Giorgio Agamben's political formalism

ABSTRACT

This article takes as its point of departure Agamben's comments about how sovereign nation-states responded to the pandemic – by requiring people to wear masks, socially distance, work from home and live under lockdown. Agamben has characterized such measures as ‘fascist’ and has been criticized for that characterization. Against the inflationary critical value of Agamben's ‘camp’ as a paradigm to judge the political form of ‘sovereignty’, this article considers the notion of form in Agamben's work through the lens of how it has recently been revitalized in literary studies in the work of Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh. The article does so to distinguish between the state's response to the pandemic (on the one hand) and fascism (on the other), and to think the state's response to the pandemic as a sovereign practice of care. While the article does not dispute that some of the techniques and technologies of such a practice may resemble those of a sovereign practice of control that might, in another historical context, be the techniques and technologies of fascism, it argues that in order to effectively resist fascism one must recognize the plurality of sovereignty's forms and pursue its critique rather than its wholesale rejection.

KEYWORDS:

• Agamben
• sovereignty
• pandemic
• form
• Levine
• Kornbluh
• care

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The sharpest criticism of Agamben's comments can be found in Bratton (2021).

2 For the French original of this passage, see: Foucault 2004, 193.

3 Kornbluh writes, for example, that ‘anarcho-vitalism refuses form’ but this statement cannot hold in the context of Agamben's work, where the status of form is much more complicated. Consider, for example, the notion of form-of-life (eidos tou biou), which Agamben's work celebrates. Does Agamben, as Kornbluh charges, indeed ‘repudiate … form in life’ (Kornbluh 29)? It would have been good to consider these terms and questions in relation to the claim Kornbluh makes in her introduction that for Marx, form is the matter of life. Overall, one feels that the relations between these various terms—form, matter, life—could have been spelled out more clearly in Kornbluh's book.

4 The notion of ‘use’ is evoked on pages 37 and 87, and named explicitly on page 39, in Levine's book.

5 This captures succinctly the idea I sought to express in the closing paragraph of my book Finance Fictions.

6 Agamben too is caught up in these debates as I have shown in Boever (2019).

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Notes on contributors

Arne De Boever

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts (USA), where he also directs the MA Aesthetics and Politics Program. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham, 2018) and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota, 2019). His most recent book François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought was published by Rowman & Littlefield (2020).