Re: [-empyre-] What is Bare Life?
dear Aliette and Marc and all,
I have begun to realize that perhaps it is assumed that I
unsubscribed GH from the list.
If so, please rest assured that's certainly not the case.
I would greatly appreciate it if we could return to the topic, "What
is Bare Life?"
Susana writes about her experience of veiling herself and being
surveilled. In a way she was 'made into' a non person, or at least
an expelled person because 'she was showing off too much."
A completely different experience was art_room, where I used a
webchat called webcamnow. My performance was developed in the
context of Identidades Virtuais workshop, and I had set a schedule
during the month of June. When I began the performance, on the
first day, I went to room 1 to announce what I was doing by simply
posting the sentence: "Don't be afraid to ask everything you always
wanted to know about contemporary art". I moved to a free room
(from 30 rooms, only three rooms had people in them), and I began
to have conversations with some of the people. I soon realize that
some of the users felt like they "own" the website (no matter what
room I moved into), and they began to become very aggressive
towards me. If you see the still image of me during the
performance, you will only see my eyes. I was hiding behind my
powerbook, because some of the users kept saying that I was showing
off too much (even if I was decently dressed). In order to avoid
some visual disturbance, I ended up "veiled" by my computer...
The result was totally the reverse from the other experiences...The
experience of a certain degree of intimacy, soon lead to fear acted
as aggressivity and exclusion. In the second day I was expelled
from the "family and friends" area: my camera was shut down, and I
was disconnected as a user by the moderator (just because he felt
like it...he confessed it, when I later protested signed as a new
user).
At first I was really furious and sent a complaint letter (that was
never answered), but soon I realize that this experiment was very
fascinating and revealing of how a human community can function -
in a social and political sense - no matter what kind of media you
are using or what kind of space you are at.
related: http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/001121.html
Silencing of people who represent as 'women' is rampant.
susanna was expelled from the 'family and friends' area ; her camera
was shut down.
The implication of 'bare life' is that anyone can be shut down. To
paraphrase Diane Enns, anyone 's life can be judged unworthy of
being lived. One's death has no sacrificial value.
The 'woman' or 'girl' of fourteen was ok to be raped and killed
because she is a non entity. She is the life judged unworthy to be
lived. Judged capriciously to be unworthy, by whatever whim
possesses the one who has power of death over her. Her
countervailing presence in death "exhibits a strange power' according
to Enns, who continues,
Agamben's conceptualization of bare life (la nuda vita) derives
from the Greeks' use of two terms to signify what we usually mean
by life: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to
all living beings, and bios, which indicated the form or way of
living proper to an individual or a group. Bare life recalls
Aristotle’s distinction between mere life and the good life;
between private life and the public life of the polis where justice
arises from the human community’s capacity to reflect on what is
best and necessary for the common good. In the interests of
exploring limit concepts, Agamben describes bare life as the life
of homo sacer, the obscure and paradoxical figure in ancient Roman
law whose life was included in the political order only by way of
its exclusion; a life judged unworthy of being lived; a life that
could be killed with impunity and whose death therefore had no
sacrificial value.[i] This figure, manifest in a continuum of
examples from the landless refugee to the Muselmann of Auschwitz,
has an essential function in modern politics as democracy's
strength yet inner contradiction, Agamben seeks to demonstrate.[ii]
It is “a two-faced being” or corpus, “the bearer both of subjection
to sovereign power and of individual liberties."[iii] Unless we
analyse this “interlacing” of politics and life - become so tight
it is difficult to unravel - we will not succeed in illuminating
the opacity at the center of the political nature of bare life; an
essential task for Agamben, if we are to understand the coming
politics.[iv]
The facticity of birth, for example, becomes what is at stake in
the question of rights for the refugee. Agamben refers us to Hannah
Arendt, who points out that in the system of the nation-state the
so-called sacred rights of man disappear the moment they no longer
take the form of citizen's rights. It is the pure fact of birth, or
bare life, that in this case appears to be the source and bearer of
rights, Agamben concludes. Birth, or the principle of nativity, is
responsible for man's passage from subject to citizen: birth
becomes nation.[v]
The refugee therefore provides a limit concept,
according to Agamben, demonstrating the inclusion of bare life into
politics, as does the euthanized life - the life judged unworthy of
being lived - the life in limbo, hovering between birth and
citizenship or between life and death. The most radical case for
Agamben is the Muselmann of the Nazi death camps: the camp inmate
who was no longer considered human he was so close to death, "the
drowned" as Primo Levi called him, an "anonymous mass of non-men"
who marched and laboured in silence, "the divine spark dead in
them, already too empty to really suffer."[vi] These men, who
marked the limits between the living and dead, described as neither
one nor the other, also marked the threshold between the human and
the inhuman, the ethical and the unethical. They were beyond
dignity and self-respect - unbearable to look at - rendering these
moral concepts useless.
Agamben claims that this fact of the Muselmann’s limit status
therefore leads to the loss of the very idea of an ethical limit.
For if an ethical concept such as dignity makes no sense for the
Muselmann, neither alive nor dead, neither human nor inhuman, then
it is not a genuine ethical concept, “for no ethics can claim to
exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult
that humanity is to see."[vii] Indeed, Auschwitz - a space in which
the state of exception became the norm, where law was completely
suspended -
marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and
conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were
reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the
only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And 'the ultimate sentiment
of belonging to the species' cannot in any sense be a kind of
dignity.[viii]
The Muselmann, Agamben concludes, the most extreme expression of
this new knowledge, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics
that begins where dignity ends.
The bare life of this homo sacer, in whom the divine
spark is dead, is therefore paradoxically, anything but sacred. As
the facticity of birth, of suffering, and of human life that is
judged unworthy of being lived, it is a reference to extreme and
absolute human fragility, a vulnerability that is no longer
excluded from political life, yet one that exhibits its own strange
power. While once it was relegated to the margins, now it has
entered politics to an unprecedented degree. With our political
order turning into a state of emergency, or state of exception,
Agamben argues, this bare life, trembling on the threshold between
the human and the inhuman, "becomes both subject and object of the
conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the
organization of State power and emancipation from it."[ix] Corpus
is a two-faced being.
excerpted from "Bare Life and the Occupied Body" by Diane Enns,
Theory & Event, 7.3, 2004
cm
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