"'Starting from this uncertain terrain': the political thought of Giorgio Agamben"

This thesis is a critical engagement with the political thought of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben is best known for his claim that the concentration camp is the “biopolitical paradigm” of modern politics. This assignment of exemplary significance to a space redolent of National Socialism would seem to sit uneasily with his claim that our time is ushering in the possibility of a form-of-life over which sovereignty would no longer have any hold. However, this thesis argues that there is no irreducible antagonism between what I characterise as the critical and the redemptive moments of his thought. Rather, Agamben’s work is animated by the belief, as Friedrich Hödlderlin wrote in Patmos, that “where danger threatens/That which saves from it also grows.” In order to elaborate on the interaction between the critical and the redemptive moments of Agamben’s thought, this thesis scrutinises his depiction of the “uncertain terrain” that he sees as the consequence of the destabilisation of the old certainties of modern politics. This terrain is marked by the biopolitical production of bare life, the normalisation of the state of exception and the nullification of sense in spectacular capitalism. I suggest that, while Agamben sees these developments as threatening humanity with a catastrophe, they are also the precondition of what he a “completely new politics”. This thesis both traces this relation between danger and salvation in Agamben’s thought, and questions its implications for political praxis. It suggests that this soteriological logic enables Agamben to maintain a critical stance towards those discourses that are increasingly used to legitimise state repression and militarism (security, human rights, the rule of law, sovereignty) and to avoid nostalgic attempts to resurrect the certainties of modern political categories. Yet, it also argues that the dangers we face are too great to put our faith in their capacity for redemptive reversal. By interrogating Agamben’s account of redemption—in particular his understanding of messianism and his formulation of what he terms the “coming community”—it argues that his political thought should be viewed not as a justification for quietism but as an impetus for experimental political praxis in the present.