The paper studies the relationship between political violence and biological life in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. I follow Foucault in arguing that understanding political violence in modernity means rethinking the ontological boundary between biological and political life that has fundamentally ordered the Western tradition of political thought. I show that while Arendt, Agamben and Foucault all see the merging of the categories of life and politics as the key problem of Modernity, they understand this (...) problem in crucially different terms and suggest different solutions to it. This results in different understandings of the relationship between violence and the political. It is my contention that the violence of modern biopolitical societies is not due to originary ties between sovereign power and biopower, as Agamben claims. Sovereign states use biopolitical methods of violence, but this violence is not an originary or necessary aspect of political power. In order to criticise the forms of violence specific to modern biopolitical societies we must expose the points of tension, as well as of overlap between two types of power – biopower and sovereign power. Understanding their distinctive rationalities is crucial for developing effective strategies against current forms of political violence. (shrink)

This article challenges the commonly held belief that atimia in its earliest Greek usage meant exile, arguing instead that atimia and outlawry were always two entirely distinct, though not mutually exclusive, concepts. It is often claimed that atimia originated as a penalty of death or exile, but that over time its harshness became modified so that those who suffered under its restrictions could not be killed or assaulted with impunity. A careful study of the evidence will show that atimia never (...) meant outlawry, and moreover, its archaic cognates do not imply that in early times to lose timê was the same as losing membership in a political community. Rather, atimazesthai entailed the loss of social honour and status which was an all-encompassing value in the aristocratic societies of archaic Greece. Atimia in the Classical period is similarly a loss of rights, and because penalties and conditions such as exile and outlawry can be easily described, in Greek, as involving the loss of prerogatives, they are conceptually forms of atimia. However, in the legal language of democratic Athens atimia is and always was something distinct from exile, and this legal distinction went back to the very earliest times. (shrink)

Though the work of René Girard has highlighted the interrelations between sacrifice and sacrality in the contemporary world, it has yet to engage the work of Walter Benjamin and his heir, Giorgio Agamben, whose project concerning the Homo Sacer has aroused interest in contemporary political thought. By focusing on Benjamin's early description of mimesis and its relation to language, a position can be elaborated that steers mimesis clear of its indebtedness to language and towards a ‘purer’ realm of gesture. Benjamin's (...) formulation of a more proper ‘divine’ language of gestures could then be said to coalesce with certain historical-religious proclamations, something that Agamben's work challenges us to consider as a viable, albeit ‘profane’, political and ethical option for humanity. (shrink)

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.