This essay reconstructs Agamben’s theory of bare life as an example of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics of life that lies beyond sovereignty. The essay shows that his account of bare life constitutes a reworking of four central motifs found in Marx’s historical materialism: the facticity of alienated existence, the fetishism of commodities, the profanity of bourgeois society, and the nihilism of revolution. Agamben’s renewal of historical materialism explicitly turns on an innovative and controversial synthesis of Benjamin and Heidegger. This (...) essay argues that such a synthesis relies, implicitly, on the negative dialectics developed by Adorno. If correct, this interpretation suggests a way of understanding Agamben’s political thought as a particularly radical and consequent continuation of the project of critical theory. (shrink)

Rawls and Schmitt are often discussed in the literature as if their conceptions of the political had nothing in common, or even referred to entirely different phenomena. In this essay, I show how these conceptions share a common space of reasons, traceable back to the idea of public reason and its development since the Middle Ages. By analysing the idea of public reason in Rawls and in Schmitt, as well as its relation to their theories of political representation, I show (...) in what way Schmitt's concept of the political cannot be divorced from an idea of justice, while, conversely, Rawls ' conception of justice cannot be divorced from a theory of the political. In that way this paper thematizes the internal relation that each theory establishes between justice and power, deliberation and decision, and consensus and disagreement. (shrink)

When political rationality deployed itself on the terrain of the biological life of the human species with the purpose of making this life healthier, more capable, and more "worthy of being lived," it also postulated that some life could be potentiated only at the price of killing off other life. Foucault therefore introduces the idea of biopolitics together with that of thanatopolitics (1990, 137) .Since Foucault, one of the urgent questions has been how biopolitics turns into a thanatopolitics and under (...) what conditions can this turn be prevented or reversed into an affirmative politics of life. In this article I offer a reading of Benjamin's project that leads from thanatopolitics to an affirmative biopolitics. .. (shrink)

This article discusses the question of how Arendt’s mature “neo-Roman” republican political theory relates to her early. It argues that her early reflections on the problem of Jewish politics in modernity already adopt one of the main pillars of her later republican political theory, i.e., the substitution of federalism for sovereignty. The article puts forth the hypothesis that Arendt’s republicanism takes up the idea that Romans and Jews, during their republican periods, both held a “civil” conception of religion. Arendt’s conception (...) of civil religion is analyzed in light of her readings of Virgil. The article concludes that Arendt’s mature political thought is neither “non-religious” nor contains a “political theology” but that it does put forward a civil-religious interpretation of natality and plurality. (shrink)

This essay offers an interpretation of Kant's republicanism in light of the problem of political judgment. Kant is sometimes thought to base his conception of law on an idea of sovereignty drawn from Hobbes and Rousseau, which would leave little room for popular contestation of the state. In this essay, I reconstruct Kant's account of the rule of law by bringing out the importance of his theory of judgment. I argue that for Kant the civil condition is ultimately characterized by (...) a contest between the judgment of the sovereign and the judgment of the people, which corresponds to the determinative and reflective employments of political judgment, respectively. On this view, popular sovereignty is ultimately located in the people 's power to judge politically and contest publicly the state. (shrink)

This article discusses the relation between Judaism and political theology in the work of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. Both Cohen and Rosenzweig give an interpretation of Judaism that prioritizes the messianic ideal while maintaining the priority of philosophy over religion. With respect to political theology, this article argues that Cohen and Rosenzweig criticize the priority assigned to the national state in modern politics in favour of a politics that is both cosmopolitan and republican, in so far as it makes (...) the internal relation between peoplehood and rule of law central, and detaches the rule of law from sovereignty. In this sense, the messianism of Cohen and Rosenzweig is opposed to Christian conceptions of the messianic recovered in recent contemporary political theory. The article concludes with a discussion of Rosenzweig’s hypothesis concerning how the antagonism between these two forms of messianism are to be reconciled in a new understanding of natural right. (shrink)

This response discusses the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics based on a materialist and atheist idea of eternal life in light of some of the challenges raised by the critiques of Morejón, Ricciardi, and Fenves. The first challenge concerns whether an affirmative biopolitics is at all possible given that biopolitics contains as an immanent possibility a racial politics that leads to a “necropolitics”. The second challenge concerns the political character of Italian theory, especially in Agamben, and its relation to communism (...) and republicanism. The third challenge concerns the applicability of recent cosmological speculations for the purpose of joining messianism and historical materialism in Benjamin’s thought. (shrink)

After 1977 Althusser’s thought took an important « turn » away front Marxism-Leninism. The posthumously published writings from his late period constitute an extremely rich theoretical resource for post-Marxist thought. In them one can find a decisive refutation of the errors of Marxism-Leninism, which Althusser believes have two roots: the denigration and misunderstanding of the autonomy of the political, on the one hand, and the reliance on a metaphysical construction of historical becoming, on the other. In order to find the (...) proper horizon to understand the political in its autonomous, or constituent, dimension Althusser finds it necessary to return to Machiavelli. In order to escape the grip of modern philosophy of history, and its obsession with a subject of history, Althusser offers a sketch of a theory of history that gives priority to the dimension of the event, of the contingent encounter, which evacuates all substance and all subject from historical becoming. The necessity of politics and the contingency of history: these are the two requirements for recovering Marx « after Marxism ». (shrink)

Since its inception, liberalism has thought of itself as being at sear with « war ». It has understood « war » as the greatest threat to a civil society whose essential end is the autonomy of individuals. Liberalism identifies two main sources of «war»: the first is orthodoxy, the second is democracy. Yet in modernity it is not unusual to find repeated alliances between these two, indicating perhaps that the « war » against which liberalism fights is not as (...) such anti-political, but rather expresses an understanding of politics as war. The formula « politics is war » is central to the thought of two important critics of liberalism who are not usually treated together: Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt. In this essay I shall use them to bring out two aporias, concerning the presuppositions of-the rule of law and of individualism, that the liberal understanding of politics constantly encounters, and that require a rethinking of both democracy and orthodoxy. (shrink)