RE: [-empyre-] What is Bare Life?

["Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net>]

Hello Christina, all,

Well i have only read part of this ongoing discussion mostly because the
topic makes me feel a bit uneasy. So i will apologise rather vainly before
starting, knowing however that in life's process these moments are
unredeemable, and claiming that this text will at least attempt to be
meaningful. It's not too long.

No doubt what happened, my unease, that's a good sign for any discussion,
the arousement, even the incidental breach of protocol,  but the fact is, to
me, some things concerning this topic would make it either impossible to
discuss them (i feel Bare Life, conceptualised like in Christina's Agamben
below actually negates the bare life it attempts to reference)or improper
(the fabric woven by the discussion allowing several human atrocities to be
listed in a way that could suggest comparison or even common ground, the
encapsulating, the wrapping of bare life into Bare Life, the consequent use
of Bare Life in a gender context repeating the argument it wants to put
forward, the clothes bought for Bare Life as if she starred in a
Shaw-redemption, an Our Fair Life, Bare, well one can understand some of the
emotional objections, it launches the whole spectrum of the arts-ethics
imbroglio, it goes straight to the bare artist and her right to claim the
title without the usual vestiments, the torn off shirts and trousers of
former appearances, so yes, it's a good question it actually forces you to
think beyond any certainty you still might have or cherish).

Concepts like these i think mostly  are best approached as functions, there
is no such thing as Bare Life but you can watch your thoughts move towards
"Bare Life" in a limit. In the mental space that unfolds several things
happening can be made out. I haven't read Agamben, but as i read its
representation here it seems in Agamben's space there's a lot of stripping
going on, clusters of Life  being ripped of their humanity, of their
dignity, pictures of individuals being bereft of freedom, rights, abilities,
possibilities are shown. The negational is being driven to its limit, and
the produced residue is thought as being projectable in the political,
global scene, it 'enters the political to a degree previously unseen'. As
such the Agamben's discours (the caricature i am able to draw up for myself)
seems to be negating itself, but there's a need to rescue some of its
produces (again within the limitations of this wrapped up form, stripping
the un-read Agamben corpus to a few paragraphs beyond its dignity), because
some of his conclusions seem absolutely right (here the initial unease hooks
up in a recursive way: "right"? "absolutely"? "conclusions"?).

I think, nonetheless, i must admit, at this instant, (given every previous
events generated in this text and before it) i'd propose a different glide
towards Bare Life, starting from the Unbearable, the Unspeakable, the
Incomprehensible. The Holocaust is not an example. Exemplifying the
Unspeakable is immoral. The glimpses of bare life we might have been forced
to witness do not in fact refer to what needs to be shielded off as an
impossibility. Starting from the unrelated, unrelatable experience of Bare
Life we need to step aside immediately because we know it happens, it
happened, it will happen, but we will never know it, for to know it is to be
beyond life.

There are ofcourse detailed and horrifying descriptions of how it happens.
The process "also" involves (i remember reading this but the memory is
corrupted by the ease of my life) a contraction within the individual, a
reversal of life within life, an "abreaction" beyond the point of rescue or
defense. 

Towards.






Outwards, negatively.
Feeding negation with negation.

An end.


What might (have been)(be) created  is a fantasy of a negative space of Bare
Life, a black hole in the media where Bare Life can be sucked out of Sight.

Beyond cynicism it draws a seemingly inevitable Six Million Dollar Man
analogy: (NY Times today)hey, its 9/11, we know we can push legislation
aside and use the Territory gained in the meantime, we have the technology,
why don't we expand beyond the human, from now on let's use this space
called Mistakes Have Been Made.

[Answer the question, then, to your best knowledge, after the end]


Bare Life is a method. In life's process the bare moments are unredeemable.



dv
 

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
> [mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Namens Christina McPhee
> Verzonden: woensdag 12 juli 2006 21:20
> Aan: soft_skinned_space
> Onderwerp: 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
>   _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>