- Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the paradox wherein the sovereign is at the same time outside and inside the juridical order – as the sovereign can proclaim sates of exception
- The law is outside itself – Schmitt's structure of exception
- The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid
- There is no rule that is applicable to chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense
- In this genealogy, authority proves itself not to need law to create law
- This reveals that the exception is more interesting than the regular case to understand the substance and limits of politics.
- The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone
- I find this proposition very deconstructivist in the sense given by Butler
- The exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology
- The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension
- It has been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri were thus able to write 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing'
- Maurice Blanchot says that modern politics tries to constitute the outside into an interiority of expectation or of exception
- Confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself' (Foucault)
- The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaning itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.
- The particular force of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority – relation of exception.
- This is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule
- E.G: The 'ordering of space' that is, acording to Schinmitt, constitutive of the sovereign nomos, is therefore not only a 'taking of land' (landesnahme) – the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an ordnung and an ortung) – but above all a 'taking of the outside', an exception (ausnahme).
- As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)
- When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp
- The camp – and not the prision – is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that while prision law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the normal order/ the juridical constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the state of siege.
- This is why it is not possible to inscribe the analysis of the camp in the trail opened by the works of Foucault. As the absolute space of exception, the camp is topologically different from a simple space of confinement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link between localization and ordering is definitely broken, that has determined the crisis of the nomos of the earth
- The main problematization to be made about sovereignty is not about who exercise it, but rather about 'over what is it being exercized'. In which case Agamben suggests that sovereignty is exercised against life as its sacralization doesn't prevent its murder – just its sacrifice – and subsequently orbitates the very possibility that it can be taken away. The possibility of emergency structures the juridico-normative power and, at the same time, derives from it.
Viagens, vida na Índia, outros olhares, outros cotidianos, compreensões radicais das R.I. e um buffet completo de bizarrices e prazeres para os famintos por pensamento critico e vida com gosto de incerteza. ----- Travels, life in India, other perspectives, other routines, radical understandings of I.R. and a buffet of oddities and pleasures for those hungry for critical thought and life with taste of uncertainty.
Sunday, 27 May 2012
ABSTRACT ON AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (CHAPTER 1 – THE PARADOX OF SOVEREIGNTY)'
ABSTRACT OF AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (INTRODUCTION)'
- The greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the world life, which was splat between:a) Zoe: which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)b) Bios : which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group
- But to speak of a zoe politike of the citizens of Athens would have made no sense
- In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined – as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of the oikos, 'home'
- At the beginning of The Politics, Aristotle takes the greatest care to distinguish the oikonomos (the head of an state) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life, from the politician, and he scorns those who think the difference between the two is one of quantity and not of kind.
- He opposes the simple fact of living (to zen) to politically qualified life (to eu zen) of the politician
- It's for a society of politicians and politicity tied to language that Aristotle defines man as a politikon zoon, not for the ideal society, not for a society of only Zoe and Bios
- Foucault refers to this very definition at the end of History of Sexuality as he summarizes the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power and politics turns into Biopolitics
- For millenia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question
- For Foucault this shift occurred along with the passage from the 'territorial state' to the 'state of population', and the creation of a 'government of men'.
- Agamben points that as a result of such process, by the first time in history it was possible for one same rationality to protect life and to authorize holocaust
- Foucault notes that the triumph of capitalism would not have been possible without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the 'docile bodies' that it needed.
- Almost twenty years before Foucault, Hannah Arendt through her concept of homo laborans have noted that the decadence of modern politics was due to the overshadow of natural life, which she considers primary, by political action.
- Agamben agrees with Foucault that the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought
- Agamben criticizes Foucault for not addressing certain key places of modernity, like the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century
- Agamben says that the enigmas that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remains with us (nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain – biopolitics – on which they were formed
- Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc) – and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction – will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon.
- Only a reflection that, taking up Foucault's and Benjamin's suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to this political practical calling
- Agamben criticizes Foucault also for not clearly pointing at which space the individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power meet each other – Agamben even recalls some critiques according to which Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power.
- This mismatch is one between Foucault's studies on political techniques (totalizing state) and his studies on the technologies of the self (individualization)
- If Foucault calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge?
- Agamben points that certain subjective aspects in the genesis of power were already implicit in the concept of servitude volontaire in Etienne de La Boetie
- Agamben proposition thus is to enquire precisely the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power – the two analyses cannot be separeted
- The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power
- In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.
- The modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.
- What remains to be interrogated in the Aristotelian definition is not merely – as has been assumed until now – the sense, the modes, and the possible articulations of the good life as the telos of the political. We must instead ask why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life.
- I particularly find this very close to the Deconstructivist approach of Butler.
- It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language
- The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it
- Politics therefore appears to be the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized
- The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/ political existence, zoe/ bios, exclusion/ inclusion.
- There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an exclusive exclusion
- If we match this with Deleuzze's explanation for the universality of castration as a necessity to articulate language, than politics can also be said to be an universal structure?
- With this framework of understanding, Agamben suggests to analyse the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed
- This is an obscure figure of archaic Roman Law, in which human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), which Agamben believes to be useful on revealing the sacrament of sovereignty and the codes of political power.
- The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis – which is, in itself, absolutely ancient – nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.
- In this process the disciplinary process of State power posing the subject as object is made indistinguishable from the democratic process of subjects as agents.
- Modern politics is based on zones of indistinction between the exclusive poles
- To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.
- Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism – which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle – will remain stubbornly with us
- Points to the inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarism but without denying their divergences as well
- Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion
- Until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it
- He says that the limits of sovereignty, as every limit, is a conceptual one, in this case opposing the sovereign to life
- The problem of sovereignty was reduced [by orthodox Marxism] to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question
- As State gets increasingly dissolved due to emergencies he suggests that one should inquire about the substance of the state and its limits rather than its leading rulers
- For one such task he advises to revise all notions claimed to be evident, just like he was lead to revise the sacredness of life to understand how the construct of this argument reifyied life and at the same time enabled it to be killed
- The Homo Sacer may be killed, but yet not sacrificed.
- Overall coments and dunderstandings about the chapter:
- Bare life is the politicized form of zoe
- Agamben uses the Homo Sacer to explain bare life
- Homo Sacer is abandoned by the divine (zoe) and profane law (bios)
- Bare life doesn't belong neither to zoe nor to bios
- For Agamben the Biopower has always existed as tyrans used to exert political control over bodies. What marks the uniqueness of modern politics, however, is the generalization of Homo Sacer in the sense that the categorizations operated through Biopolitics get blured and politics become a space of indistinction centered on those very blurings.
- In one such space everyone is subjected to become Bare life.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
A CONTINUIDADE HISTÓRICA DA ACUMULAÇÃO PRIMITIVA DO CAPITAL: O CASO NOROESTE E A CIDADE DE ASSIS – SP.
A CONTINUIDADE HISTÓRICA DA ACUMULAÇÃO PRIMITIVA DO CAPITAL: O CASO NOROESTE E A CIDADE DE ASSIS – SP.
Acabo de ler os capítulos sobre acumulação primitiva do capital no livro “O Capital”. Resolvi reler estes capítulos após as conversas que ando tendo com um amigo que acaba de iniciar seu mestrado sobre a Acumulação Primitiva do Capital como fenômeno recente, no qual ele contextualizara o debate para o caso do Setor Noroeste, em Brasília.
Mais uma vez o meu amigo Reacinha mandou muito e trouxe a tona um questionamento aparentemente simples, mas de repercussões gigantescas. O fato é; se olharmos em volta, estamos absolutamente cercados de leis e acontecimentos políticos que não possuem uma explicação mais honesta do que o roubo sistematizado do acesso ao capital por meio da instauração enviesada de direitos de propriedade. Infelizmente, os horrores que marcam de sangue os capítulos 26, 27 e 28 de “O Capital” não ficaram na história como propõe o velho Papai Smurf (que é como costumo chamar o Marx)... estes absurdos estão ai.
Tomando o caso brasileiro agente poderia citar um arcabouço de leis agrárias que reforçam a reprodução do capital nas mãos dos detentores históricos dos meios de produção. O nosso glorioso código florestal, a regularização de terras griladas em 2009 e uma série de outros exemplos recheariam um materialismo histórico tão bem quanto as leis dos Reis Ingleses e Franceses citadas pelo Papai Smurf.
Mas dizendo isso eu corro o risco de ser confrontado por algum arguto internauta liberal a me dizer que a expropriação simples do bem de produção não gera por si só o ciclo da mais-valia e que, portanto, no século XIX quanto agora, os Marxistas estão errados.
Bem... é ai que entra o capítulo 28 do Marx, é ai que entra a cidade de Assis – SP, e é justamente ai que residem meus medos. Na análise histórica que faz, Papai Smurf é consciente de que a massa vadia, o lumpem em festa, não servem de nada para o capitalismo como ele o identifica. Por isso mesmo ele nos apresenta um apanhado de leis que coibiam praticas como a mendicância, a vadiagem e outras mais. Dentre as penas constavam a escravidão do vagabo, sua marcação a ferro quente, mutilação, chicotada e a execução em caso de reincidência. Selecionei aqui alguns parágrafos só pros leitores “sentirem o drama”:
Henrique VIII, em 1530: os mendigos velhos e incapazes de trabalhar recebem uma licença de mendigo. Em contrapartida, chicoteamento e encarceramento para os vagabundos robustos. Devem ser atados à parte de trás de uma carroça e fustigados até que o sangue corra do seu corpo, fazem depois um juramento de regressarem ao seu lugar de nascimento ou aonde moraram nos últimos três anos e de «se porem ao trabalho» (to put himself to labour). Que ironia cruel! No 27.° [ano do reinado] de Henrique VIII o estatuto precedente é repetido, mas reforçado com novos aditamentos. Ao ser apanhado pela segunda [vez] em vagabundagem, o chicoteamen-to deve ser repetido e metade da orelha cortada, à terceira vez, porém, o visado é executado como grande criminoso e inimigo da comunidade.
Eduardo VI: um estatuto do primeiro ano do seu reinado, 1547, ordena que, se alguém se recusar a trabalhar, deve ser sentenciado como escravo da pessoa que o denunciou como desocupado. O dono deve alimentar o seu escravo com pão e água, bebida fraca e os restos de carne que achar convenientes. Tem o direito de o obrigar a qualquer trabalho ainda que repugnante por meio de chicoteamento e de agrilhoamento. Se o escravo se ausentar por 14 dias, é condenado à escravatura por toda a vida e deve ser marcado a fogo com a letra S(59*) na fronte ou nas faces; se ele fugir pela terceira vez, é executado como traidor público. O dono pode vendê-lo, legá-lo, alugá-lo, como escravo, inteiramente como outro bem móvel ou gado. Se os escravos empreenderem algo contra os donos, devem igualmente ser executados. Por informação os juizes de paz devem perseguir o malandro. Se se verificar que um vadio não fez nada durante três dias, deve ser levado para o seu lugar de nascimento, marcado a fogo com um ferro ao rubro, no peito, com o sinal V(60*), e aí, com cadeias, deve ser utilizado nas ruas ou em qualquer outro serviço. Se o vagabundo der um lugar de nascimento falso, como castigo, deve ficar escravo por toda a vida desse lugar, dos moradores ou da corporação e ser marcado a fogo com um S. Todas as pessoas têm o direito de tirar os filhos aos vagabundos e de os manter como aprendizes — os rapazes até aos 24 anos, as raparigas até aos 20 anos. Se fugirem, deverão ficar escravos do dono até essa idade, o qual, consoante quiser, os poderá prender com cadeias, chicotear, etc. Cada dono pode pôr um anel de ferro à volta do pescoço, do braço ou da perna do seu escravo, para o conhecer melhor e estar seguro de que é seu(61*). A última parte deste estatuto prevê que certos pobres devem ser empregados pelo lugar ou pelos indivíduos que lhes queiram dar de comer e de beber e encontrar trabalho para eles. Esta espécie de escravos paroquiais conservou-se, em Inglaterra, até bem dentro do século XIX, sob o nome de roundsmen (rondadores).
Isabel, em 1572: mendigos sem licença e acima dos 14 anos de idade devem ser fortemente chicoteados e marcados a fogo na orelha esquerda, no caso de ninguém os querer tomar ao seu serviço por dois anos; em caso de repetição, se estão acima dos 18 anos de idade, devem ser executados, no caso de ninguém os querer tomar ao seu serviço por dois anos; à terceira reincidência, porém, são executados sem piedade como traidores públicos. Estatutos semelhantes: no 18.° [ano do reinado] de Isabel, c. 13, e em 1597(62*). Jaime I: uma pessoa vadia e mendiga é declarada malandro e vagabundo. Os juizes de paz nas Petty Sessions[N77] têm o poder de os mandar chicotear em público e de os encarcerar, na primeira vez que forem apanhados, por 6 meses, na segunda, por 2 anos. Durante a prisão devem ser chicoteados tanto e tão frequentemente quanto os juizes de paz acharem por bem... Os vagabundos incorrigíveis e perigosos devem ser marcados a fogo com um R(63*) no ombro esquerdo e postos a trabalhos forçados e, se forem de novo apanhados a mendigar, devem ser executados sem piedade. Estas ordenações, legalmente vinculativas até aos primeiros tempos do século XVIII, só foram revogadas por Anano 12.° [ano do seu reinado], c. 23.
Leis semelhantes em França, onde, por meados do século XVII, foi estabelecido em Paris um reino dos vagabundos (royaume des truands). Ainda nos primeiros tempos de Luís XVI (Ordenança de 13 de Julho de 1777), todo o homem sãmente constituído dos 16 aos 60 anos, se não tivesse meios de existência e exercício de uma profissão, era mandado para as galeras. Semelhante é o estatuto de Carlos Vpara os Países Baixos de Outubro de 1537, o primeiro édito dos Estados e Cidades da Holanda de 19 de Março de 1614, a proclamação das Províncias Unidas de 25 de Junho de 1649, etc.
Assim, o povo do campo, expropriado à força da terra, expulso e feito vagabundo, foi chicoteado, marcado a fogo e torturado por leis grotesco-terroristas, [com vista] à disciplina necessária ao sistema do trabalho assalariado.
Aqui o meu leitor liberal vai cair de pau dizendo que nossa democracia liberal verde e amarela jamais suportaria uma tal violação do direito personalíssimo a passar fome, a ser desempregado. Horas bolas, não é esse, afinal de contas, o legado histórico do liberalismo: garantir a liberdade de sermos famintos, de não conseguirmos empregos, de sermos fantasmas famintos pelas cidades? ... aparentemente não, e pra os que diziam que a coisa não podia ficar pior, a abordagem do Reacinha parece descortinar um inferno novinho em folha.
Embora eu ainda não tenha notícias de nenhuma lei ou política sistêmica e direta que leve à escravização, tortura e extermínio de vagabos (essa parece ser a função da ética policial), o fato é que a gloriosa cidade de Assis há algum tempo estrelou nas telas da Bandeirantes enquanto seus peões de farda regozijavam-se quebrando o dedo e executando a violenta prisão do repórter Danilo Gentili, então disfarçado de alguém que não estava fazendo nada (não achei um termo mais adequado para o que ele (não)estava fazendo).
Como o reporter vestia algo além de um uniforme e tinha um corte de cabelo destoante do visual Gestapo 2010, imaginei que sua prisão fosse ser pela “substancial evidencia de que se tratava de um ladrão ou usuário de drogas”, que é uma experiência comum no Brasil, a qual eu já tive o desprazer de experimentar em mais de uma ocasião. Porém, fiquei surpreso ao ver que a alegação que pesava era a de que ele incorrerá no crime de vadiagem... uma antiqüíssima lei brasileira que fora recentemente restaurada na cidadezinha.
Retomando o contexto desta observação... o fato é que tortura, escravidão e extermínio eu ainda não vi assim regulamentado “na letra da lei”, mas a prisão, essa ta gravada pra quem quiser ver http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LwwZ3JvTF8 .
Além de me preocupar com os rumos que isso pode tomar, principalmente dadas as entusiásticas opiniões da pequena burguesia de Assis – SP, me preocupo com a cara-de-pau dos liberalistas que falam de surgimento da economia em termos românticos... chegando ao absurdo de abstrair essa racionalidade assassina como resultado de um esforço ético. Curioso como, tendo vivido um século antes de Marx e, portanto, a uma distância histórica muito menor destas leis sanguinárias que obrigavam os camponeses expropriados a venderem seu trabalho por preços ridículos, Adam Smith não se deu ao trabalho de questionar em que medida a ameaça de escravidão, morte e tortura estavam por trás do fato de o padeiro servir-lhe o pão, o açougueiro cortar-lhe a carne e o cervejeiro servir-lhe a bebida... Não, pra que isso... muito mais fácil é fechar-se numa real salinha de universidade e dizer que “não é da benevolência do padeiro, do açougueiro ou do cervejeiro que eu espero que saia o meu jantar, mas sim do empenho deles em promover seu "auto-interesse".
Ele disperdiçou uma chance boa de dizer algo coerente... de fato é uma questão de auto-interesse... só faltou dizer que o auto-interesse aqui era o de ficar vivo, inteiro e o mais livre que fosse possível.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
BRIEF ON “THESES ON FEUERBACH”, by Karl Marx
ABSTRACT ON “THESES ON FEUERBACH”, by Karl Marx
I. Feuerbach’s perception of reality as something to be contemplated excludes the objectivity of human action and avoids his materialism from being revolutionary.
II. To Marx, the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
III. To Marx, the change of structures lays in the individual action.
a. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
IV. Feuerbach points to the duplication of the world into secular and religious, and claims to resolve the religious world through its secular bases, however, Marx says that this process also includes the identification and solution of paradigms of the own secular world, without which it wouldn’t be misused as base for religious purposes.
V. Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation: but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.
VI. Feuerbach deals with religion as if it was something of the human essence, without considering the historical process and that the human essence in itself is the ensemble of social relations.
VII. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.
VIII. Accordin to Marx, all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
IX. For Marx, the highest point of “contemplative materialism” is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.
X. For Marx, the standpoint of old materialism is civil society; and the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.
XI. Marx says: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”.