1 ACAgamben Short

American politics is dominated by an axiom of security which combines
unprecedented economic liberalism with equally absolute police and state control
Agamben 14 (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collge International de
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
Destituent Power, transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on
Roarmag, 2-4-14, http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/)
A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where
it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non-democratic, but
that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new,
for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy. Let me begin with a
concept which seems, starting

from September 2001, to have replaced any other political notion: security. As you know, the formula for
security reasons functions today in any domain, from everyday life to international conflicts, as a
codeword in order to impose measures that the people have no reason to accept. I will try to show that the real
purpose of the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed, to prevent dangers, troubles or even
catastrophes. I will be consequently obliged to make a short genealogy of the concept of security. A Permanent State of Exception One possible way to
sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman
principle Salus publica suprema lex public safety is the highest law and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity does not
acknowledge any law, with the comits de salut publique during French revolution and finally with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground
for the Nazi regime. Such a genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures
which are familiar to us. While
the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which

was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security
reasons constitute today a permanent technology of government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show
precisely how the state of exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so
accurate. The
only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took power in February 1933, he
immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning
personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire Third Reich can be considered as a
state of exception which lasted twelve years. What is happening today is still different. A formal state of
exception is not declared and we see instead that vague non-juridical notions like the security
reasons are used to install a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly
identifiable danger. An example of such non-juridical notions which are used as emergency producing
factors is the concept of crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgment in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the
history of this term which, as is evident for you, comes from the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the medical tradition, crisis means
the moment in which the doctor has to judge, to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the
decisive days. In theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what
is essential in both
traditions is the connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is
precisely this connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement, is split from its temporal index and
coincides now with the chronological course of time, so that not only in economics and politics but in every aspect
of social life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of government. Consequently,
the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous decision-making process decides
nothing. To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that, having to face a continuous state of exception, the government
tends to take the form of a perpetual coup dtat. By the way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in
Greece as well as in Italy, where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups dtat. Governing the Effects This is why I think that, in order to
understand the peculiar governmentality under which we live, the
paradigm of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I
will therefore follow Michel Foucaults suggestion and investigate the origin of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by Franois Quesnais
and the Physiocrates, whose influence on modern governmentality could not be overestimated. Starting with Westphalia treaty, the great absolutist European
states begin to introduce in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of its subjects security. But Quesnay is the first to establish security
(suret) as the central notion in the theory of government and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time
was the problem of famines. Before
Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines through the
creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both these measures had negative effects on
production. Quesnays idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to prevent famines, he decided to let
them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred, liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. To govern
retains here its etymological cybernetic meaning: a good kybernes, a good pilot cant avoid tempests, but if a tempest occures he must be able to govern his boat,
using the force of waves and winds for navigation. This
is the meaning of the famous motto laisser faire, laissez passer: it is not only
the catchword of economic liberalism; it is a paradigm of government, which conceives of security (suret, in Quesnays words)
not as the prevention of troubles, but rather as the ability to govern and guide them in the right
direction once they take place. We should not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It
means an epochal transformation in the very idea of government, which overturns the traditional
hierarchical relation between causes and effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is safer and more useful to try
to govern the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The ancien
regime aimed to rule the causes; modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom applies to every domain, from
economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to
rule the causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnays
theorem makes also understandable a fact which seems

otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal paradigm in the
economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police control. If government aims
for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.
Biometric surveillance of American citizens poses a grave threat to democracy and

reduces citizens to their biological identity
One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses, which
increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared in 18th
century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger prints, they were obviously not
meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents. Only once a second crime has occurred, you can use the
biometrical data to identify the offender. Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time their exclusive
privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger prints. But
according to a sort of fatality or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have been invented
for animals, for criminals, strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human beings. Therefore, in the
course of 20th century, biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens, and Bertillons identification
photographs and Galtons fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship But the extreme step has
been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization. The development of new digital
technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only finger prints but also the retina or
the eyes iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move beyond the police stations and
immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to students restaurants or even to schools is controlled
by a biometric apparatus on which the student just puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field, which are quickly growing, recommend that citizens
get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing, because the European Commissions for the development of security
(like the ESPR, European Security Research Program) include among their permanent members the representatives of the big industries in the field, which are just
It is easy to imagine the

dangers represented by a power that could have at its disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic
the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to the security business.
information of all its citizens. With such a power at hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on
the basis of incomparably less efficient documentation, would have been total and incredibly swift. But I will not dwell on this important
aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that
are involved in security technologies. This
transformation is so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the

society in which we live is still a democratic one, but also if this society can still be considered political.
Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of the conceptualization of the political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he
calls a politicization (politisierung) of citizenship. While until that moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of conditions and social
statuses of different kind for instance belonging to nobility or to a certain cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc.
from now on citizenship became the main criterion of social identity. The result was a specifically Greek conception of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to
behave as citizens found an institutional form. The belonging to economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a democracy
considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as they devoted themselves to a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and
defined one another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life, by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the
house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to the private space, which was the reign of necessity. According to Meier, this specifically
Greek process of politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where citizenship remained the decisive element. The hypothesis I would like to propose to you
is that this
fundamental political factor has entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as a
process of increasing de-politicization. What was in the beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly
active condition, has now become a purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are
progressively blurred and become indistinguishable. This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I
will not dwell on it. Rise of the State of Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the
security apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of
technologies which were conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity
of the citizen. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social personality and its
recognition by others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the
fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in the double helix of DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive
factor of social identity, which loses therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by
biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction
of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints
or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought
again from the ground up. While
the classical Greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the
private and the public, the oikos, which is the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems
rather to move in a zone of indifference between the private and the public, or, to quote Hobbes terms, the physical and
the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video surveillance of the
streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons
has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a video-recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a
hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference between the prison and the forum. This
transformation of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon that involves a multiplicity of
causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The primacy of the biological
identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare life in modern states.
But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not
be astonished if today the normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion,
police filing and control. The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every
citizen is a potential terrorist. But what is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can
we even consider it as something political? In what kind of state do we live today? You will probably know that Michel Foucault, in his book
Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collge de France, sketched a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime,
which he calls the territorial or sovereign state and whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves progressively into a population state and into a
disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire vivre et laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizens life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered and
manageable bodies. The
state in which we live now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call
it the tat de contrle, or control state, because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but
rather to manage and to control. Deleuzes definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and
discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government did not want for the police
to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From Politics to Policing American
political scientists who have tried to analyze the

constitutional transformation involved in the Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed
September 2001 prefer to speak of a security state. But what does security here mean? It is during the
French Revolution that the notion of security suret, as they used to say is linked to the definition of police. The laws
of March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792 introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de suret (security police), which was doomed to have a long
history in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the
speakers (Brissot, Heraut de Schelle, Gensonn) is able to define police or security by themselves. The
debates focused on the situation of
the police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonn maintains that they are two separate and distinct powers, yet, while
the function of the judicial power is clear, it is impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function
of the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the
judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines the actions of police officer, who, in
a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not
really take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judges decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by
definition undecidable. The
name of this undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison dtat, or state reason. It is
rather security reasons. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police is a
kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called science of the police first appears in the 18th century, the police is brought back to its
etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as such to politics. But it is surprising to see that police coincides now with the true political function, while the
term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while he
calls Polizei the relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: Police is the relationship of a state with itself. The hypothesis I
would like to suggest here is that, placing
itself under the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of
politics to enter a no mans land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The security
state, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about the
dangers it involves for democracy, because in it political life has become impossible, while democracy
means precisely the possibility of a political life.
Biometrics biologizes life, entrenching violent biopolitics

Muller 10 (Benjamin J. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the
University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queens University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric
State: Governing Borders and Bodies, p. 22-23)
In exposing what he calls virtual security politics, Dillon notes the extent to which security
measures such as biometrics are not only

charged with having to specify the attributes of their subjects, but also indicate their own fallibility (Dillon
2003: 554). One could phrase this differently as follows: like all security measures, the characteristics of the subject of
security require description; however, the extent to which the technological system itself is a potential
threat must be recognized. In this political space of biometrics where, as Dillon suggests, the physical and the virtual meet,
there is a definite fortification of biological life over political life and the further entrenchment of the
biopolitical. Here, the introduction of biometric technologies is a cogent example of Agambens suggestion
that security is imposing itself as the basic principle of state activity, leading to the gradual
neutralization of politics (Agamben 2002). Underscoring the extent to which the relationship between the
collected data and the subject of that collection is markedly different from traditional analogue
procedures for data collection, this discussion of the introduction of biometric technologies as constituent
of virtual security (and thus, virtual borders), the move towards the state of exception as the rule, and the general
biologization of life, indicate a dramatic difference between digital data collection and analogue vis--vis
security, subjectivity and sovereignty. In fact, arguments insensitive to such phenomena as exemplified in the
biometrics literature, the CIC forum, and to a lesser extent the European Commission report misleadingly focus on the policy of
biometrics rather than the politics of biometrics.
The biologization of life and resulting calculability renders some fit to live and others
fit to die
Dillon 5 (Michael Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life, in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff, biopolitics
must determine the

quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction, promotion and refinement may itself be continuously
assessed. It follows that some life will be found to be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other life
may prove intractable to the powers of investment and the demands it makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into
evaluating the eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be positively inimical to
the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics continuously trades, and have
to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained.
Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the biologisation of life to which biopolitics is
committed, the violence of that biologisation and the reduction of the classical political question
concerning the good life (and the good death) to that of the endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life. The good life
Agamben refigures in terms of the pure - he also says 'profane' but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.
Biometric technologies blur the line between wartime technology and domestic
security, creating a permanent state of emergency
Muller 10 (Benjamin J. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the
University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queens University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric
State: Governing Borders and Bodies, p. 104-109)
We argue here that the
use of biometrics for the management of the population is constitutive of

contemporary securitized (exceptional) politics, and while more apparent, the case of Fallujah is not dissimilar to domestic homeland
security initiatives and the securitization of borders and the bodies that cross them. Moreover, it speaks to an evolving global norm of
securitized identity, emphasizing the mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign
policy, or at the very least destabilizing conventional notions about the separation between these
spheres, regularly reified in the discourses and disciplinary regimes/ knowledge of IR and Comparative Politics (CP). 3 Moreover, it speaks to an
attempt to exercise biopolitical technologies of power as forms of subjugation and control/
management, which in turn constitutes the subject under such exceptional circumstances as Agambens
homo sacer. The chapter begins by briefly revisiting the concept of the state of exception, and the extent to which the introduction of biometric technologies is
representative of a particular politics of exceptionalism. As the chapter title indicates, we consider these securitizing moves, namely the introduction of biometric
technologies, as underscoring constitutionalizing trends, or at the very least, the untenable differentiation between domestic and foreign policy. In this specific case,
in much the same way that modern technology has rendered conventional articulations of space and time anachronistic, the
simultaneous use of
biometric technologies as a part of both domestic homeland security strategies and foreign policy
objectives can begin to challenge articulated limits of identity and place. We then examine the case of Fallujah, arguably
an exemplar in the wider case of American occupation practices subsequently replicated across Iraq and Afghanistan, wherein the struggle to gain the biopolitical
ascendancy of sovereign power is asserted by occupation forces in an effort to take control of biopolitics the management of life. As a result of the destructive
violence executed by occupation forces, identity is rearticulated on the principles of biometrics and, to draw on Giorgio Agambens work, some Iraqis are articulated
as homo sacer; namely the 15 45-year-old males who were not given the option of leaving Fallujah prior to the siege in November 2004 . In this sense, while
cognizant of the disturbing story of destruction represented in Picassos Guernica, 4 the story here is much more about the destructiveness of reconstruction, and
the struggle over sovereign power in its biopolitical form. We conclude with some reflections on the arguments presented, and their wider application in the Iraqi
context. Homo Sacer and the State of Exception Drawing on the work of Nazi constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, but also a Hobbesian and Weberian heritage, the
revival of deliberations over the state of exception is found in contemporary work by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Although many of those not
beholden to the triumphalism found in post-1989 commentaries turned to Schmitt, some specific resonances were absent. In particular, one of the critical points for
Agamben regarding the state of exception becoming the norm sent many writers and thinkers scrambling. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the
subsequent introduction of anti-terrorist legislation and homeland security strategies however, this contention is much less radical . Specific pieces of anti-terrorist
legislation such as Bill C-36 in Canada, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), or even the American Homeland
Security Act of 2002, involve at a bare minimum certain sunset clauses, if not in fact subjecting the entire piece of legislation to such a clause. Of particular
importance is the way in which sunset clauses give certain impermanence to exceptional or emergency powers. While the sovereign might indeed, to borrow from
Schmitts dictum, decide the exception, it is not intended to be carte blanche power. If it were, exceptional powers would no longer be exceptional but the
norm, or what is termed the permanent state of exception. Historical powers of judicial oversight, constitutionality, habeas corpus, and so on, have placed specific
checks and balances on the power of the executive. The question then, is what
gives the state of exception its permanence, and

what are the implications to the members of the political community in this normalized state of
exception? On the one hand, to follow Agambens lead, the state of exception arises at an intersection between the legal
and political; a civil war, an insurrection, an armed resistance (Agamben 2005: 1). Moreover, the state of exception is the result of a
political crisis, indicating that it should be understood in political terms and not on juridicalconstitutional grounds (Agamben 2005). For Agamben, what is particularly challenging about the state of exception
is the way in which it functions in a zone of undecidability, or what he and others have referred to as a
zone of indistinction (Agamben 1998; Edkins 2002). As the sovereign is both the law and outside the law, with
subsequent power to suspend the law, there is a sort of legal sanction to the state of exception, which is extra-juridical.
Therefore, as Agamben contends, the state of exception is awarded a certain legal status, such as the notion of the legal civil war he explores (Agamben 2005: 2
3). Furthermore, and perhaps most important to the transformation of the state of exception becoming the norm, is the way in which exceptional
powers, or permanent states of emergency, become important technologies of governmental control. Here, as Agamben
accurately notes, the state of emergency is not always openly declared in a technical sense, yet statutory
amendments and changes that occur in the background speak directly to the permanence of the state of
exception. 5 Moreover , the suspension of conventional legislative and judicial powers and the concentration
of power in the hands of the core executive constitute the state of exception. The ways in which this
creeps into hidden statutes that lie in wait, ready to spring forward when required, and the general way
in which this state of exception seems to have become an effective technology of rule for contemporary
governments emphasize the permanence of the state of exception. Much of this speaks directly to Michel Foucaults point
made in the collection of his lectures entitled Society Must be Defended, that modern politics is biopolitics, in so far as sovereign power is preoccupied to a much
greater extent with the management of life as a particularly important technology of power (Foucault 2003: 239 64). As Foucault notes: Biopolitics deals with
the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem, as powers problem
(Foucault 2003: 245). For Agamben, what is particularly important about Foucaults thesis is the way in which one understands the sense of this transformation
towards biopolitics and the management of life. Hence, Agambens dialogue about form-of-life and the power( s) that constitutes multiple forms of life as the
form -of-life . In other words, it seems impossible to isolate naked life from the form-of-life that is political life (Agamben 2000: 3 14): Inasmuch as its
inhabitants [of the camp] have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space
that has ever been realized a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation. (Agamben 2000: 41) In this zone of
indistinction that is the political space of the exception, homo sacer or sacred man becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. Hence, in the same way as the
zone of indistinction is exceptional extra-juridical the subjectivity of the inhabitants is also extra-juridical, as they are deprived of rights and prerogatives to the
point that committing any act towards them no longer appears as a crime (Agamben 2000). In our analysis, if Fallujah is indeed a space/ place of exception as in
broader terms we might argue that Iraq on the whole is subject to a state of exception, as is the domestic space of the US under conditions of the war on terror, or
more specifically the border spaces and virtual borders, which further emphasizes the mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy then
to what extent are the inhabitants homo sacer? In considering the specifics of the Fallujah case, while not all inhabitants are articulated as homo sacer, certainly
those perceived as most threatening by occupying forces are constructed as such. Furthermore, our analysis emphasizes the extent to which the application of
biometric technologies by US-led forces is at the very least a contributing factor to this (re) articulation of Iraqis or in this case Fallujahns as homo sacer, or indeed
might be a necessary although not sufficient condition for this particular (re) articulation. Before discussing the specific case of Fallujah, however, some brief words
on biometric technologies and the specifics of contemporary applications in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biometrics and the BAT Biometric technologies are discussed at
length throughout this text, but some review is worthwhile here. Simply, biometrics
involves the measurement of physiological

characteristics, generally in digital form. The breadth of allegedly measurable physical characteristics
appears limitless , at least according to the industry literature. The most popular biometric applications are face recognition vis--vis digitized facial
scanning, iris scans, retinal scans and digitized fingerprinting. These conventional biometric applications reinforce notions of
the body as a solid, stable entity of which definable and quantifiable parts can be subject to
measurement. However, so called esoteric biometrics take not only the unique aspects of the body but the actual physiology, which, for lack of a more
suitable phrase, measures the bodys output. Esoteric biometrics include: facial thermography (the pattern of facial heat caused by the distinctive blood flow
under the skin); DNA; body odor (measuring rolatiles, the chemical substances that cause odor); gait (measuring the distinctive manner of walking); and foot
dynamics (considers not only the size of the foot, but dynamics, such as pressure analysis relating to the shape of the foot, the foot geometric regarding timing of
steps, and dermatoglyphics, which uses the measurement of footprint ridges to measure friction) (Woodward et al. 2003: 115 36). The reason for offering some
examples of esoteric biometrics is not simply for its shock value, but to emphasize the vision and belief in the body as password that permeates the biometrics
industry and the literature. It also exposes the industry and its advocates long-term vision , indicating both a belief in the sustained need for biometric technologies,
and their suitably futuristic (re) solutions of/ for these needs. The possible applications for biometrics, it would seem, are only limited by ones imagination .
Biometric technologies have generally been employed in the private sector, such as in high security sites like financial institutions, secure nuclear or chemical
facilities, or for the security of particular products, such as the narcotics necessary for anesthesiologists. Biometric technologies are also not strangers to the
panoptic sphere of surveillance and are consistently used to track the comings and goings of employees in large institutions. Contemporary debates over the
applications of biometrics are subject to some very particular phenomena of both the contemporary information age and the post-9/ 11 security context. The
events of September 11, 2001 definitely had an impact on the biometrics industry, if only to open a
policy window for already supportive legislators. Doing much more than preaching to the converted, however, the advocates of
biometric technologies strategically presented them as the panacea to the security problems of the
post- 9/ 11 world. Caught in the paradox between securing borders and bodies and the imperatives of
the neoliberal global economy, states were attuned to the representation of the security problem that
the biometrics industry was so quick to articulate. Indeed, the Canada/ US Smart Border Declaration signed after the events of 9/ 11 is a
case in point. The application of RM is championed, an embrace of particular identification technologies is applauded, and the proliferation of programs and
approaches from trusted traveler programs, to no-fly lists and passenger prescreening lays the groundwork for the subsequent Western Hemisphere Travel
Initiative (WHTI) and the general proliferation of borders. The proposed applications of biometrics for the purpose of securing borders and bodies are generally for
biometric or biometric-ready passports, visas, permanent resident cards, and national identity cards. The general emphasis is for machine readable travel
documents (MRTD), allegedly contributing to increased efficiency and heightened security, thus satisfying the dual requirements of the imperative free movement
of the global economy and the post-9/ 11 supposed security imperatives. Throughout these debates , however, the (im) possibility of securing bodies and borders
generally appears to fall outside of the space of biometrics politics. As Simon A. Cole maintains, based on its assumptions about the security of the body itself, this
entire project may in fact be misguided: Indeed, the body itself may become a rather antiquated way of defining the individual. A wide variety of new technologies
sex reassignment, cyberspace, artificial intelligence, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation, and so on all point toward the demise of the nineteenth century
notion of the body as solid, stable entity and the advent of some new conception of bodies as mutable and flexible We may cease to think of ourselves, or to
identify ourselves, strictly as physically unique bodies and begin to think of ourselves as somewhat more ethereal entities for whom bodies and body parts are
merely resources. (Cole 2001: 310) While there are ways in which Coles contentions might challenge the introduction and claims of biometrics, the introduction of
biometrics might also be interpreted as a contributing factor to this rather fetishized account of the body. In other words, if the body becomes password, does it
cease to be the body? 6 On such questions and others, the literature, government commissioned reports, and public forums generally fall silent. Following on from
arguments made by Robert Putnam and others, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach assert that the separation between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly
untenable; domestic policies influence international affairs, and vice versa (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996: 261). To this end, biometric
strategies
towards the (re) articulation of the body as password and the general securitization/ criminalization of
what Agamben refers to as bare life, or even homo sacer itself , appear mutually reinforcing in the spaces of
both domestic and foreign policy. In the domestic space, the new normal biopolitical relationship
between the citizen and the state affords sovereign power the ability to appropriate and register the
biological life of bodies (Agamben 2004).
Urban zones of indistinction fostered by the blur between political and biological
identity manifests itself in a police state which disproportionality affects minorities
Jobe 14 (Kevin Scott, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University, Pre-emptive States of
Emergency: Martial Governmentality & the Crisis of Police, in Critical Legal Thinking, 12-11-14,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentalitycrisis-police/)
Commenting on the investigation into the police killing of Luis Rodriguez in Moore, OK in February 2014, an attorney for the Moore, OK police department declared,
In this country, it seems we are becoming anti-police and that the tide has turned in respecting law enforcement.1 In the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric
Garner grand jury verdicts, and the lack of any formal charges in the cases of Luis Rodriguez and so many other victims of color of police violence just this year, it is
easy to see why. In this article, I focus on the pre-emptive state of emergency declared by the Governor of Missouri in the Michael Brown case, and link this form of
martial governmentality to the apparent crisis of police in their inability to control or suppress the revolts stemming from the Ferguson protests which seek to shut
down the normal operations of law and order. The
militarization of American policing has received much needed scrutiny

in recent years by both academics and civil rights watch groups like the ACLU. In the wake of anti-police protests from Ferguson to New York and
around the globe, these analyses could not be more timely. However with the growing unrest leading up to the
Michael Brown grand jury verdict, the state of Missouri saw something perhaps even more startling than a militarized police force: a
pre-emptive state of emergency. As Janai Nelson from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund reminds us, governors have used their emergency police
powers preemptively in the past in anticipation of eminent natural disasters and, more recently, in the case of potential Ebola outbreaks. But the
preemptive state of emergency issued in Ferguson by Governor Nixon, for example, signals the
activation of a form of governmentality which grants carte blanche to determine what actions are
required throughout the state in the name of public safety despite the lack of any imminent threat.2
Nelson calls attention to the preemptive declaration of emergency issued during World War Two by FDR and allowed in the 1944 Koremastu v. United States case
which authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans. And while the case of Ferguson is of a different order of magnitude, it nonetheless follows the same logic.
As Nelson writes, (I)t seems premised on the fearful notion that black people gathering in Ferguson to protest perceived injustice is a state of emergency. But the
expectation of Americans coming together to express outrage does not justify intervention by the militia.3 The
expectation that public protest

in Ferguson might require the mobilization of state military forces is precisely what seems to underwrite
the justification of Nixons executive order. The rationale for the executive order is couched in the language of protecting peaceable assembly,
protest and the protection of public safety, civil rights and private business. However, the suspension of law to protect civil rights raises a disturbing prospect, one
that Stephen Graham highlights in his recent book Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism. As Graham shows, there
is an increasing
coincidence of the discourses of policing, domestic security and militarization in urban governance such
that policing the city comes to look more and more like the protection and organization of a military
camp. Echoing Agambens thesis on the camp as internal logic of the contemporary nomos, Graham writes, A priori incarcerations, bans, and a
creeping mass criminalization begin to puncture already precarious legal norms of due process, habeas
corpus, the right to protest, international humanitarian law and the human rights of citizenship. Increasingly, the always fragile notions of homogenous national
citizenship fray and disintegrate as different groups and ethnicities are pre-emptively profiled, screened, and treated differently. The rights of citizenship are
disaggregated or unbundled: Law is
deployed to suspend law, opening the door to more or less permanent states
of exception and emergency Systems of camps, militarized borders, and systems of illicit, invisible
movement now straddle nations and supranational blocs. The resulting transnational archipelagos of incarceration, torture and
death exhibit startling similarities to those that sustain global geographies of tourism, finance, production, logistics, military power and the lifestyles of elites. The
enemies within, the persons adjudged risky or worthless or out of placethe African-Americans of
New Orleans, the troublesome inhabitants of Pariss banlieues , the Roma encamped in the suburbs of
Naples or Rome, the favela dwellers on the edges of Rios tourist hot spots, the undocumented
immigrants, the beggars, the homeless, the street vendors everywherebecome increasingly
disposable, assaulted, forcibly excluded.4 Indeed, to the extent that (L)aw is deployed to suspend law, opening the door to more or less
permanent states of exception and emergency Systems of camps, [and] militarized borders, it is precisely the legal, civil and human rights that law is supposed
to protect that is suspended and replaced with the logic of camp. The suspension law in order to protect civil rights is thus the paradigm of the logic of the
exception, a disturbing situation where martial law becomes necessary for the protection of civil rights. In this way, justifying
a state of emergency
by claiming that such a state is the best means to protect civil rights therefore implies the very
possibility Graham raises: the permanent state of exception or state of emergency that claims it is necessary
to protect civil rights. In Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism, Graham documents the massive global
proliferation of deeply technophiliac state surveillance projects[which] signals the startling
militarization of civil societythe extension of military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into the quotidian spaces of everyday life.5
Situating the massive crossover of military discourses and technologies into the governance of urban
life, Graham argues that these military-style governmentalities represent dramatic attempts to
translate long-standing military dreams of high-tech omniscience and rationality into the governance of
urban civil society.6 For Graham, these movements to militarize urban policing and governance, most notably after
9/11, also signal the blurring of the lines between discourses of State homeland security and martial
practices. Indeed for Graham, what we are seeing is (T)he dovetailing of state domestic security and military
doctrines.7 Graham makes sense of the militarization of civil society through Foucaults thesis about the
boomerang effect of modern state governmentality, whereby colonial techniques of genocide,
discipline and social control are appropriated by the State and applied internally on their own
populations. This is a central thesis of the book. Thus for Graham, the militarization of civil society can be understood as the
internal application of colonial and post-colonial models of social control, developed also in the Global
South and in the War on Terror, internally upon the domestic population. Graham outlines five key features of the new
military urbanism. First, Graham notes the expansion of the traditional language of battlespace from the field to
the city, such that everyday urban places such as subways, supermarkets, tower blocks, industrial
districts, and public spaces become reimagined as the site of urban warfare. Indeed, (E)veryday spaces of
the city are becoming the main battlespace both at home and abroad.8 In this way, Graham states, Western
security and military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined in ways that dramatically blur the juridical and
operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military; distinctions between war and
peace; and those between local, national and global operations.9 According to Graham, the traditional understanding of legal
or human rights and legal systems based on ideas of universal citizenship is being replaced within these new battespaces with the profiling of individuals,
places, behaviors, associations, and groups.[and] assign these subjects risk categories based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or resistance
against the dominant geographical orders sustaining global, neoliberal capitalism8 This for Graham, the profiling of individuals with regard to their risk or
dangerousness is a feature of the new military urbanism. The second feature of the new military urbanism has to do with Foucaults Boomerang: where
explicitly
colonial models of pacification, militarization and control, honed on the streets of the global
South, are spread to the cities of capitalist heartlands in the North.11 Internal colonization as mode of social control. For
Graham, the new technologies of militarization that are being deployed by local and state government
increasingly view urban areas as if they were a sort of post-colonial military camp which needs to be
protected and walled in from outside invading forces. Indeed, for Graham, such technologies, force people to prove their legitimacy if
they want to move freely. Urban theorists and philosophers now wonder whether the city as a key space for dissent and collective mobilization within civil society is
being replacedby camps which are linked together and withdrawn from the urban outside beyond the walls or access-control systems.12
According to both Agamben and Foucault, biology as a subject is totalitarian it

reduces people to their animal identity, otherwise known as bare life. Biology also
introduces the definition of normal and abnormal, making oppression and other forms
of violence possible. This is paradoxical, since the people of the US are part of the
bios, or population which has political power, but are being reduced to zoe, or bare
life, by their own government. This, along with hurting the people of the US, affects
the US itself, as the US is made of a lot of people who use their constituent power to
make up the government, and if these people get reduced to bare life, then the US
itself will be reduced to bare life as well.
The role of the ballot is this debate is to vote for the team who provides the best
methodology through which we can interact with the law.
WE ADVOCATE THAT THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES SHOULD ADOPT THE VIEW
OF PLAYING WITH THE LAW THIS CREATES A SYSTEM OF POLITICS WHICH REVOLVES
AROUND THE CONCEPT OF A DESTITUENT POWER, WHICH CREATES INOPERATIVITY
THIS SOLVES
Rather than reading the resolution as a question of policy, we approach it from the
political --- only our affirmation of studious play can reclaim politics from the state of
exception
Morgan 7 (Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley, Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of
Pure Means, Journal Of Law And Society, volume 34, Number 1, March,
www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_Pure_Means
Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception paints an ominous picture.
Agamben asks whether law can regulate its own

suspension not because this is an interesting, if abstract, legal problem, but because the state of
exception has become a worldwide `paradigm of government'. According to Agamben, a global state of
exception is the only way to explain our current state of affairs, in which: law can ... be obliterated and
contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that, while ignoring international law externally
and producing a permanent state of exception internally, nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.
The state of exception enables this contradiction since it is neither inside nor outside law. On the one hand, it is not a `special kind of law' since
it is `a suspension of the juridical order itself'; on the other, it is not merely the absence of law, since law contains provisions for its suspension.
This topographical paradox means that law functions unusually within the state of exception. The state
of exception doesn't create chaos or anarchy; it sepa-rates the law's force from its application. Law's purely
formal applicability comes loose from its direct impact on life. As a result, acts that are not authorized by any law can
employ the force of legal action: in extreme situations `force of law' floats as an indeterminate element
that can be claimed by both the state authority ... and by a revolutionary organization. Agamben argues that
this ultimately makes law and life indistinguishable: every action is potentially a legal action. Unfortunately,
however, we can't simply return to a situation prior to the state of exception: from the real state of
exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law, for at issue now are the very
concepts of `state' and `law'. If we take Agamben's claims about the reach of the state of exception seriously, we are left to
grapple with the odd solution that Agamben suggests. This solution is what I would like to interrogate here. Agamben argues
that to get beyond the state of exception we must do something more radical than modify the law,
since the exception has revealed that the normal functioning of law depends on violent force. As a
consequence, we must pursue `the only truly political action ... which severs the nexus between violence
and law'. But it is difficult to imagine how we might actually take this `truly political' action, which Agamben calls `play': One
day, humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them
from it for good... . [T]his studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at ... justice. `Play' is a surprising answer
to the problems that Agamben has dramatically sketched: it seems simultaneously too abstract and not serious enough. But can we take play
seriously?
Play might be able to counteract the law's violent application to life because of its lack of
seriousness: play suspends both instrumentality and normativity. In this sense, play deinstrumentalizes
what Agamben frequently calls the `machine' or `apparatus' of the state of exception.
Traditional political dissent merely strengthens the security state --- we must instead
expose and depose of the security technologies the government employs
Rediscovering a Form-of-Life But I
would like to conclude or better to simply stop my lecture (in philosophy, like in art, no conclusion is possible, you
can only abandon your work) with something which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most urgent political problem.
If the state we have in front of us is the security state I described, we have to think anew the traditional
strategies of political conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow? The security paradigm
implies that each form of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the order, becomes an
opportunity to govern these actions into a profitable direction. This is evident in the dialectics that
tightly bind together terrorism and state in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French Revolution, the political tradition of
modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir constituant, the constituent power, of a new
institutional order. I think that we
have to abandon this paradigm and try to think something as a puissance destituante, a
purely destituent power, that cannot be captured in the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this
sort that Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the Critique of Violence, when he tries to define a pure
violence which could break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence, an
example of which is Sorels proletarian general strike. On the breaking of this cycle, he writes at the end of the essay maintained by
mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is
founded. While
a constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power
insofar as it deposes once for all the law can open a really new historical epoch. To think such a purely destituent
power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. In the same sense, Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four
Sal masters saying to their slaves: true anarchy is the anarchy of power. It is precisely because
power constitutes itself through the

inclusion and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to
these dimensions; it is so hard to think today of something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a
praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the
governmental security technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension becomes
possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of
all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life whose memory the
security state tries at any price to cancel.
As referred to in the card above, a destituent power, which we believe holds the
solution to our problems, is a power which is able to render the law inoperable. This is
in contrast to a constituent power, which believes that the law can be reformed to fit
any situation.
Studying the law absent a transcedent objective an objective which is above the
human capability renders it inoperative and breaks its link with power and violence
Snoek 12 (Anke Ph.D. in Philosophy from Macquarie University, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding
Freedom Beyond Subordination, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 48-52)
According to Agamben, study
is an important strategy for living outside the law and making it inoperative. In what sense
can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of resistance. In 586 BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar
and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer
had a temple and were forbidden to practise their faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated Babylonia
and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries, 40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple.
But the religion of the Jews was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and
study has since then become the true temple of the Jews. The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic
significance (IP, 63). Talmud means study; the original meaning of Torah is not law but instruction Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root that
has repetition as its basic meaning. The
study Agamben is aiming at does not have a predetermined goal: getting a

degree and a good position in society, or getting some valuable insight that can be used to overthrow a
political structure. Just as the strategy to close the door of the law was especially hard because the law
does not prescribe anything and the task of the Messiah is paradoxical because there is no original
structure of the law to restore, so study also lacks a transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as
etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related to a root that indicates a coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are closely related in that
sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the
other, undertaken. Here
Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotles description of potentiality, which is passive on
the one hand an undergoing and active on the other an unstoppable drive to undertake something, to do something,
to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation
between amazement and clarity, discovery and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of undergoing and undertaking yields a kind of passive
activity, a radical passivity. Something happens without seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study is
pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the scholar a
woeful air. At first glance, the students in Kafkas works seem to be of little use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play:
Among Kafkas creations, there is a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafkas works
are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3 Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary embodiment of study in our
culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the
apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of study that plays such an important role in the strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafkas
useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees
a strange young man: He watched silently as the man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another book that he always picked
up at lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, his face always bent surprisingly low over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ...
Youre studying? asked Karl. Yes, yes, said the man, using the few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books.3 (...) And when wifi you be finished with
your studies? asked Karl. Its slow going, said the student. ... [Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of
pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. 32 Karl explains his problems with Delamarche to the student.
The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and even advises him to remain with Delamarche absolutely33 Karl
wonders where studying had got him [or her] he [or she] had forgotten everything again.34 The most extreme example of a student, in Agambens view, is
Melvills Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing. According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped
writing or that they have lost the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the Schrift or the Torah, but
they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamins genius is apparent, according to Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost
the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does
not attach any promises to study that are traditionally attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned around
here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede but follows its action, which it has left behind forever, of a Talmud
that has not only announced the reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. At this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns
to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation who have lost their
house of prayer. His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their [u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The study of
the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example of the student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus, who happens to become a
lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the
warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. ... I recently saw a quite simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at the lawyer as the
latter, lifting his thighs high, mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ... Nowadays,
as no one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that Macedonia is too narrow ... but no one, no
one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days Indias gates were beyond reach, but their direction was indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows
the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus
has done, to immerse oneself in law books. Free, his flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexanders baffle, he
reads and turns the pages of our old books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes that
law is set over against myth in

the name of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical (pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39
Benjamin sees this as a serious misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and
human beings, like the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to Benjamin,
what is new about this new lawyer what is new for the legal profession, is that he does not practice law
but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander the Greats thighs
and he is no longer carrying the latter on his back. The door to justice is not to employ law but to make it inoperative
not by practicing law (which would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that law is in force
without significance), but by doing nothing more than studying it. The law which is studied but no longer
practiced is the gate to justice. Bucephalus strategy against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is
decisive that the law that is not practiced but only studied does not itself become justice but only the
door to it. The study of the law has no higher purpose that is why the law has become inoperative.4
That which opens the passage to justice is not the abolishment of the law but its deactivation and
inactivity that is, another use of the law (SE, 63). This is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all
relation to sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is possible after its link with violence and
power has been deposed, a law that is no longer in force and applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of
doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it possible to remain living outside the law. Agamben
then outlines the following picture of the future: One day humanity will play with law just as children
play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it
for good. (SE, 64)
Power separates us from our impotentiality our capacity to not do or be causing us

to lose our capacity to resist --- only impotentiality solves
Snoek 12 (Anke Ph.D. in Philosophy from Macquarie University, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding
Freedom Beyond Subordination, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 82-85)
Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities ( the
laws being in force without significance, the subtle reverse

found in Kafka work of this situation, Agambens praises of creatures without work), the questions arise what ought we to do now?
What form of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major
criticisms on Agambens work that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to forumulate any explicit
answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agambens close friends, points out that
Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his
philosophy.2 Agambens work is often described as a radical passivity.3 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agambens
passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This passivity also shows
evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to
Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant La Lettre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the
tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him a work
of his own. If the human being has no identity of his own and no activity of his own, then this also has consequences
for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as
goal-oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in
line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafkas open singing executioners or questioners Deleuze
once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But Agamben states, There is, nevertheless, another and
more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do their
potentiality but rather their impotentiality that is, what they cannot do, or better, cannot do (N, 43).
Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his
impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible
motto of the contemporary individual, No problem, I can do it comes precisely at the moment when he [one] should instead realize that he [one] has been
consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [one] has lost all control (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and
callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability Agamben sees an example of this in Kafkas The Trial. In
the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph Ks door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K does not recognize them as
such and thinks that they are [o]ld second-rate actors or opera singers?5 Agamben argues that, in Kafkas world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to
impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead
of making use of our possibility of not being we fail it, we flee from our lack of
power, our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some power of being (CC, 32). But this power we
try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In
Kafkas world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free
than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist they can still not do.
Those who are
separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist (N, 45) And it is evident,
according to Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from
his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What
should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the Tiqqun
collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 2008 their compound was raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were
quite vague belonging to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with Ibreign groups; participating regularly in
political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a
tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the Tiqqun collective. This collective
embodies Foucaults idea of the non-subject. One of the latters greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over
another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was the idea of non-authorship. The
subject itself its

identity is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed subjectivization
techniques. In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject
responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of
its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we
continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot
liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben, not one of looking for
a subject that can assume the role of savior or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force
fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become
diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very
clear picture of Agambens position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely
with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agambens constant reply was that anyone who
poses this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is
there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has
nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists present at Agambens lecture at
Tiqqun. Although
the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Ttqqun collective, the activists
present at Agambens lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the
power of the Tiqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actiona but
sought unexpected possibilities in being thus: In that same sense, Agambens analysis of Kafkas work should
not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in which the
power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities
and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end.
As Kiahik pointed out, Agambens work is an attempt to make means meet (not with their ends, but with each other)?
One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafkas work, the shame of Joseph K. and the as
not in Kafkas On Parables show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.
Our playful study of the law deactivates its instrumentality, opening it up to a new
potential
Mills 8 (Catherine Associate Professor at the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University,
Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice, in South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
107, Number 1, p. 22-24, http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/107/1/15.short)
To return to my starting point, more
can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that
is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the
toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the "temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value. That is, in making present "human
temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the once and the no longer (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous
and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104-5). In relation
to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politico- economic
and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its
being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the "once . . . no longer, rather than within the synchrony of
miniaturiza-tion. This is significant because it
highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and
present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking
the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that
which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the
revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben
insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other,
thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, "at the end of the game, the toythe privileged signifier of absolute
diachrony"turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate (IH, 79). This implies that playing
with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued
from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized
by the simple lack of practico- economic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form
of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of
law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase "at the end of
the game used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end
would in fact push Agambens conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The Time That
Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is
intimately related in the paragraph in question, play
is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose,

Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.17 In fact, it is presumably the endlessness of play that allows
for the noninstrumental appropriation of law and ultimately its deactivation in play; that is, the free use
of law within play exceeds the constraints of instrumentality and gives onto a justice that Agamben
identifies as akin to a condition in which the world can no longer be appropriated by law. In this way, the
noninstrumentality and interminability of play ensure a passage to a justice that is irreducible to law. As
Agamben writes, The
lawno longer practiced but studiedis not justice, but only the gate that leads to it.
What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivitythat
is, another use of law (SE, 64). One of the questions that this raises is to what extent a deposed or deactivated law remains a law. In what sense is a
deposed law still a law? Agamben suggests that it is this question of the status and meaning of law after its messianic fulfillment that motivates Benjamins
reflections on Kafka, in which law no longer has force or application (SE, 63). However, this raises more questions than it answers, and in particular, it leaves open
what a postjuridical justice arrived at through studious play might look like. We can be sure that what Agamben means by justice does not coincide with more
standard jurisprudential conceptions as the proper application of law. Despite his concern with questions of law, though, the concept of justice has played a small
part in Agambens work to date (at least if considered at an explicit textual level), and there is little overt indication of what it would amount to beyond this
discussion in State of Exception. One point at which a (slightly) more extended consideration of justice does appear is in an early fragment in which Agamben
defines justice as the handing on of the Forgotten and the transmission of oblivion (IP, 79). At first glance, this does little to clarify the concept of justice that he
employs, but it does point toward a path of elucidation.
A politics of inoperativity where the law does not work, but can be studied neither
affirms nor negates law but simply renders it open to a new use
*anthropogenesis = the process of becoming human
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, What is a destituent power?, in
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 32, p. 65-74, 2014,
http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d32/d3201tra.pdf [modified for gendered language])
6. On the concept of inoperativity. Inoperativity does not mean inertia, but names
an operation that deactivates and renders
works (of economy, of religion, of language, etc) inoperative. It is a question, that is, of going back to the problem that Aristotle fleetingly posed in the
Nicomachean Ethics (1097b, 22 sqq), when, in the context of the definition of the object of episteme politike, of political science, he wondered if, as for the flute
player, the sculptor, the carpenter, and every artisan there exists a proper work (ergon), there is also for man as such something like an ergon or if he is not instead
argos, without work, inoperative. Ergon of man means in this context not simply work, but that which defines energeia, the activity, the being-in-act proper to
man. The
question concerning the work or absence of work of man therefore has a decisive strategic
importance, for on it depends not only the possibility of assigning him [one] a proper nature and
essence, but also, as we have seen, that of defining his [ones] happiness and his politics. The problem has a wider
meaning, therefore, and involves the very possibility of identifying energeia, the being-in-act of man as man, independently and beyond the concrete social
figures that he can assume. Aristotle quickly abandons the idea of an argia, of an essential inoperativity of man. I have sought on the contrary, reprising an ancient
tradition that appears in Averroes and in Dante, to think
man [one] as the living being without work, which is to say, devoid of
any specific vocation: as a being of pure potentiality (potenza), that no identity and no work could exhaust.
This essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation of all activity, but as an
activity that consists in making human works and productions inoperative, opening them to a new
possible use. It is necessary to call into question the primacy that the leftist tradition has attributed to
production and labor and to ask whether an attempt to define the truly human activity does not entail
first of all a critique of these notions. The modern epoch, starting from Christianitywhose creator God defined himself from the origin in opposition to the deus
otiosus of the pagansis constitutively unable to think inoperativity except in the negative form of the suspension of labor. Thus one of the ways in which inoperativity has been thought is the
feast [la festa], which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially as a temporary suspension of productive activity, of melacha. But the feast is defined not only by
what in it is not done, but primarily by the fact that what is donewhich in itself is not unlike what one does every daybecomes undone, is rendered inoperative, liberated and suspended
from its economy, from the reasons and purposes that define it during the weekdays (and not doing, in this sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension)/ If one eats, it is not done for
the sake of being fed; if one gets dressed, it is not done for the sake of being covered up or taking shelter from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not done for the sake of working; if one walks, it is
not done for the sake of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not done for the sake of communicating information; if one exchanges objects, it is not done for the sake of selling or buying.
There is no feast that does not involve, in some measure, a destitutive element, that does not begin, that is, first and foremost by rendering inoperative the works of men. In the Sicilian feast
of the dead described by Pitre, the dead (or an old woman named Strina, from strena, the Latin name for the gifts exchanged during the festivities at the beginning of the year) steal goods
from tailors, merchants, and bakers to then bestow them on children (something similar to this happens in every feast that involves gifts, like Halloween, in which the dead are impersonated
by children). In every carnival feast, such as the Roman saturnalia, existing social relations are suspended or inverted: not only do slaves command their masters, but sovereignty is placed in
the hands of a mock king (saturnalicius princeps) who takes the place of the legitimate king. In this way the feast reveals itself to be above all a deactivation of existing values and powers.
There are no ancient feasts without dance, writes Lucian, but what is dance other than the liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure
inoperativity? And what are maskswhich play a role in various ways in the feasts of many peoplesif not, essentially, a neutralization of the face? Only if it is considered in this perspective
can the feast furnish a paradigm for thinking inoperativity as a model of politics. An example will allow us to clarify how one must understand this inoperative operation. What is a poem, in
fact, if not an operation taking place in language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its communicative and informative function, in order to open it to a new possible use?
What the poem accomplishes for the potentiality of speaking, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting. Rendering inoperative the biological, economic, and social
operations, they show what the human body can do, opening it to a new possible use. 7. If
the fundamental ontological question today is not
work but inoperativity, and if this inoperativity can, however, be deployed only through a work, then the
corresponding political concept can no longer be that of constituent power [potere constituente], but
something that could be called destituent power [potenza destituente]. And if revolutions and insurrections
correspond to constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order
to think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task
of the coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form,
in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which
makes the law and violence that preserves it. It is a matter of a concept that is only just beginning to appear in contemporary political
reflection. Along these lines, Tronti alludes in an interview to the idea of a potere destituente without managing in any way to define it. Coming from a tradition in
which the identification of a subjectivity was the fundamental political element, he seems to link it to the twilight of political subjectivities. For us, who begin from
that twilight, and from the putting into question of the very concept of subjectivity, the problem presents itself in different terms. It
is a destitution of this
imagined in the essay Critique of Violence, trying to define a form of violence that
escaped this dialectic: on the breaking of this cycle that plays out in the sphere of the mythical form of
law, on the destitution (Entsetzung) of law with all the powers on which it depends (as they depend on it), ultimately therefore on the
destitution of state violence, a new historical epoch founds itself (Benjamin, 1977, page 202). Now what does to destitute law
mean? And what is a destituent violence that is not only constitutive? Only a power that is made inoperative and deposed is
completely neutralized. Benjamin located this destituent power in the proletarian general strike, which Sorel opposed to the simply political strike.
type that Benjamin
While the suspension of work in the political strike is violent, because it causes (veranlasst, occasions, induces) only an extraneous modification of working
conditions, the other, as pure means, is without violence (Benjamin, 1977, page 194). Indeed, this does not entail the resumption of work following external
concessions and some modifications to working conditions, but the decision to resume only a work completely transformed and nonimposed by the state; that is,
an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes (veranlasst) as realizes (vollzieht) (page 194). The difference between veranlassen, to induce, to provoke,
and vollziehn, to accomplish, to realize, expresses the
opposition between constituent power, which destroys and always

recreates new forms of law, without ever completely destituting it, and destituent power, which, in
deposing law once and for all, immediately inaugurates a new reality. It follows that the first of these operations is
lawmaking but the second anarchic (page 194). An example of a destituent strategy that is neither destructive nor constituent is that of Paul faced with the question of law. Paul
expresses the relationship between the messiah and the law with the verb katargein, which means to render inoperative (argos), to deactivate (Estiennes Thesaurus suggests, redo aergon et
inefficacem, facio cessare ab opere suo, tollo, aboleo). Thus Paul can write that the messiah will render inoperative (katargese) all rule (potere), all authority, and all power (potenza) (1
Corinthians 15:24) and, at the same time, that the messiah is the telos that is the end and fulfillment of the law (Romans 10:4): inoperativity and fulfillment coincide here perfectly. In
another passage, he says of the believers that they have been rendered inoperative (katargethemen) with respect to the law (Romans 7:5-6). The customary translations of this verb with to
destroy, to abolish are not correct (the Vulgate expresses it more cautiously with evacuari), all the more so because Paul in a famous passage declares to want to hold firm the law (nomon
istanomenRomans 3:31). Luther, with an intuition whose importance must not have escaped Hegel, translates katargein with aufheben; that is, with a verb that means as much to abolish
as to conserve. In any case, it is certain that for Paul it is not a question of destroying the law, which is holy and just, but of deactivating its action with regard to sin, because it is through
the law that the people know sin and desire: I would not have known desire, if the law had not said: do not desire: taking impulse from the commandment, sin has made operative
(kateirgasato, has activated) in me every desire (Romans 7:8). It is this operativity of the law that the messianic faith neutralizes and renders inoperative, without thereby abolishing the law.
The law held firm is a law deprived of its power of commandthat is, it is a law no longer of the commandments and of work (nomos ton entolonEphesians 2:15; ton ergonRomans
3:27), but of faith (nomos pisteosRomans 3:27). And in its essence, faith is not a work, but an experience of the word (faith from the hearing and hearing through the wordRomans
10:17). On the other hand, Paul, in a decisive passage of 1 Corinthians 7, defines the Christian form of life through the formula hos me (as not): But this I say, brethren, time contracted itself,
the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the
world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. The as not is a destitution without refusal. To live in the form of the as-not means to deactivate every juridical and social
property, without establishing a new identity. A form-of- life is, in this sense, that which unrelentingly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself living, without negating them, but
simply using them. If, writes Paul, in the moment of the call you found yourself in the condition of the slave, do not worry: but if you would also be made free, use (chresai) your condition of
the slave (1 Corinthians 7:21). Use names here the deposing potentiality in the Christian form of life, which destitutes the figure of this world (to schema tou kosmou toutou). It is this
destituent potentiality that both the anarchist tradition and 20th-century thought sought to define without ever actually succeeding. The destruction of tradition by Heidegger, the
deconstruction of the arche, and the fracturing of the hegemonies by Schurmann, and what, on the trail of Foucault, I have called philosophical archaeologythey are all pertinent, but
insufficient, attempts to return to an historical a priori in order to destitute it. But also a good part of the practice of the artistic avant-garde and of the political movements of our time can be
seen as the attemptso often miserably failedto carry out a destitution of work that has ended instead with the recreation of powers even more oppressive inasmuch as they had been
deprived of any legitimacy. The destitution of power and of its works is an arduous task, because it is first of all and only in a form-of-life that it can be carried out. Only a form-of-life is
constitutively destituent. The Latin grammarians called deponents (depositiva, or, also, absolutive or supine) those verbs that, similar in this regard to the middle voice verbs, cannot properly
be called active or passive: sedeo, sudo, dormio, iaceo, algeo, sitio, esurio, gaudeo. What do the middle or deponent verbs depose? They do not express an operation, rather they depose it,
neutralize and render it inoperative, and, in this way, expose it. The subject is not merely, in the words of Benveniste, internal to the process, but, having deposed its action, it is exposed and
Benjamin
once wrote that there is nothing more anarchic than the bourgeois order. In the same sense, Pasolini makes one of the
gerarchi in Salo say that the true anarchy is that of power. If this is true, one understands then why the thought that tries to
think anarchy remains trapped in aporia and contradictions without end. Since power (arche) constitutes
itself through the inclusive exclusion (the ex-ceptio) of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy
coincides with the exhibition of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is that which becomes possible
only in the moment that we grasp and destitute the anarchy of power. The same goes for every attempt to think anomy: it
put in question together with it. In this sense, these verbs can offer the paradigm to think in a new way not only action and praxis, but also the theory of the subject. 8.
becomes accessible only through the exhibition and the deposition of the anomy that law has captured within itself in the state of exception. This is true as well for
the thought that seeks to conceive the a-demy, the absence of a demos or people that defines democracy (here I use the term ademy because a people that must
be represented is by definition absent). Only the exhibition of the ademy internal to democracy allows us to depose the fiction of a people that it pretends to
represent. In all of these cases, constitution coincides without remainder with destitution; positing has no other consistency than in deposing. Defining the dispositif
of the exception as a structure of the arche yields an important consequence. Since
power functions through the inclusive exclusion

of anarchy, of anomie, of inoperativity, etc, it is not possible to access these dimensions directly: it is necessary first
to exhibit the form in which they are captured in power. Something is excepted in the state and, in this way,
politicized: but, for that to happen, it is necessary that it be reduced to the state of nudity (bare life, anarchy as
war of all against all, anomy as being-in-force [vigenza] without application, ademy as formless multitude). We know of life only bare life (seeing
that the medicalization of life is an integral part of the political dispositif), of anarchy we understand only the war of all against all,
of anomy we see only chaos and the state of exception, etc. Hence the importance of research such as that of Illich, of Clastres, and of Sigrist,
showing that there are vernacular figures of anomic communities that have a completely different character. When one wants to recover life, anarchy, anomy, and ademy in their truth, it is
necessary therefore first to release oneself from the form that they have received in the exception. This is not, however, only a theoretical task: it can occur only through a form-of- life. By the
term form-of-life, we mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something like a bare life. A life that cannot be separated from its form
is a life for which, in its way of living, what is at stake is living itself, and, in its living, what is at stake above all else is its mode of living. What is at stake, then, is a life in which the single ways,
acts, and processes of living are never simply facts, but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potentiality [potenza]. Tiqqun has developed this definition in three
theses, stating that, (1) The human unity is not the body or the individual, but the form-of-life, that (2) each body is affected by its form- of-life as by a clinamen, an attraction, a taste, and that
it is necessary to replace the ontology of substance with an

ontology of how, an ontology of modality. The decisive problem is no longer what I am, but how I am
what I am. It is necessary, in this sense, to radicalize the Spinozan thesis according to which there is only being
(substance) and its modes or modifications. Substance is not something that precedes the modes and exists
independently from them. Being is not other than its modes, substance is only its modifications, its own
how (its own quomodo). Modal ontology makes it possible to go beyond the ontological difference that has
dominated the Western conception of being. Between being and modes the relation is neither of
identity nor of difference because the mode is at once identical and differentor, rather, it implies the coincidence
(3) my form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I amP] Here
that is, the falling together [cadere insieme]of the two terms. In this sense, the problem of the pantheist risk is badly put: the Spinozist syntagma Deus sive (or)
natura does not mean God = nature: the sive (whether sive derives from the conditional and concessive si or the anaphoric sic) expresses the modalization, that is,
the neutralizing and the failure as much of identity as of difference. What is divine is not being in itself, but its own sive, its own always already modifying and
naturingbeing bornin the modes. Modal
ontology means rethinking from the start the problem of the relation
between potentiality and act. The modification of being is not an operation in which something passes
from potentiality to act, and realizes and exhausts itself in this. What deactivates operativity in a formof-life is an experience of potentiality or habit, it is the habitual use of a potentiality that manifests
itself as power of not [Aristotle calls it adynamia, impotentiality, formulating the axiom according to which all potentiality is, on the basis of the same
and with respect to the same, impotentiality (Met.1046, pages 30-31)]. The destitution of the being-in-work of the work (of its energeia) cannot be carried out by
another work, but only by a potentiality that remains as such and shows itself as such. Aristotle (De Anima 429b, pages 9-10) wrote that thought, when it thinks in
act each of the intelligibles, remains in some way in potentiality and is thus able to think itself. It
is only this irreducible remainder of

potentiality that makes the destitution of work possible. To destitute work means in this sense to return
it to the potentiality from which it originates, to exhibit in it the impotentiality that reigns and endures
there. All living beings are in a form of life, but not all are (or are not always) a form-of-life. In the moment that the form-of-life constitutes itself, it deactivates
and renders inoperative not only all the individual forms of life, but first of all the dispositif that separates bare life from life. It is only in living a life that a form-oflife can constitute itself as the inoperativity immanent in every life. The constitution of a form-of-life coincides, that is, completely with the destitution of the social
and biological conditions into which it finds itself thrown. The form-of-life is, in this sense, the revocation of all factical vocations, which deposes and puts in tension
from within the same gesture by which it is maintained and dwells in them. It
is not a question of thinking a better or more

authentic form of life, a superior principle or an elsewhere, which arrives from outside the forms of life
and the factical vocations to revoke and render them inoperative. Inoperativity is not another work that
appears to works from out of nowhere to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and
constitutively with their destitution, with living a life. And this destitution is the coming politics. One
understands, then, the essential function that the tradition of Western philosophy has assigned to the
contemplative life (to theoria) and to inoperativity: praxis, the properly human life is that which, rendering
inoperative the specific works and functions of the living, makes them, so to speak, spin idle [girare a vuoto],
and, in this way, opens them to possibility. Contemplation and inoperativity are, in this sense, the metaphysical
operators of anthropogenesis, which, freeing the living being from every biological or social destiny and
from every predetermined task, renders it open for that particular absence of work that we are
accustomed to calling politics and art. Politics and art are neither tasks nor simply works: they name, rather, the dimension in which the
linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as such.
As we have shown with the cards that we have just read, a studious play of the law
will expose that the government is constantly operating under the state of exception,
and that its subjects under it are being reduced to bare life. Traditional political
dissent by the people with their constituent power seeking to reform the law will
never work, since society, according to Agamben, will always have at least a sect of
people who are being reduced to bare life. (This is because society needs an overflow
valve to allow for the systems mobility.) Rather, if the citizens of the US use their
power as a destituent power, they may be able to break the current law system
entirely. This will create what Agamben calls the real state of exception, in contrast to
the fake one that we are currently in. The fake one that we are currently living under
has no (im)potentiality, since the people of the US have no option but to accept the
state of exception that the sovereign is using. The real state of exception, however,
would have no laws this would create the potentiality to solve for the violence that
we are living in (it could be done, but would not have to). In the same way, the state
of exception is potential in its every dimension. This inoperativity and even larger
state of exception (which is a system used to render people who are part of the other
to be expelled and be placed outside of the law the real state of exception is the
ultimate state of exception because the law would not be there everybody would be
outside of the law) would create a politics of inoperativity which solves.

1 ACAgamben Short

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1 ACAgamben Short

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American politics is dominated by an axiom of security which combines

concept which seems, starting

the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which

paradigm of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I

was the problem of famines. Before

theorem makes also understandable a fact which seems

Biometric surveillance of American citizens poses a grave threat to democracy and

It is easy to imagine the

transformation is so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the

political scientists who have tried to analyze the

debates focused on the situation of

Biometrics biologizes life, entrenching violent biopolitics

measures such as biometrics are not only

must determine the

use of biometrics for the management of the population is constitutive of

gives the state of exception its permanence, and

involves the measurement of physiological

militarization of American policing has received much needed scrutiny

expectation that public protest

According to both Agamben and Foucault, biology as a subject is totalitarian it

Agamben asks whether law can regulate its own

power constitutes itself through the

study Agamben is aiming at does not have a predetermined goal: getting a

law is set over against myth in

Power separates us from our impotentiality our capacity to not do or be causing us

laws being in force without significance, the subtle reverse

Those who are

subject itself its

is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose,

Agamben writes, The

an operation that deactivates and renders

the fundamental ontological question today is not

opposition between constituent power, which destroys and always

power functions through the inclusive exclusion

it is necessary to replace the ontology of substance with an

is only this irreducible remainder of

is not a question of thinking a better or more

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