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Giorgio Agamben presents a contrast to Esposito's approach to impolitico in contemporary theory, insofar as his vision of the notion remains primarily negative: the impolitical, as bare life (nuda vita), is the originary problematic aspect of Western (bio)politics that needs to be addressed in order to contain its destructive power. However, despite the obvious negative rendering of the impolitical, I will argue that we can get a glimpse of something like the positive impolitical in Agamben's notion of “form-of life” (or “happy life”) that is supposed to form the basis of “coming politics.” In other words, “form-of-life” (forma-di-vita), which Agamben so readily politicizes, can be interpreted as the unpolitical as such (especially given Agamben's attention to the “as such”): an integral notion of life that gains more and more importance in contemporary thought in contrast to a variety of its 'differential' conceptions. In view of this task, I will, first, present an analysis of the use of the impolitical in Agamben's works and suggest

how it is related to the notion of “bare life;” then, I will sketch out his view of “form-of- life” (even though he does not present a consistent theory of this notion) and show how it can be interpreted as containing the unpolitical elements that we are after. Due to the enormous amount of literature and studies dedicated to Agamben's oeuvre, I will only focus here on distilling his notion of the impolitical in its relation with 'life', leaving the general, more comprehensive investigation of the various themes in his philosophy beyond the scope of my present endeavour. I will also briefly discuss Foucault's synthetic notion of life and of life as the domain of error, as well as Esposito's and Deleuze's notion of “impersonal life” as a point of comparison to Agamben's notion of “form-of-life.” Most importantly, these discussions constitute not just mere cases of comparison but echo what Agamben calls “the coming philosophy” and pave a way toward something like the coming unpolitical thought of life.

Life and politics

Consideration of life in its relation with politics is not unique to Agamben, of course. The most obvious examples of other thinkers, discussed here, that posit life at the centre of their thought are Hobbes, Schmitt and Foucault. Hobbes famously defines the state of nature in terms of war of all against all, where the major criteria of this very war lies not in actual fighting but in the permanent threat of (potential) death. Thus, mere survival, preservation of life or struggle with death seem to be the major concern of humans in such a state. In a similar way, Schmitt brings life to our attention in his discussion of the concept of the political as well as in his writings on sovereignty. First of all, the political is defined by Schmitt through the struggle between friend and enemy which, as I showed, oscillates, in a Hobbesian manner, around the threat of real killing or death. Consequently, for Schmitt and Hobbes life comes to attention mainly through its opposite – death, and their 'definition' of life could probably be exhausted in terms of struggle with death. Furthermore, many post-foundational thinkers also consider life primarily in its relation with death, however, in not exactly the same terms as Hobbes and Schmitt. The real threat of death and killing, as the ultimate limit as well as drive of life, is replaced by the considerations of finitude in more general terms, i.e., non-specific to any particular

situation of human interaction. The struggle with death is translated into facing and

coming to terms with finitude, with the absence of the ultimate foundation of human life and thus of any politics and community. The resulting affirmation of void or finitude at the 'core' of the new conceptions of community is evident.

An important 'source' for Agamben's project is Foucault's investigation of modern biopolitics. However, even though Agamben pays homage to Foucault in his Homo Sacer

(1998), it would be hard to conceive of Agamben's work as a direct engagement with Foucault's. Mika Ojakangas (2005b) describes this situation as an “impossible dialogue on bio-power,” implying that Agamben's view of biopolitics, except for the term itself, has little in common with Foucault's. If for the latter biopolitics is a modern 'invention', the result of transformation of the previous mode of power relations, i.e., sovereignty with its right over life and death, for Agamben bio-power has been with us since the very inception of Western politics: “before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion” (1998, 121). Foucault's work is thus dedicated, according to Agamben, to the study of “growing inclusion of man's natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (119; my emphasis), implying that Foucault's biopolitical inquiries were limited to the study of modernity, which does not 'introduce' biopolitics (as Foucault would suggest) but rather brings it to light by explicitly recognizing life as the object of politics.

Furthermore, Agamben's view of biopolitics (contrary to Foucault) hinges on the figure of “bare life,” that is, he proposes that Western (bio)politics is founded on the originary exception of naked life from the polis. What is of the most importance is the very definition of this excepted life: bare life is life exposed to an unconditional power or threat of death (Agamben 1998, 88, 90). In Agamben's view, the biopolitical regime is purely negative, it contains death as its animating principle: biopolitics in its essence is no more than thanatopolitics. As Ojakangas argues, Foucault's conception of biopolitics, however, is of a more positive character since its main principle is no longer the threat of death, as it used to be in the case of sovereign power (and of which Agamben apparently

gives an accurate account), but “the care of 'all living'” (2005b, 6). 'Make live and let die' is the operating principle of bio-power. In this regard, Ojakangas reminds us that “[i]n order to function properly, bio power cannot reduce life to the level of bare life, because‐ bare life is life that can only be taken away or allowed to persist ... Bio power needs a‐

notion of life that corresponds to its aims. ... Its aim is not to produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes, to 'multiply life', to produce 'extra life'” (14). As a result, she‐

suggests that Foucaultian biopolitics already presupposes as its ground a “synthetic” notion of life, for which Agamben is only searching with his notion of “form-of-life,” which would apparently announce the end of biopolitics. Consequently, it seems that Agamben's project might have been born out of the misreading of Foucault's account of bio-power in The History of Sexuality.

The impolitical as bare life

Whatever the 'origins' of Agamben's ideas, what interests me here is his explicit connection between life and the notion of the unpolitical, which is not found in the authors discussed previously (except, perhaps, in Esposito's later works).73 _Impolitico,

variously translated into English as “unpolitical,” “nonpolitical” or “impolitical,” is not a major notion in Agamben's works as such, however, it is intimately connected with a pivotal concept of his political philosophy – bare life. As a matter of fact, for Agamben the unpolitical is bare life. In this respect he follows Schmitt's structural logic asserting that “the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical [unpolitische] is always a political decision...” (Schmitt 2005, 2). Agamben slightly adjusts the content of this statement, thus radically reorienting its perspective, by adding that “something unpolitical” refers solely to bare life. Starting with a similar quote from Schmitt's another work, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, he writes “'It is general knowledge among the contemporary German political generation that precisely the decision concerning whether a fact or a kind of thing is apolitical [apolitico] is a specifically political decision' (ibid., p. 17). Politics is now literally the decision

73 Of course, let us not forget the impact of Hannah Arendt's ideas, especially her discussion of naked humanity in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), on Agamben's development of the notion of bare life.

concerning the unpolitical [dell'impolitico] (that is, concerning bare life [nuda vita])” (1998, 173; my emphasis). Agamben translates that which Schmitt proposed a while ago in terms of life, and not just any life, but naked, impolitical life that, in fact, is always already politicized through its exposition to death in the originary state of exception, springing from the sovereign decision. “Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element” (88).

On several other occasions Agamben refers to something like bare life in terms of the unpolitical or impolitical (1998, 131; 2004, 76, 77). Let us consider another example here. He writes: “[t]he political ... is drawn out of the living being through the exclusion – as unpolitical – of a part of its vital activity” (2007, 6). The unpolitical, bare life, is clearly presented here as only a part of the vital activity of the living being. What is this part, and what is the rest of it? Agamben famously starts his investigation into the history of Western biopolitics by suggesting that the ancient Greeks did not have a unitary concept to signify life, as we do nowadays, but differentiated between two kinds of life:

zoē and bios, “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)” and “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1998, 1), respectively. In other words, the Greek notion of life was based on the distinction and apparently clear separation between the mere fact of living, often also referred to as nutritive or vegetative life isolated from logos (cf. Agamben 1999, 231), and qualitative life proper to (some) human beings – bios politikos, life organized or manifest in the

polis for the sake of 'good life'. Corresponding to the linguistic distinction, the Greeks maintained a separation of spaces dedicated to these different kinds of living: oikos or the domain of the household was the space of zoē's confinement, devoted solely to maintenance and reproduction of natural life, while the polis was the space where logos

was exercised for the attainment of 'good life'.

Following his reading of Aristotle, Agamben suggests that this distinction between zoē

and bios, even thoughno longer preserved in contemporary European languages, does not disappear but, on the contrary, forms the foundation of Western politics; it is its ontological presupposition. “In contrasting the 'beautiful day' (euemeria) of simple life

[zoē] with the 'great difficulty' of political bios ... Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics” (1998, 11). This irresolvable internal contradiction that contaminates a transhistorical ontology of politics is bare life, which is “included in politics in the form of exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (11). As exception, impolitical life is not simply opposed to politics, like zoē might be opposed to bios, and it does not preexist politics, as the state of nature might precede the state, but rather it is co-originary with politics. The latter is constituted, according to Agamben, through an originary decision, split, distinction and separation between inside and outside, between the political and unpolitical: politics emerges in the delimitation of its own outside, in drawing its border. As a result, due to the dialectic nature of a limit, which not only separates but also unites, the outside of the political space always faces the inside. More than that, it is 'domesticated', incorporated into the inside through the status of the outside. “Exteriority [i.e., impolitical life],” Agamben writes, “is truly the innermost centre of the political system, and the political system lives off it in the same way that the rule, according to Schmitt, lives off the exception” (36). Consequently, this exteriority is never truly outside, it is only relative outside epitomized in the excepted figure of homo sacer. In his own terms Agamben seems to address here the problem of modern correlation between political inside and outside, pointing out the impossibility of conceiving something like the radical outside of the political space from within the categories of this very space. In order to go beyond this correlationism one would have to rework the very distinction between the inside and the outside: to 'collapse' one into the other, but not in the same way as modern biopolitics turns the exception into the rule everywhere. This redefinition would have to occur, according to Agamben, in rethinking the notion of life in terms of its immanence to itself – as “form-of-life.”

This new notion of life is 'integral' (cf. Prozorov 2009, 343), meaning that it precludes the possibility of distinguishing life from itself, or rather of separating living from its form (or

zoē from bios), as in the case of bare life. This does not suggest, however, a return to some prior state of innocence of zoē or the state of nature, that is, to the state not

contaminated by sovereign politics. It is important to understand, Agamben reminds us, that the 'purity' of zoē or 'truly' unpolitical life is not available to us; all that we know of it is bare life, which is not natural life, but a product of politics. As William Rasch puts it, “[t]he political ... does not replace nature; it creates it” (2007, 101). This 'nature' or 'outside' of the political is “not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor

bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer [...], a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (Agamben 1998, 109).74 _{The topology of exteriority of Western politics is thus nothing}

else but the zone of indistinction, the outside-within, the exception. It has the topology of a Mobius strip or a Leyden jar, where what is presupposed as external reappears as the inside (37).

As for Esposito, Agamben's impolitical is the “threshold,” space outside of all space, “the always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty [i.e., of the political]” (1998, 106). The political does not replace the unpolitical, it is not opposed to it but creates it. Impolitical life, for Agamben, is not independent of politics, on the contrary, it is a political product: the threshold which the system invents and continues to reinvent, and through which it declares itself always different from (or nonidentical to) itself. Agamben refers to Blanchot in this respect suggesting that “[c]onfronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself'” (18; my emphasis). (This is true not only for Agamben's analysis of sovereign relation with life, but also for correlationist thought in general that emphasizes the difference or exteriority of politics insofar as it can be interiorized or re- incorporated into it as, for instance, 'the political', 'exception' or 'outside-within'.) We can conclude that the impolitical does not have positive connotation for Agamben (as it has for Esposito and Cacciari), but designates life resulting from a prohibition or abandonment through sovereign decision and withdrawal.

74 Catherine Mills suggests that there are altogether “four categories of 'life' operating in Homo Sacer:

zoē or biological life, bios or political life, 'bare life' (sometimes rendered as 'naked life', from the Italian term 'nuda vita'), and a new 'form-of-life', ...” (2005, 219).

Bare life is “a destroyed or degraded bios from which all positive determinations have been subtracted” (Prozorov 2009, 341). The sovereign gets a hold of life not by conquering it but by withdrawing from it, meaning that the law applies to this life in its abandonment. The impolitical is not simply left outside of political space but is rather “taken outside” or banned by the sovereign from the 'inside' and thus from being subject to law of any order, sacred or profane. As Agamben puts it: “The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension. In this sense, the exception is truly, according to its etymological root, taken outside (ex- capere), and not simply excluded” (1998, 18). In other words, the exception, on which Western politics is found, is not “real” but “fictional”: the structure of the juridico- political order is that of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside, an inclusion through abandonment. The figure of homo sacer, according to Agamben, is representative of this structure: homo sacer not simply exists in the anomie of the state of nature, where the way of killing is the way of survival and so anyone can kill him without committing a homicide. The state of nature is a political creation, it does not (pre)exist in non-relation with politics, and so the condition of homo sacer is not indicative of pre- political chaos but can appear only as a result of exclusion from the political order, of stripping bios down to naked life. However, this abandonment of life to exteriority does not sever its link with politics: bare life is never fully outside or really excepted, but is placed within the political order as a structurally necessary element of presupposed exteriority. Agamben's analysis, in this regard, is very similar to Schmitt's, from whom he obviously derives many of his arguments: first, the exception (the impolitical) is a structurally necessary element of political order, and not contingent or disruptive, as it was, for example, in Esposito's view; second, the unpolitical is reduced solely to the status of the exception, acclaimed positively by Schmitt and negatively by Agamben. In Agamben's work, the notion of 'impolitical' remains attached solely to 'bare life' (an excluded part of vital activity) and is not 'redeemed' in the messianic coming of the new politics envisioned by him. His main task consists in a redefinition of the notion of

'politics', while 'the unpolitical' serves only as the negative background against which this urgent necessity of redefinition is posited. As a result, while for Agamben the state of exception is the ahistorical negative foundation of political order in the West, the reduction of 'the unpolitical' to 'bare life' is the negative foundation of Agamben's messianic political project. The 'redemption' of bare life in Agamben's work happens through its politicization and is thus reminiscent of, for example, Rancière's solution to