One of the questions that aha and I wanted to pose for class discussion tomorrow is one that I posed briefly in my 'third world bare life' response to mftc's "oh wow" post: namely, to what extent does Agamben support a 'politicization' of bare life, and what would such a politicization look like?

In 'Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,' he suggests that the rhetoric of 'rights of man,' namely the division between 'human rights' and 'civic rights,' goes wrong in at least two ways: (1) the gap between 'inalienable and sacred rights of man' and 'the rights of the citizen' quickly broadens, with 'active rights' (i.e. civic ones that women, children, foreigners, et al. do not share) being established contra 'passive rights' (130); with refugees being denuded of citizenship and so being denuded of all rights (e.g. genocidal legislation: 'And one of the few rules to which the Nazis constantly adhered during the course of the "Final Solution" was that Jews could be sent to the extermination camps only after they had been denationalized [stripped even of the residual citizenship left to them after the Nuremberg laws]' [132]); and so on; (2) the humanitarian organizations that insist on 'the sacred and inalienable rights of man' (133), even with the best intentions, presuppose the man/citizen division and end up actually reinstituting the category of 'bare life' that sovereignty requires.

More on (2):

'The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations - which today are more and more supported by international commissions - can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life - which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed - and that only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The 'imploring eyes' of the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who 'is now becoming more and more difficult to find alive,' may well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp - which is to say, the pure space of exception - is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master' (133-4).

If the politicization of bare life cleaves 'man' and 'citizen' too neatly, refugee states and general biopolitical oppression result; likewise, if humanitarian rhetoric relies too heavily on the category of bare life, this homo sacralization reestablishes the sovereignty that is founded on it. What Agamben seems to be calling for instead is a 'political humanitarianism,' one that solders 'bare life' and 'civic life' together in such a way that resists easy division. But what does a 'properly politicized' bare life, or just a political humanitarianism, look like? There's a moment on p.153, when Agamben is glossing the theoretical divergence of Heidegger and Nazism, when it seems as though Heideggerian Dasein, as //not// misappropriated by fascism, might serve as the kind of soldering I've been discussing:

'Nazism determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space. In Heidegger, on the other hand, homo sacer - whose very own life is always at issue in its every act - instead becomes Dasein, the inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities, life and world, "whose own Being is at issue in its very Being." If life, in modern biopolitics, is immediately politics, here this unity, which itself has the form of an irrevocable decision, withdraws from every external decision and appears as an //indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to locate something like a bare life//' (my emph.).

What does everyone make of all this? Do 'political humanitarianism,' a rethinking of the division between 'man' and 'citizen,' a rethinking of the rhetoric of 'rights of man,' and a Dasein-like 'indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to locate something like a bare life' all seem like tenable projects? What do we understand by them? Can we think of examples (or does Agamben provide any) that sort of get at the heart of them?

--Guattari Hero