My experience in reading "Homo Sacer" was, to put it mildly, a frustrating one. Nevertheless, I pushed through, and for the most part, I ultimately understood most of concepts. He certainly has a knack for repeating his arguments. I can say with great confidence that the homo sacer may be killed but not sacrificed. However, I am still confused by the "Being vs. being." The capital letters always throw me off and this is no exception. On page 59, he writes, "That Being abandons the being means: Being dissimulates itself in the being-manifest of the being. And Being itself becomes essentially determined as this withdrawing self-dissimulation." Considering I don't know what the difference betwen Being adn being is, this statement is difficult (no, impossible) for me to grasp. In the paragraph prior, Agamben refers to the Being as "something" and the being as "something else." As descriptive as this may be for some, it means nothing to me. Help, please? What is a Being and how is it not the same as being?
What's awesome about this post is that the blog is formatted in such a way that subject lines can't have capital letters.
--Guattari Hero
Part of the reason for this passage's impenetrability is that it is Agamben/Heidegger's attempt to think outside the form of relation. beings are entities, basically anything you can point to and say that 'it is' - the chair is a being, I am a being, etc. When Agamben writes 'Being' he means something like 'pure' Being, in the sense that it is pure existence independent of reference to any being. Being is very hard to write about without sounding silly and Dr. Seuss-ish. One way of thinking about it would be that 'Being' is what is opposed to 'nothing' in the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' Another way would be to think about beings participating in Being - 'the chair is in Being.'
'Being dissimulates itself in the being-manifest of the being' refers to the impossibility of saying much of anything about Being without recourse to beings. The presence of beings, their 'being-manifest', masks Being in the sense that we experience Being as so many beings - tools ready for use, food to be eaten, objects of calculation, etc - in a 'can't see the forest for the trees' kind of way, although this isn't really accurate because Being isn't the sum of beings. Being, then, *is* this form of abandonment (abandonment to calculation, use), in the same way, Agamben wants to say, that sovereignty *is* the ban.
The challenge then becomes to think this ban not simply in terms of a relation - Being abandons the being to calculation - but abandoment as such - Being is the abandonment of being... Exactly what this means is hard to say, and I'm not totally comfortable my explanation in this last paragraph of the non-relational nature of abandonment, so if anybody has insight into this it would be appreciated.
-aha