Sergei Prozorov

Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist

The article takes Giorgio Agamben’s declaration of his optimism with regard to the possibilities of global political transformation as a point of departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects of Agamben’s political thought, frequently overshadowed by his more famous critical claims. We reconstitute three principles grounding Agamben’s optimism that pertain respectively to the total crisis of the contemporary biopolitical apparatuses, the possibility of a radically different form-of-life on the basis of their residue and the minimalist character of this transformation that consists entirely in the subtraction of existence from these apparatuses. While the first two principles are unproblematic in the wider context of Agamben’s work, the third principle introduces the problematic of will that remains highly ambiguous in his philosophy. In the remainder of the article we address this ambiguity in an analysis of Agamben’s reading of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and conclude that Agamben’s optimism ultimately consists in the affirmation of absolute contingency, beyond both will and necessity.

Giorgio Agamben and the End of History Inoperative Praxis and the Interruption of the Dialectic

The article presents a conception of the end of history, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s critical engagement with Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Departing from Agamben’s concept of inoperosity as an originary feature of the human condition, we argue that the proper or ‘second’ end of history consists not in the fulfilment of its dialectical process but rather in the radical interruption of the dialectic that terminates the teleological dimension of social praxis. Introducing the figure of the ‘workless slave’ into the scenario of the Master—Slave dialectic, the article demonstrates how the dialectic of history may be ended in a non-dialectical fashion through inoperative praxis that subtracts itself from the struggle for recognition. In the conclusion, the implication of this reading of the end of history for the understanding of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ is addressed.

Foucault and Soviet biopolitics

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault’s own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault’s reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault’s genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the ‘counter-historical’ discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project.

Powers of Life and Death Biopolitics beyond Foucault

The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Starting from Michel Foucault’s genealogies of governance of sexuality, crime, and mental illness in modern Europe, which marked the shift from negative and repressive techniques of sovereign power toward the positive and productive power over life, the research on biopolitics has developed into a wider interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatialand temporal contexts. While biopolitics is conventionally understood as positive and productive, numerous studies of biopolitics, both theoretical and empirical, suggest that this claim is by no means unproblematic. Biopolitics is inherently paradoxical, in that its ambition to ‘‘make live,’’ to foster, augment, and optimize life, remains intertwined with its apparent opposite, the negative power of exclusion and annihilation. While this conversion of biopolitics into ‘‘thanatopolitics’’ was noted already in Foucault’s History of Sexuality I, its full implications have been elaborated in the more recent theories of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and others. These studies demonstrate that the association of the positive power over life with the negative power of death is hardly coincidental but rather lies at the heart of the biopolitical project. While the interpretations of this conjunction of the powers of life and death are certainly diverse and resort to ontological, anthropological, historical, and ideological arguments, they clearly demonstrate that the problematic of biopolitics may no longer be viewed in terms of a simple temporal succession from the dark age of sovereign negativity to the glorious age of positive power that makes life live. Biopower, however we define it, is always already a power of life and death, not only in the sense that fostering the life of some presupposes the death of others but also in the more ominous sense that the life fostered, amplified, and optimized in biopolitical practices remains in proximity to death precisely by virtue of being enfolded in an apparatus of power, whose biopolitical productivity does not exclude sovereign negativity. This understanding of biopolitics introduces a range of problems for critical research. Insofar as it is no longer meaningful to simply oppose biopower to sovereignty as the positive to the negative, what does the task of critique consist in? Is it a matter of attempting to dissociate the powers of life and death, to free biopolitics from its constituent negativity? What does it mean to speak of a ‘‘positive’’ or ‘‘affirmative’’ biopolitics given the intertwining of the powers of life and death? Can biopolitics be affirmative, unless what one affirms in it is precisely death itself? Alternatively, if a biopolitics without negativity and death is impossible, should criticism aim at exiting the biopolitical

Ethos without nomos: the Russian-Georgian War and the post-Soviet state of exception

This paper addresses the 2008 Russian–Georgian conflict in the context of the post-Soviet spatial order, approached in terms of Carl Schmitts theory of nomos and Giorgio Agambens theory of the state of exception. The ‘five-day war’ was the first instance of the violation by Russia of the integrity of the post-Soviet spatial order established in the Belovezha treaties of December 1991. While from the beginning of the postcommunist period Russia functioned as the restraining force in the post-Soviet realm, the 2008 war has made further recourse to this function impossible, plunging the post-Soviet space into the condition of anomie, or the state of exception. This paper interprets this disruptive policy in the post-Soviet space as the continuation of the domestic political process of the ‘management of anomie,’ which has characterized the entire postcommunist period. In the conclusion, we address the implications of the transformation of the international order into the ethos of anomie for rethinking the ethical dimension of global politics.

Living a la mode

The publication of The Use of Bodies, the final volume in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, makes it possible to take stock of Agamben’s project as a whole. Having started with a powerful critique of the biopolitical sovereignty as the essence of modern politics, Agamben concludes his project with an affirmative vision of inoperative politics of form-of-life, in which life is not negated or sacrificed to the privileged form it must attain, but rather remains inseparable from the form that does nothing but express it. The article begins by reconstituting the non-relational logic that Agamben develops in order to render inoperative the existing apparatuses of ontology, ethics and politics. We then address the dimension of lifestyle as a new key domain of Agamben’s work, in which biopolitics may be recast in an affirmative key of form-of-life. While Agamben is better known for sceptical and scornful statements about contemporary liberal democracies, we shall argue that his affirmative biopolitics, characterized by destituent power, resonates with Claude Lefort’s understanding of democracy as structured around the ontological void and epistemic indeterminacy. In the conclusion we question the viability of this biopolitical democracy, focusing on Agamben’s example of the Nocturnal Council in Plato’s Laws.

Badiou's Biopolitics: The Human Animal and the Body of Truth:

The paper addresses Alain Badious attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a ‘truth procedure’, transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badious account of the formation of the ‘body of truth’ fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agambens definition of biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of ‘good life’. While Badious claims to overcome biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the ‘democratic-materialist’ biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badious account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badious ‘body of truth’ is thus nothing other than the living bodies themselves, plus the truth of their equality. Insofar as in this figure ‘good life’ and ‘mere life’ become indistinct, Badious politics of truth accords with Agambens idea of affirmative biopolitics of a life inseparable from its form.

Living Ideas and Dead Bodies The Biopolitics of Stalinism

Aside from casual references to Soviet biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it argues that this combination is ultimately aporetic, leading to the violent destruction of the very lives that were to be transformed. The conclusion considers the contemporary relevance of the lessons to be learnt from Stalinist biopolitics.

A Time Like No Other: Russian Politics after the End of History

Contemporary Russian politics is conventionally grasped in terms of a simple antithesis of the Yeltsinite decade of the 1990s. From the moment of its triumphant ascendancy on the eve of the millennium, the Putin presidency posited as the condition of its legitimacy the overcoming of the 1990s in numerous ways: political stabilization, economic growth, the reassertion of sovereignty in foreign policy, the restoration of historical tradition, the reconstitution of the state, etc. Despite the fact that Putin emerged to the forefront of Russian politics only by being designated by Yeltsin as his choice for successor, the regime’s discourse of self-legitimation has invariably articulated the ‘Putin era’ as an outright negation of the 1990s as the ‘Yeltsin decade’. Responding to criticism of contemporary policies, the apologists of the current administration, many of them ironically belonging to the narrow circle of Yeltsin’s ‘spin doctors’, never fail to remark that the present situation is ‘at least better than in the 1990s’ (see Pavlovsky 2000). The advantage of the present regime over that of the 1990s is apparently visible in all aspects of socio-political life, from the impressive statistics of economic growth to the sense of societal consolidation, from the resurgence of patriotism and the revival of cultural traditions to the more assertive line in foreign policy. The key word in all accounts is nonetheless stability, a sense of new-found certainty and security, coveted so much in the chaotic period of early postcommunism. Conversely, the most damaging criticism of Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev, advanced, for example, in leftist or nationalist circles, relates precisely to the denial of this negation by pointing out that the ‘farewell to the 1990s’, proclaimed by the current regime, is at best illusory and that at worst the regime persists, ever-more cynically, in the same political paradigm that characterized the 1990s (see Belkovsky 2005). In these arguments, the proverbial achievement of stability is reinterpreted as a cruel irony: not only is the Yeltsinite political regime maintained against all protestations to the contrary but, to add insult to injury, it has even managed to stabilize itself.

Book Review Forum: The Discourse of Conflict and the Possibility of Dialogue: A Response to Haukkala

I am thankful to the review editor of Cooperation and Conflict for the opportunity to respond to Hiski Haukkala’s review of my Understanding Conflict between Russia and the EU. Haukkala raises a host of issues, many of which deserve more extensive discussion than could be pursued in this response for lack of space. For instance, issues of discourse-analytical methodology, grounded theory and the incommensurability of paradigms continue to generate debate in social sciences, and their definitive resolution by Haukkala comes somewhat prematurely. This is not to say that his position is incorrect, but simply to suggest that, even when fortified by the references to the authoritative figures of American positivist IR, it is not sufficient to adjudicate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ social science. Leaving aside some of these metatheoretical and methodological issues, I focus on only a number of key points that the author raises in the criticism of my argument, beginning with the intense assault on the normative implications of the thesis of Understanding Conflict.