Abstract
Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.
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Notes
Much of the first book of Aristotle’s Politics, which deals with the differences between the political sphere and the household, can be seen as a critique of Plato. This is implied in Aristotle’s comment, ‘It is an error to suppose that the relationships between statesman and state, between king and subjects, between householder and household, between master and slaves, are all the same’ (Aristotle 1942, p. 25). It is because Aristotle separated political life from life in the home more emphatically than did Plato that Agamben often refers to the caesura between life and politics as stemming from Aristotle.
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Whyte, J. Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics. Law Critique 20, 147–161 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9045-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9045-2