Use Beyond Value: Giorgio Agamben and a Critique of Capitalism

Abstract

Interest in Giorgio Agamben's work is related to concerns about law in the aftermath of September 11 and the global war on terror. This article redirects the critical engagement with Agamben by exploring his relevance for understanding the politics of inclusion and abandonment in capitalist economies. Taking accounts of abandonment in the global economy as a provocation, I offer a rereading of Agamben that makes visible the specificity of capitalism as a mode for establishing and transgressing the border between proper and abandoned lives. Such a reading is already operative in Agamben's work, specifically in his engagement with Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord and his assertion that the exception has become the norm in spectacular societies. Recognizing this relationship requires qualification of Agamben's claim of an originary link between sovereign power and bare life, and allows us to reconsider the usefulness of his thought for a critique of political economy.

Keywords:

• Giorgio Agamben
• Nomos
• Value
• Spatial Order
• Police Powers

Acknowledgements

This paper emerged out of ongoing conversations with Adam Sitze and Vinay Gidwani, and I thank them deeply for their thoughts. An earlier version was presented at the 2006 Association for American Geographers conference. I would like to thank the participants in the session, Anne Kornhauser, Gautham Rao, and the editors and reviewers from Rethinking Marxism, particularly David Ruccio and S. Charusheela, for their generous engagement with my work. I would also like to thank the Copeland Fellowship at Amherst College and the participants in the program for their support. I am responsible for the errors and problems that remain.

Notes

¹One has to question the paradigmatic status of the camp, given Agamben's insistence that the example is structurally similar to the form of exception (1998, 24–5; 1993, 9–11, 71–7). Agamben argues in The Coming Community, “On one hand, every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity … Hence the proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds” (1993, 10).

²Agamben, of course, has found his advocates. In these pages alone, Gambetti and Güreman (2005) have argued that Agamben's work is necessary for understanding the tendencies toward totalitarianism already operative in more hopeful accounts of Empire. Nevertheless, a dominant response to Agamben on the Left has been to note the limitations of his work, deriving from either its messianic politics (Rancière 2004) or its connections with conservative thinkers such as Schmitt and Heidegger (Brennan and Ganguly 2006).

³See Mills (2004) for an instructive reading on the importance of Benjamin in Agamben's politics. Interestingly, in the 1999 Vacarme interview republished in English in Rethinking Marxism, Agamben grounds his politics not with Schmitt, Foucault, or, even Benjamin, but with a reworked phrase from Marx cited by Guy Debord: “the desperate situation of society in which I live fills me with hope” (Vacarme 2004, 123).

⁴In “Notes on Politics,” Agamben recapitulates the statement once again: “The plane of immanence on which the new political experience is constituted is the terminal expropriation of language carried out by the spectacular state … human beings are separated by what unites them … but, for the same reason, the spectacle still contains something like a positive possibility—and it is our task to use this possibility against it” (2000, 115).

⁵In addition to a certain similarity with theoretical writing on value from the extraparliamentary left in Italy (Negri 1991), this reading of Benjamin also situates him in relation to the critiques of the value form offered by Postone (1993) and Elson (1979).

⁶Brett Neilson has provided an extremely useful analysis that examines Paolo Virno's response to Agamben's writing on potentiality. Neilson demonstrates that Virno takes seriously Agamben's critique of Antonio Negri on potentiality and actuality, while also managing to maintain the link between potentiality and living labor that is central to Negri's work (2004, 71). My point is not to collapse the important differences between Virno and Agamben, but merely to show that concepts of labor, value, and use already constitute a problematic in Agamben's political writings.

⁷Schmitt locates the first threats to the order of European public law with eighteenth-century British merchants and their commitment to free trade. For this reason, England “became the agency of the spatial turn to a new nomos of the earth, and, potentially, even the operational base for the later leap into the total rootlessness of modern technology” (Schmitt 2003, 178). What Schmitt finds troubling about capitalism is that it posits itself as eutopic and thus outside any determinant spatial order. For this reason, Schmitt locates the ultimate dissolution of the system of European public law and its failure to stop World War II in the simultaneous economic dominance of the United States and its formal absence from the legal order represented by the League of Nations.

⁸For instance, Negri argues that economic crisis and the threat of revolution forced states to re cognize the importance of labor as “an autonomous moment within capital” (1994, 43). He examines the Keynesian welfare state, or what he calls “the State of social capital,” as a capitalist response to the problem of working-class power, which recognized the instability of accumulation and attempted to restore economic equilibrium through the political inclusion of labor. In Negri's rendering, Keynes's focus on employment and consumption becomes a means of depoliticizing working-class resistance and transforming it into a technical problem of economic administration.

⁹If the developmental state is also structured like a camp, in which the common good and public welfare exceed any law, it is interesting to note that Escobar (1995), 38) emphasizes the U.S. practices of state planning and social engineering that provided models for development, including both New Deal Keynesianism and racialized camps associated with the American Indian reservation system and Japanese internment.