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The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14735784.2010.496592

1473-5784

Dimitris Vardoulakis,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Abstract Agamben contends that 'There is … no such thing as a stasiology, a theory of stasis or civil war' in the western understanding of sovereignty. His own vision of a politics beyond biopolitics explicitly culminates in the end of stasis. How can we understand Agamben's political theology by investigating his use of stasis? Stasis is particularly suited to an inquiry into political theology. It is linked to politics, since its primary meaning is political change, revolution, or civil war, as well as to the theological, since it denotes immobility or immutability, which were attributes of God. Stasis, then, presents the simultaneous presence and absence that exemplifies the unassimilable relation of the sacred and the secular in political theology. The question is: Does Agamben remain true to this unassimilable relation? Or does he betray it the moment he calls for an end to biopolitics? Agamben's reading of Spinoza will provide useful clues in answering these questions. Notes 2 The same statement can also be found in Agamben Citation2000: 35. 1 This paragraph and its call for a stasiology can be read as a summary of Agamben's argument in the second sequel to the Homo Sacer project, State of Exception (Agamben Citation2005b). 3 See the entry for stasis in Liddell and Scott (Citation1973). The most significant book on stasis is Nicole Loraux's The Divided City (Citation2006). The most thorough philological study on the use of stasis in classical Greek sources is Hans‐Joachim Gehrke, Stasis (Citation1985); see also Kostas Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease (Citation2000). 4 This translation, published in 1629, was Hobbes' first significant work. 5 See Agamben Citation1998: 1–3, and passim. Agamben often refers to bare life as zoe and to political life as bios, and he traces their separation back to Aristotle. It is curious – to the point of being spurious – to suppose such a distinction in Aristotle. The most cursory reading of either the Nicomachean Ethics or the Politics will show that Aristotle's favourite expression to refer to the aim of politics is to eu zen, the happy life, of the citizen. For example, in Politics 1280b Aristotle says: 'τρλoς µν oν πóλϵως τò ϵ ζν' [the aim of the polis is the happy life]. 6 The term 'biopolitics' is borrowed from Foucault. For a discussion of Agamben's curious reading of Foucault's last chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality see Fitzpatrick (Citation2001: 13–14). Fitzpatrick also questions Agamben's reading of the term homo sacer in Roman law. 7 This separation is presented in various ways in Agamben's works. For instance, it is presented as the separation between constituent and constituted power in Agamben Citation1998: 43–4, referring to Negri. The same separation between constituent and constituted power is argued for in Agamben (Citation2005b) with recourse to Carl Schmitt (Agamben Citation2005b: 33, 36, 50, 54) 8 Bernstein (Citation2004) has critiqued this position. 9 Erik Vogt correctly notes that, for Agamben, 'boundaries between politics and law are equally indistinguishable, since sovereignty and the sovereign exception are marked too by an inclusive exclusion' (Citation2005: 78). 10 The paper 'Absolute Immanence' is also an interpretation of Deleuze (Citation1997), however, this interpretation will not be discussed here. Agamben also mentions Spinoza elsewhere in his work, but in many cases only as passing references (for example Agamben Citation1993: 18–19 and 90–91) that will not then be discussed here. Nor will chapter 7 of Agamben Citation1999b be discussed here, since it is really about Elsa Morante's reading of Spinoza and not Spinoza's work itself at all. 11 The translation 'biological body' has been amended to 'biopolitical body', since the original text in Italian says 'il corpo biopolitico' (Agamben Citation1996: 57). 12 As Adam Thurschwell (Citation2005) has shown, Agamben uses a similar appropriation of Derrida. 13 Andreas Kalyvas has also taken Agamben's conception of temporality to task, writing: 'Homo Sacer returns to a representation of time – the tie of the sovereign – as uniform, one‐directional, and rectilinear' (Citation2005: 111). This general position on time, Kalyvas argues, becomes the ground for Agamben's historical extrapolation of sovereignty: 'Sovereign biopolitics … has uninterruptedly accompanied the ancients and the moderns alike, remaining unaffected by critical events' (Citation2005: 111). The upshot of this understanding of sovereignty as a perennial quality is a loss of singularity: 'By disregarding the distinct aspects of political power, politics is relegated to a single, pejorative version of sovereign power and state authority' (Kalyvas Citation2005: 115). 14 Philippe Mesnard (Citation2004) objects precisely to this structure of negative theology in Agamben's discussion of the Muselmann. 15 In Catherine Mills' words: 'What Agamben fails to take into account, though, is that the taking place of enunciation can itself be seen as always a matter of 'being‐with' others' (Citation2005: 211). 16 This corresponds to what Carl Schmitt (Citation1998) calls political romanticism. 17 It does not follow from the distinction between nominative (the subject) and accusative (the object) that there is a positing of human agency independent of its environment. As Jacques Derrida put it, 'that which lets itself be designated différance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as a passion or as the action of an agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms' (Citation1984: 9). This erasure of agency and the ensuing sense of community is the lynchpin of John Llewelyn's discussion of the middle voice in the most interesting recent book on the topic (Llewelyn Citation1991). 18 Even though Spinoza does use the words 'immanent cause' in Chapter 12 of the Hebrew Grammar, whence Agamben derives a second example, Spinoza is nevertheless not making any philosophical claim about immanent causality here but merely trying to explain the middle voice. In fact, Agamben's translation of the Latin is rather misleading. In Latin it is clear throughout Chapter 12 that Spinoza is positioning the reflexive between the active and the passive mood (ad agentem and ad patientem). Thus, when Spinoza writes 'Ideoque necesse fuit Infinitivorum speciem excogitare, quae actionem exprimeret ad agentem, sive causam immanentem relatam' (Spinoza Citation1924, I: 342), this is accurately translated by Maurice J. Bloom as: 'Therefore it was necessary to devise another form of infinitive which would express an action related to the active mood or to the imminent cause' (Spinoza Citation2002: 629). Spinoza's point is grammatical, not philosophical, and it is a point about the relation between the different moods. Thus, Agamben's translation of the subordinate clause is rather surprising: 'which expresses an action referred to an agent as immanent cause' ['che esprimesse l'azione riferita all'agente come causa immanente'] (Agamben Citation1999b: 235; 1996: 52). Agamben's translation erroneously suggests that Spinoza is talking here about an individual which acts as (come) an immanent cause. Spinoza's point, however, is much more uncontroversial: in the active voice, the subject itself is the cause of the action. There is nothing in the text of Chapter 12 to suggest that Spinoza is advancing a theory of action, or of agency, or of individuation. 19 God as 'causa immanens' is one of the important aspects of Part I of the Ethics. The definition of Proposition 18 is already implicit from at least Proposition 15, although the whole of the preceding of Part I can be seen as leading up to Proposition 18. On God and causality – including God as an immanent cause – see also Short Treatise, Part I, Chapters 2 and 3, as well as the final chapter of the Short Treatise. For the sources of Spinoza's understanding of divine causality, see volume 1 of Wolfson (Citation1969). 20 Agamben also offers a similarly curious reading of beatitude. With reference to Ethics, Part III, Proposition 51, Agamben argues that beatitude is the same as the immanent cause (see for instance Agamben Citation1999a: 237). But towards the end of Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza has already defined affectivity and is well on the way to providing a typology of emotions. In the end of the Scholium to Proposition 51, cited by Agamben, Spinoza defines passions which are conceived by the mind as being self‐caused. The two passions are repentance (paenitentia) and self‐contentment (acquiescentia in se ipso, which Agamben translates as 'being at rest in oneself'). The former gives the impression that the self causes its own pain, while the latter its own pleasure. There is no direct or indirect reference to beatitude, and the idea of beatitude – a joyful union with God – is entirely out of place at this point of the Ethics. According to Ethics IV, Propositions 54–57, repentance and self‐satisfaction belong to the first kind of knowledge because they are self‐caused, and not to the third kind of knowledge and to beatitude, whose cause of pleasure is the idea of God.