig have given more postmodern interpretations of her work, I think her own
final self-understanding was squarely situated in the humanist tradition.
However, the rationale for her inclusion is that her reconstruction of the
Western political tradition in terms of the priority of bios over zoe provides a
perfect starting point and normative foil for the construction of the
philosophy of “mere” life that reasserts the claims of zoe. Arendt’s hierarchy of human activities in an ascending order
from labour, through work, to action, provides the basis for the classical
normative understanding of humanity in terms of bios. Furthermore, her analysis of totalitarianism is employed by
Agamben, albeit problematically, in his critical diagnosis of the prospects of
contemporary liberal democracy. She also provides an
interesting democratic political alternative to the latter’s call for a break
with the western tradition in favour of a redemptive vision of politics.
16.
It was not until after the First World War that the
issue of political sovereignty re-emerged again on the theoretical agenda after
two hundred years, with the
founding of the Weimar Republic. It was Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology that reasserted the primacy of the concept of
sovereignty. His most important insight was to recognise the general
significance of the state of exception in the form of the emergency decree or
state of siege. In Schmitt’s reconstruction of the “state of exception”, the
legal order is constituted from two distinct juristic elements: norm and
decision. It is his contention that it is always the latter that ultimately
actually determines the legal order. The later is order of norms and the
conventional jurisprudence that is interested in it inhabits the peaceful and
lawful everyday. Not surprisingly, it is disconcerted by civil “disturbance”
because such ‘unlawfulness” throws up the question of unlimited authority and
the potential suspension of the entire existing order. For Schmitt, it is the
exception that reveals the priority of decision and with it the primacy of the
question of sovereignty. The exception is that which cannot be subsumed under
norms: it defies general codification.
However, in so doing, it reveals in absolute purity just how vital decision
is as the foundation of every political situation in its totality. According to
Schmitt, in such crisis conditions sovereign authority is revealed as the
essence of the state: its produces law without being itself based on law.
Agamben will follow Schmitt in arguing that the state of exception is the
constitutive paradigm of the juridical order: that the suspension of law is the
original means of encompassing life and defining the relations between beings
under the law. It is for this reason that he accords priority to the sovereign
tie over the tie of positive rule or the social pact. However, this originary
political tie is also an “untying”, because its ban decisions both produce and
exclude various forms of “bare life”.
17.
Benjamin plays a vital theoretical role in this
tradition of thinking on “creaturely life”. Firstly, he introduces a concept of
“mere life” in his Critique of Violence
as an analysis of the violence inherent to the functioning of law where it
symbolizes the blood of the innocent. In this respect he initiates a debate
with Carl Schmitt that will be crucial to the later work of Agamben. Benjamin
also elaborates the concept of creatureliness in The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1924). At the centre of this
analysis is his rehabilitation of the allegoric form in the Baroque Trauerspiel. Against the classical
preference for symbolic transcendence and the humanist will to eternal
totality, Benjamin offers an alternative aesthetic favoring immanent appropriation
of the details and fragments of historical life focused on the hopelessness of
the earthly condition and its vast reservoir of creaturely misery and corporeal
sufferings. This opposition to all idealisation and pursuit of the eternal in
history gives rise to the natural history perspective. Paradoxically, it finds messianic
insight in human subjection to nature, expressed in all manner of historical ruin
and detritus. This insight is encapsulated in his great critique of the concept
of progress and “progressivist” radical politics expressed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1938).
Writing in the immediate wake of the Nazis-Soviet Pact in 1939, Benjamin
especially wanted to shake Marxists of any complacent belief they might still
hold that history was inherently progressive and running in their favour. His
famous angel from the IX Thesis
contemplates ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon
wreckage’. Benjamin saw the contemporary situation as similarly catastrophic;
however, not in the apocalyptic sense of the end of the world, but as crisis. Such
a crisis engenders not despair but the need for resolute decision. For
Benjamin, this meant completely abandoning the traditional Judeo-Christian end
of history that would fix its meaning in a final judgement. Instead the
messianic becomes the dynamic possibility that he hears ringing “in each minute
for sixty seconds”. This shift to a new conception of the end of history does
not mean that history loses it unity or that historical progress is
denied. Things may improve over
time but to assume this to be certain or guaranteed by those in power or by the
subterranean forces or laws of history would be naïve. Benjamin goes further and
even elevates the standard of proof required by claims for progress by refusing
to allow the calculus of majoritarian improvement to outweigh particular human
suffering or to warrant unwavering faith. Events must be judged from the
standpoint of redemption. This
conception also relegates the actual coming of the messiah to an almost
secondary role. We cannot know for certain whether there is a Messiah and if he
is on his way. For Benjamin all that exists is eternal transience: this is the
“rhythm” of the messianic and our goal is to live in this world and life
accepting its essential transience. However, acceptance here does not mean
quietism and a resignation before the way of the world. Instead, we should
direct all our efforts to this world and our time rather than awaiting rapture
in the other world. The “weak messianic power” of human beings to which
Benjamin appeals resides in their capacity for moral reflection, responsibility
and individual and collective action to change the historical equation. For
Benjamin messianic time is not the time of infinite deferral but of immediacy,
of grasping the potentialities of the present situation.
18.
In Adorno’s hands, this alternative paradigm of
understanding history was articulated as “natural history” in which history is
not just reduced to a natural fact, but grasped as nature, while nature itself
is rendered as history. Writing against Heidegger’s ontology that emerged in
close historical proximity, the natural history perspective transforms
everything into philosophically interpretable ruins and fragments. This
requires a dual focus: on the one hand, the ontological problematic is reduced
to a historical formulae and reveals the way in which ontology can be
historically radicalised. On the other hand, taking up the Benjaminian idea
that transience is at the core of nature, it reveals how history itself in a
sense presses towards an ontological turn as mere remnant. Viewed in these
terms, natural history has to do with the breakdown and reification of meaning
in human life. It entails not only that nature has a history but more that the
artefacts of human history acquire the characteristics of natural being at the
juncture where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life.
However, the inherent duality involved in these traumatic crisis means that the
demise of a human “second nature” can also be experienced as a denaturisation,
transformation of historical being into mere ruin.
19. Having looked at
various articulations of the concept of “creaturely life” we will then turn to
the other tradition in the contemporary discourse of “mere” life associated
with the concept of “bare” life. Firstly we will consider the birth of the
bio-political perspective in the work of Foucault and elaborate the distinctive
problematic giving rise to the concept of “bare” life. The concept of life has
a central place in Foucault’s work and is analysed under the rubric
“bio-power”. He offers a radically historical account of the new modern power
constellation and the new political rationality: “reasons of state”. From this perspective, the task of
politics now transcends considerations of law to turn its attention to new
range of modern questions: all the behaviour of the individual, ultimately to
life itself. So the primary domain of life-- the household--, previously
excluded from the province of the traditional political, becomes, for Foucault,
its chief object. He directs special attention to an insidious political logic
that Agamben will call the “bio-political fracture”. This is the key conceptual
instrument in the contemporary constitution of the category of “bare life”.
Bio-politics promotes a new logic of exclusion based on medicalisation. Some categories of persons, conditions
and practices are deemed abnormal and therefore in need of “treatment”, being
left to die or even eliminated for the sake of the health of population or
according to ascribed criteria of a life worth living. Foucault’s historical
analysis draws special attention to the unacknowledged, but highly political,
character of these judgments and their increasing pervasive character.
20. While Coetzee and
Sebald speculatively survey the internal and external panorama of humanist
civilisation, probing its hidden fissures and predicting its increasingly
evident limits and likely end, Giorgio Agamben strikes an analytical path right
into the heart of western political philosophy to overturn the liberal
democratic conviction of its own benign intentions and unimpeached genealogy.
Agamben is far from bereft of speculative interests. His theory of modernity
shares Coetzee and Sebald’s messianic temper. However, this is only the
backdrop to his critique of the dominant social contract foundation of liberal
democratic theory as the guarantee of modern freedom and individual human
rights. He argues that the contractualist preservation of human freedom as a
legitimate transfer of natural freedom and “natural rights” obscures the
specifically political moment in the act of foundation that is sovereign
decision. Agamben rehabilitates Carl Schmitt to claim the act of foundation,
more than an act of political creation, is primarily one of violence and
exclusion. In this scenario, “bare life” finds itself as both included and
excluded. Included negatively as the form of life not to be admitted and
excluded as the life stripped of civil privileges and rendered helpless before
the dictates of state power. For Agamben, “bare life” is the secret key to the
meaning of contemporary liberal democracy and its self-justification as the
defender of “human rights”. Even more than the truth of sovereign power, defenseless
“bare life” is the key that suggests the necessity to dismantle the whole
humanist edifice of contemporary liberal democracy. “Bare life” signifies a
demand for an anarchist politics that lies beyond normative relational
categories, a transgressive politics of pure singularity and absolute
possibility.
21. Finally we will look at a more robust
and critical version of contemporary humanism offered in the writings of
Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov’s reflections on morality in history are derived
primarily from the centrality of totalitarianism to the history of the 20th
century. Considerations like these, and a political émigré’s awareness of the
importance of human rights and political citizenship, inspired Todorov to
construct a humanism from the elements of French tradition that could avoid accusations of complicity in the
institutional abuse of human rights and genocides that have come to public
attention in our time. He provides us with a “critical humanism” that
distinguishes between scientism and humanism; he rejects ultra-rationalism in
favour of a rational restraint that recognises the limits of human powers and
their contingency as well as their ineliminable conditionedness. Todorov
acknowledges that humanists have sometimes allowed their own best intentions
and abstractions to stand in the way of critical scrutiny of their own
practice. However, he insists that critique should not be simply negative but
constructive: humanist self-reflection should revive the intensity of original
principles and values. It opens contemporary individuals’ experience of these
values to a universal perspective and, in so doing, creates a space in which
they will be empowered to debate their legitimacy with all others. He maintains
that the critic must judge the existing in comparison to the ideal. However,
the flight of speculative fantasy and its inherent ambition must also be
constrained by reference to the democratic principles of contemporary society. The concept of mere life raises questions of fundamental values and
human costs typically not posed or answered by hegemonic humanist discourse.
However, it is possible to accuse the philosophy of “mere life” of varying
degrees of apocalyptic messianism: we find this in both Sebald and Agamben. The
“system” appears beyond rescue and the reader is invited to identify with “bare
life”, to insist on ethical interrogation or refusal or, opt for political
transgression by means of a redemptive aesthetic politics. Against this,
Todorov’s “critical humanism” points to the real dangers of a politics of
redemption. Political responsibility demand a politics of immanence orientated
to universal values. Speculative/aesthetic fancy must be constrained by
rational restraint and reference to democratic principles. This engenders the
obvious anti-humanist retort that the “universal” values of the liberal
democratic modernity are integral to the system that continues to perpetuate
horrific crimes against “bare” life. Todorov and
Agamben represent the contemporary poles of the 21st century debate on this
issue. I hope that a closer look at these critiques and their rebuttals will provide
the seminar with food for thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment