Introduction: Agamben and Radical Politics

This chapter explains the rationale for the book by surveying the reception of Agamben’s work and the development of the Homo Sacer project. It notes that Agamben was often criticised for political quietism and for focusing on sovereignty and the totalitarian state at the expense of capitalism and liberal government. It suggests that we should re-think Agamben’s contribution to critical thought on the basis of his recent works, which develop a genealogy of the theological roots of economy, and develop his account of a non-sovereign politics. It also emphasises the importance of Agamben’s engagement with classical and contemporary theorists associated with the revolutionary tradition for understanding his contribution to political thought.

Law and Life beyond Incorporation: Agamben, Highest Poverty and the Papal Legal Revolution

The final chapter this the book reconstructs and problematises Agamben’s account of form-of-life in The Highest Poverty’s by situating it in the context of the ‘papal legal revolution’ of the 12th and 13th Centuries. It begins by comparing Agamben’s analysis of law and life in State of Exception and that in The Highest Poverty. Vatter argues that Agamben’s account of the conflict between the Franciscans and the Papacy is problematic because it fails to address the legal dispositif that ultimately spelled the defeat of the Franciscan project to emancipate life from law, that of incorporation. The chapter concludes by reconstructing the history of the common-law apparatus of the ‘trust’ as an alternative to the corporation, and argues that this can provide an understanding of group action that is neither sovereign nor anti-nomian.

Capitalism as Religion

This chapter is the first translation into English of Agamben’s essay ‘Capitalism as Religion.’ It develops on Walter Benjamin’s thesis that capitalism is an extreme form of religion by considering the role that money plays in the capitalist cult. Agamben argues that the theological content of capitalism was clarified by the end of the gold standard in 1971 because money no longer refered to a concrete thing whose value it represented, but rather, to credit. The capitalist religion puts money in the place of God and replaces faith in God with faith in credit, which is, ultimately, faith in faith. The chapter concludes by drawing out the destructive implications of this parodic form of Christian faith by considering its relationship to the contemporary hegemony of finance, the development of the spectacle, and the “profound anarchy of the society in which we live.”

‘Man Produces Universally’: Praxis and Production in Agamben and Marx

This chapter examines the engagements with Marx that appear in Agamben’s analyses of praxis, history and inoperativity. Whyte begins by analysing Agamben’s treatment of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Man without Content and Infancy and History, before turning to his claim, in The Kingdom the Glory, that Marx secularises the theological paradigm of oikonomia. The chapter then draws on Althusser to argue that there is a major break between the young Marx’s analysis of labour and his later analysis in Capital Volume 1, and that the former obscures the historical specificity of labour under capitalism. Whyte charges Agamben’s genealogy of oikonomia, which traces a continuity between the Greek oikos and contemproary capitalism, with a similar lack of historical specificity, for conflating the labour of the slave with that of the proletarian.

Glory, Spectacle and Inoperativity: Agamben’s Praxis of Theoria

This chapter argues against the common image of Agamben as an apocalyptic thinker focused on theoretical transformation rather than political praxis. It provides a concise account of the genealogies of economy and glory in The Kingdom and the Glory before turning to Agamben’s argument that the society of the spectacle as the contemporary form of glorification. Abbott argues that the fundamental stake of the Agamben’s analysis is a theoretical praxis that responds to the political conditions of spectacular capitalism by enacting the inoperativity at the heart of thought. This is not a matter of doing philosophy instead of acting, but, rather, a politics that is simultaneously practical and theoretical.

What Is a Form-of-Life?: Giorgio Agamben and the Practice of Poverty

This chapter, and the one following, focus on Agamben’s recent work on form-of-life and the Franciscan practice of poverty. DeCaroli argues that form-of-life should be understood as a particular form of life that is aware of the contingency of the rules that govern our existence, and does not attempt to replace them, but to patiently expose the machinery of their operation. Franciscanism was an incomplete attempt to develop such a form-of-life through a community of non-appropriative use that claimed no social or juridical foundation. The name for this way of living was poverty – which does not mean poverty in material things (although the Friars did live modestly) – but rather poverty in those less tangible things, such as possession and privilege, that profoundly shape our social reality, but whose operation we are often only faintly aware of.

Zoē aiōniōs: Giorgio Agamben and the Critique of Katechontic Time

This chapter illuminates Agamben’s understanding of time, which is central to his ‘messianic’ approach to politics, by tracing the semantic history of the term aion (which gives rise to the modern ‘eternity’). Heron shows that aion initially referred to an immanent life force before gradually shifted in meaning to denote an unending duration associated with a transcendent and unchanging being. This latter understanding of eternity became central to the Church, which justified its existence on the basis that the messianic event was delayed (a vision that was secularised by the modern state). The link that Agamben draws between eternal life and the ‘coming politics’ in the final pages of The Kingdom and Glory is an attempt to undermine this institutionalise the messianic event and restore the idea of eternity for use in the present.

An Alogical Space of Genetic Reintrication: Notes on an Element of Giorgio Agamben’s Method

This chapter focuses the relationship between Agamben’s methodology and that of Michel Foucault, which was one of the most hotly contested issues in the initial reception of the Homo Sacer project. It argues that Agamben’s work involves a critical engagement with Foucault that, through a confrontation with its limits, displaces its method and problems. Clemens argues that this method involves a practice of profanation: it is not a substitute for ‘real action’, but a way of enacting, in the reading of texts, the in distinction between theory and praxis that is central to Agamben’s vision of the ‘coming politics’.

Liturgical Labour: Agamben on the Post-Fordist Spectacle

This chapter responds to arguments that Agamben’s work contributes little to the analysis of contemporary capitalism by reading his genealogy of government in the context of Guy Debord’s analysis of spectacular capitalism and the analysis of immaterial labour developed by post-operaismo thinkers. The chapter shows how Agamben’s analysis of glorification in The Kingdom and the Glory builds upon his earlier work on sacrifice to describe an estranged practice that masks the social foundations of governmental power. McLoughlin then argues that Agamben extends on this analysis in The Highest Poverty, which describes a monastic labour that that occupies the totality of life, and which simultaneously enacts and glorifies the divine order. This monastic paradigm can, the chapter claims, be usefully deployed in understanding contemporary capitalism, which has integrated language into both the process of exchange (the spectacle) and the process of production (Post-Fordism).

Agamben, Badiou and Affirmative Biopolitics

This Chapter argues that the thought of Badiou and Agamben is much closer than most people, including themselves, recognise. Prozorov shows that there is a striking similarity between Badiou’s concept of the body of truth and Agamben’s notion of the form-of-life and that, despite their manifold differences, the two thinkers are united by the attempt to rethink politics on the basis of the brute facticity of being. The chapter concludes by arguing that, while Badiou has shown little interest in the problematic of biopolitics, his militant ‘politics of truth’ is nonetheless a version of the ‘affirmative biopolitics’ that Agamben has painstakingly developed.