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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2 (APRIL 2004)
“I am sure that you are more
pessimistic than I am . . .”: An Interview
with Giorgio Agamben
Vacarme
Translated by Jason Smith
The specific reason we wanted to meet you was to ask you about the
“flip side,” so to speak, of the biopolitics you speak of. There are a certain
number of movements—movements that we ourselves either come from or feel
close to, such as those of the undocumented immigrants, the unemployed and
those with no secure employment, the movement of people with AIDS, or even the
emergent drug users’ movement—that unfold in the very political space that
you’ve identified: the zone of indistinction “of public and private, of biological
body and political body, of
,” in this “state of exception that has
become the rule.” But you say very little about these movements, or do so only
indirectly. They linger between the lines you’ve drawn, but more as objects (of
camps, of welfare or medical power) than as subjects. You analyze with some
precision the “major” biopolitics, that of the enemy whose genealogy you minutely
trace, and whose center or focus would be, according to you, “
zoè
and
bios
”: naked
life exposed to a sovereignty whose apparatuses, such as the camp, you also
attentively examine. But you forgo the biopolitics of reappropriation or riposte,
the minor biopolitics, “our” biopolitics, so to speak: the biopolitics of AC!,
homo sacer
the
collectives for the undocumented, or that of Act Up. You do think both the possi-
bility and the necessity of this minor biopolitics: “it is,” you say, “starting from
this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we
must once again the path of another politics, of another body, of another speech. I
would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological
body and political body, of
1
, for any reason whatsoever. It is here that
I must find my space once again—here or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts
zoè
and
bios
1. The acronym refers to the French organization Agir ensemble contre le Chômage (Act
together against Unemployment), formed in 1993, and concerned not only with a reduction of
work-time combined with a guaranteed income for all, but with the analysis of new modalities
of work that can no longer be characterized under the official opposition of employment and
unemployment: the temporary, marginal, and “flexible” work of post-Fordism. This and all
subsequent notes have been added by the translator.
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/04/020115-10
© 2004 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690410001676186
Vacarme:
116
AGAMBEN
You do not, however, explore the
concrete forms of struggle that already practice a politics rooted in an awareness—
and experience—of the state of exception. We ask then whether there isn’t an
embryonic form of this other politics you yourself call for, precisely when the
unemployed stake a claim to a guaranteed income, when people with AIDS demand
treatment, or when drug users demand safe drugs?
2
In a way, it seems the question should be turned around: it is
from the actors in question that you should expect a response. That said, if the
movements and the subjects you speak of “linger between the lines I’ve drawn more
as objects than as subjects,” it’s because this is for me the site of a major problem:
the question of the subject itself, that I can only conceive of in terms of a process
of subjectivation and desubjectivation—or rather as an interval or remainder
between these processes. Who is the subject of this new biopolitics, or rather of this
minor biopolitics you’re speaking about? It’s a problem that is always essential in
classical politics, when it’s a matter of finding who the revolutionary subject is, for
example. There are people who continue to pose this problem in the old sense of
the term: in terms of class, of the proletariat. These are not obsolete problems, but
from the moment one positions oneself on the new terrain we are speaking of, that
of biopower and of the biopolitical, the problem is difficult in a different sense.
Because the modern state functions, it seems to me, as a kind of desubjectivation
machine: it’s a machine that both scrambles all the classical identities and, as
Foucault shows quite well, a machine (for the most part juridical) that recodes these
very same dissolved identities. There is always a resubjectivation, a reidentification
of these destroyed subjects, voided as they are of all identity. Today, it seems to
me that the political terrain is a kind of battlefield in which two processes unfold:
the destruction of all that traditional identity was (I say this, of course, with no
nostalgia) and, at the same time, its immediate resubjectivation by the State—and
not only by the State, but also by the subjects themselves. It’s what you evoked in
your question: the decisive conflict is from now on played out—for each of its
protagonists, including the new subjects you speak of—on the terrain of what I call
, biological life. And in fact, it is nothing other than this: I don’t think there can
be any question of returning to the classical political oppositions which clearly
separate private and public, political body and private body, etc. But this terrain is
also the one that exposes us to biopower’s processes of subjection. There is therefore
an ambiguity, a risk. This is what Foucault showed: the risk is that one reidentify
oneself, that one invest this situation with a new identity, that one produce a new
subject, if you like, but one subjected to the State; the risk that one from then on
carry out again, despite oneself, this infinite process of subjectivation and subjection
that precisely defines biopower. I don’t believe there is any escape from this
problem.
2. See G. Agamben,
Means without End: Notes on Politics
, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 139.
from such an awareness can interest me.”
Giorgio Agamben:
zoè
AN INTERVIEW
117
Is it a risk or an aporia? Is every subjectivation fatally and without fail a
subjection, or can something like a maxim or formula of subjectivation be obtained
that would allow one to escape subjection?
In Foucault’s last works, there is an aporia that seems very interesting to
me. There is, on the one hand, all the work on the “care of self”: one must care for
one’s self, in all the forms of the practice of self. But at the same time he often
states the apparently opposite theme: the self must be let go of. He says so on many
occasions: “Life is over if one questions oneself about one’s identity; the art of living
is to destroy identity, to destroy psychology.” There is, therefore, an aporia: a care
of self that should lead to a letting go of self. One way the question could be posed
is: what would a practice of self be that would not be a process of subjectivation
but, to the contrary, would end up only at a letting go, a practice of self that finds
its identity only in a letting go of self? It is necessary to maintain or “stay,” as it
were, in this double movement of desubjectivation and subjectivation. Obviously, it
is difficult terrain to hold. It’s truly a matter of identifying this zone, this no man’s
land between a process of subjectivation and a process of desubjectivation, between
identity and nonidentity. This terrain would have to be identified, because this would
be the terrain of a new biopolitics. This is precisely what is interesting about a
movement like that of people with AIDS. Why? Because it seems to me that, in this
case, identification takes place only on the threshold of an absolute desubjectiva-
tion, sometimes even at the risk of death. Here, it seems that one is held right on
this threshold. I have tried a little in the book on Auschwitz, with regard to
testimony, to see the witness as the model of a subjectivity that would be the subject
only of its own desubjectivation. The witness witnesses nothing other than its own
desubjectivation. The one who survives witnesses solely for the
In
the last part of the book I was interested in really identifying a model of the subject
as what remains between a subjectivation and a desubjectivation, speech and
muteness. It’s not a substantial space, but rather an interval between two processes.
But this is only a beginning. A new structure of subjectivity is barely touched upon,
but it’s very complicated, it’s a work that still remains entirely to be done. It’s
truly necessary . . . It’s a practice, not a principle. I believe that one can have a
general principle only if one makes sure not to relapse into a process of resubjec-
tivation that would at the same time be a subjection—that is, of being a subject
only within the framework of a strategy or tactic. This is why it’s very important to
see how, in the practice both of the movements and of each one of us, these possible
zones get drawn out. This can be done everywhere, working with this notion of a
care of self found in Foucault, while moving it into other domains: every practice
of self there might be, including the everyday mysticism of intimacy, all these zones
where one brushes against a zone of nonknowledge or a zone of desubjectivation,
be it sexual life or whatever other aspect of bodily life. In these cases there are
always figures of a subject attending its own downfall, brushing against its own
Muselmänner
.
3
, trans. D. Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). The second chapter of this text is devoted to “the
Muselmann.”
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Vacarme:
Agamben:
3. See G. Agamben,
118
AGAMBEN
desubjectivation—these are all everyday zones, a very banal, quotidian mysticism.
We should be attentive to everything offering us a zone of this kind. It’s still quite
vague, but this is what would offer the paradigm of a minor biopolitics.
You present identity as a risk, an error of the subject. Isn’t there all the
same a material thickness of identities—even if only insofar as the adversary assigns
them to us, be it through the law (think, for example, of immigration laws) or through
insults (i.e., homophobic insults)—which renders these identities “objective,” so to
speak? In other words, how much room for desubjectivation do our social conditions
leave us?
Paul formulates the problem:
“What is messianic life? What are we going to do now that we live in the messianic
time? What are we going to do with regard to the State?” What’s interesting to me
is the double movement we find in Paul that has always been problematic. Paul says:
“Remain in the social condition, be it juridical or cultural, in which you find yourself.
You’re a slave? Remain a slave. You’re a doctor? Remain a doctor. You’re a wife, a
husband? Remain in the vocation for which you have been called.” But at the same
time, he says: “You’re a slave? Don’t worry, but make use of it, take advantage of
it.”
Right now I’m working on Paul’s letters.
4
This means that it’s not a matter of changing your juridical status, or changing
your life, but of making use of it. He then specifies what he means through this very
beautiful image: “as if not,” or “as not.” That is: “You’re crying? As if you weren’t
crying. You’re rejoicing? As if you weren’t rejoicing. Are you married? As nonmarried.
Have you bought something? As not bought, etc.” There is this theme of the “as not.”
It’s not even “as if,” it is “as not.” Literally, it’s: “Crying, as not crying; married,
as not married; slave, as not slave.”
It’s very interesting, because we could say that
what he calls “usages” are conducts of life which, on the one hand, do not directly
confront power—remain in your juridical condition, your social role—but nevertheless
completely transform them in the form of an “as not.” The notion of use, of usage,
in this sense, interests me a great deal: it’s a practice that cannot be assigned a
subject. You remain a slave, but, since you make use of it in the manner of this “as
not,” you are no longer a slave.
6
How could such a use be properly political, or take place under political
conditions? It’s possible to see it as a strictly individual or ethical—even religious—
conversion of thought which would, in any case, be singular and “private.” How does
this conversion vis-à-vis one’s own status, allowing one no longer to be a subject,
relate to politics? In what way does it necessitate community, struggle, conflict, and
so on?
Lettera ai
Romani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), and is forthcoming in an English translation from
Stanford University Press.
5. Agamben refers throughout this response to Paul’s 1 Cor. 7:20–30.
6. The “as not” (
Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla
,” which recurs throughout
this sequence. The reading of this passage is developed in detail on the “Second Day” of
comme non
) renders the Greek syntagm “
hos mè
Il
tempo che resta
.
Vacarme:
Agamben:
5
Vacarme:
4. This book has since been published as
AN INTERVIEW
119
Of course, this theme in Paul is sometimes thought of as implying an
interiorization. But I don’t believe that it is a matter of interiorization at all. His
problem is to the contrary that of the life of the messianic community to which he
addresses himself. For example, this theme of use or usage reemerges in a very
powerful form—as a critique of right—in the Franciscan movement, where the
problem is that of property. These orders practice an extreme poverty while refusing
all property, and yet they must nevertheless make use of certain goods. There was
a severe conflict with the Church over this, insofar as the Church wanted very much
to allow them to refuse a right to property, be it that of the individual or the order,
but it wanted them to classify their conduct as a right of usage, a right to use. This
is something that still exists: usufruct, the right to use, as separate from the right
to property. To the contrary, the Franciscans insisted—this is where the conflict is—
by saying: “No, it’s not a right to use, it is a use without right.” They call this
usus
, poor usage. It’s truly the idea of opening a zone of communal life that makes
use, but has no right, and claims none. Moreover, the Franciscans do not critique
property; they leave all property rights to the Church: “Property? We don’t want
any. We make use of it.” This problem could therefore be said to be purely political,
or at least communal.
7
All the same, is it strictly by chance that the references you invoke in
thinking this alternative belong to the religious sphere? Sometimes, when reading
you, one finds in the designation of this other politics and this other status of the
political something like a prophetic tone. For example, you write: “For this reason—
to risk advancing a prophecy here—the coming politics will no longer be a struggle
to conquer or to control the state on the part of either new or old social subjects,
but rather a struggle between the state and the nonstate (humanity), that is, an
irresolvable disjunction between whatever singularities and the state organization.”
8
What role do these references and this tone play in your work?
What interests me about Paul’s text is not so much the domain of religion
but a punctual domain that concerns religion without coinciding with it: the
messianic, which is a domain very close to the political. Here, it is in fact another
author who has been decisive for me, one who is not at all religious: Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin thinks the messianic as paradigm of the political, or, let’s say, of historical
time. This is, for me, what’s really in question. As a matter of fact, I think the way
Benjamin introduces (in the first Thesis on the concept of history) theology as an
entity that, even hidden, should help historical materialism win out over its enemies
remains a very legitimate and timely gesture giving us, precisely, the means to think
otherwise both time and the subject. So, you were speaking about the prophet . . .
I was recently listening to recordings of Foucault’s courses, notably the one where
he distinguishes four figures of truth in our culture: the prophet, the sage, and the
specialist, and then what he calls the
, the one who has the courage
to say the truth. The prophet speaks of the future, and not in his own name, but in
parrhesiastes
7. On this
usus pauper
, see once again the “Second Day.”
8. See
Means without end
, p. 88.
Agamben:
pauper
Vacarme:
Agamben:
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