Politics Unborn: A Thougth Experiement on the (Re)production of a New Political Subject

[Partially in response to this post at the weblog]

Once the category of the “state of exception” is mastered in its formality, such states begin to appear ubiquitous. However, pointing out such instances serves no real political purpose. It is, at most, diagnostic. Similarly, numerous examples of the homo sacer, even beyond the extensive catalogue that Agamben cites, can be named without too much difficulty. But again, the identification of such instances is not the important point – nor, however, is nostalgically working to restore things to the way they were before the emergency or the sovereign decision. The political exigency that follows from the biopolitical predicament, according to Agamben, is to conceive of such “zones of indistinction” as themselves sites of new political possibilities.

Thus, to point out that the “fetus” or the “unborn” represents an exemplary figure of the homo sacer is not to say too much. To point out that a child in utero is neither living nor non-living properly speaking – insofar as the decision on this status is the one constantly in dispute – and that such an existence occupies a “zone of indistinction” between fact and law, by virtue of this undecidability, is not to see in Agamben’s analysis a tacit pro-life agenda.

Of significance, however, are the political consequences of such a realization when it comes to discerning the true political subject. The liberal model understands the political subject, in this case, to be the autonomous individual who is free to deal with the fact of pregnancy in the way that she sees fit – or the way that she sees fit within the realm of available law and technology. The conservative model locates the final say in an unimpregnable male (legislator, priest, doctor, ethicist). But there is yet another assessment of this situation, a third political subject, who becomes available in light of Agamben’s work. The site of resistance to biopolitics is life itself, a zoe that has become its own bios. Life itself becomes both the object of biopolitical capture and the subject of its resistance. Would not the unborn then become the political subject par excellence, insofar as such a life is the one which is inseparable from its form. The question then becomes: how to conceive of an unborn politics?

Lenten Reflection 4b: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;
5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Comment
I spoke earlier of Paul’s biopolitics – such that the passage to redemption is corporal. Here is yet another perspective on this biopolitics. Agamben argues, at the conclusion of Homo Sacer, contra Foucault, that there is no escape from the biopolitical predicament: every body is always already a biopolitical body. Thus, the “new economy of bodies and pleasures” that Foucault gestures towards at the end of History of Sexuality 1 is not really conceivable. Foucault, as far as Agamben is concerned, is not critical enough with his concepts. It is not merely a new relation between body and pleasure that is necessary but a, in some sense, a new body, a new corporal destiny. Further, this new body cannot be the return to an old body, there can be no nostalgia for a pre-biopolitical existence -- “There is no return from the camps to classical politics” (187).

In Paul we find something like the possibility of a new corporal destiny, not in terms of an escape from bodily existence – as it sometimes sounds in 2 Corinthians – but in terms of a participation in another future for the body: “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for him” – these are the words that immediately precede our text. These are the conditions under which Paul can claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” There is here the possibility of not just a new relation between body and world, but the possibility of a new body, of a new site for a biopolitical resistance to biopolitics. In this way Paul represents a possible completion of Agamben’s project to found a new politics which would be a zoe which is its own bios – this, by the way, is not a possibility that Agamben names in his Paul book.