I

Since the publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and three related works, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, and State of Exception, the social and political ideas of the Italian literary critic and philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, have spread rapidly.Footnote ¹ In the last decade or so, Agamben's intellectual stock has risen sharply in literary theory, comparative literature,Footnote ² sociology,Footnote ³ international relations theory,Footnote ⁴ history,Footnote ⁵ law, and critical legal theory.Footnote ⁶ His work now commands attention in the highest citadels of European and North American academia.Footnote ⁷ Citations of Agamben abound, as do references to his concept of bare life and to two related distinctions: the distinction between bare life and political life, and the distinction between zoē and bios. Footnote ⁸

No doubt, the current fascination with Agamben's work has something to do with the intoxicating nature of his conclusions. Homo Sacer concludes with the assertion that “[t]oday it is not the city but the camp that is the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West.”Footnote ⁹ Agamben's thesis is that a “biopolitical paradigm” is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Nazi concentration camps, and that it provides the hitherto concealed common link or “inner solidarity” between Nazism and liberalism.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Agamben, the same “paradigm” can explain or illuminate why the post–Second World War period, in spite of the dark shadow cast over it by totalitarianism, has witnessed the gradual diminishment of democratic politics and the irresistible growth of autocratic and executive governance. Agamben is wont to claim, for example, that his theory can throw light on why in the wake of the war on terror apparently liberal democratic states go in for practices such as “extraordinary rendition” and the detainment and torture of “unlawful combatants” at that other camp in Guantanamo Bay.Footnote ¹¹ Whatever else one might think about them, these are audacious and provocative statements, which, when viewed at a low enough level of historical and empirical resolution, appear to chime with recent geopolitical developments in the aftermath of 9/11.

Contra Agamben, I think that the very idea of a single underlying paradigm of Western politics since the Greeks is ridiculous, that his diagnosis of contemporary society is wholly unpersuasive, and that his social theory has no critical purchase whatsoever on the current political state of affairs. The argument I pursue here, however, focuses mainly on the textual evidence on which Agamben bases his thesis of the destiny of Western politics, evidence which consists almost entirely of an erroneous—albeit widespread and hence not yet discredited—reading of Aristotle's Politics. Partly because that reading is so adhesive and influential, it is worth taking another detailed critical look at it, which I do in section III below. In sections IV and V, I attempt, to spell out the consequences for Agamben's wider social and political thought—that is, for the whole project sketched out in his Homo Sacer trilogy and his State of Exception. If I am right, the credibility of the social theory, namely the diagnosis of Western politics set out in Homo Sacer and elsewhere, is closely tied to, and heavily dependent on, the credibility of his reading of Aristotle and of his intellectual history.

II

Before turning to the disputed interpretation of Aristotle, I shall set out in detail the thesis upon which Agamben's diagnosis of the destiny of Western politics rests. It takes the form of an analysis of the paradoxical logic of political sovereignty. Agamben maintains that a single, hidden, biopolitical paradigm, originating in ancient Athens and running through to modern Western democracy, epochally determines and obscures the nature of politics to the present day.Footnote ¹² This “hidden foundation” [il fondamento nascosto] or “hidden paradigm” [il paradigma nascosto], he claims, is characterized by a single logic, captured in the distinction between “bare life” and “politics.”Footnote ¹³ He calls this logic “the logic of exception” by which he means that it is not only a relation of exclusion of the former (“bare life”) by and from the latter (“politics”), and of mutual opposition between the two terms and their referents, but one that is simultaneously an inclusion of the former in the latter.Footnote ¹⁴

This thesis is very abstract. What does it amount to concretely? What does it mean to claim that bare life is simultaneously included within and excluded from politics? We can make the thesis that politics excludes bare life from it, and remains opposed to it, more concrete by construing it as an historical claim about ancient political life. At one level, Agamben means that the political life of citizens in ancient Greece was conducted separately from family life, and thus separately from the women and slave economy, and the material and biological side of social reproduction. By contrast, the modern state both includes and confines these spheres (or the modern manifestations of bare life) within it: hence the thesis that in modernity bare life is both included—confined within political life—while simultaneously being excluded from and opposed to it.Footnote ¹⁵ To expand slightly, Agamben claims that in modern society political sovereignty, by dint of the institutional forms and effects of civilization, is directed against the human being's natural existence and his or her biological and animal functions. Or rather, these functions are maintained in existence, but closely controlled by the juridical, administrative, and executive power of the state. Since its origins in the ancient Greek polis, especially since the advent of modernity, politics, according to Agamben, has been marked by an intensification of the state's regulation, control, and subordination of the biological and somatic aspects of human existence and its management of the economic, material, and instinctual basis of human life.

We can throw a little more light upon Agamben's argument by looking briefly at the different sources from which it is configured. Agamben's thesis is essentially an inference drawn from three different sets of claims.

III

Agamben claims that in its origins, among the Greeks, politics [politica] was conceived as an exercise of a power that was implacably opposed to bare life [la nuda vita], which he understands as a human being's physical, instinctual, biological, and material existence, and which he glosses as “the simple fact of living.”Footnote ³⁶ He maintains that the peculiar opposition between these two forces can be seen in Aristotle's use of two different Greek words for life, zoē (zēn) and bios, which form the terms of an Urdistinction that grounds the distinction between bare life and politics, and from which the social and historical struggle between bare life and political sovereignty unfolds. Agamben further claims that actually existing politics in the ancient world was marked by this peculiar opposition—which is the “foundation of Western democratic politics.”Footnote ³⁷ Whether Agamben's claim is that Aristotle himself laid this foundation in the Politics or rather that Aristotle's Politics testified to the existence of such a foundation among the ancient Greeks is not made clear. Agamben makes now one, now the other claim, and does not adduce any further linguistic or historical evidence.

In any case, Agamben's claim of a distinction between bare life and politics, or zoē and bios, is central to both his diagnosis of what ails Western liberal democratic politics and his etiology of the atrocities of the twentieth century. Furthermore, he claims to be able to trace this distinction back to Aristotle's Politics, and, therefore, to the ancient Greek language and, thus, to actual ancient Greek political culture and society. He asserts that we owe our current political self-conception, and indeed our paradigm of the political, to “the Greeks.”Footnote ³⁸ Agamben bases all these claims on the slender evidence of his reading of a few passages of Aristotle's Politics.

In the beginning of Homo Sacer, Agamben discusses the following sentence from Aristotle's Politics, which he considers to be of crucial and fateful significance.

There are several points to note here. First, Agamben reads Aristotle's contrast in the passage between life (zēn) and the good life (eu zēn) as the original instance of the opposition between bare life and politics. Second, he claims that the contrast Aristotle makes is captured by the semantic distinction between two different Greek words for “life,” namely, “zōē” and “bios.” Third, he takes this sentence as evidence that Aristotle conceives these two distinct kinds of life—“bare life” and “political life”—to be exclusive and mutually opposed and, hence, to exemplify the logic of exception. Fourth, Agamben claims that the distinction between zoē and bios was pandemic in the ancient Greek language. Fifth, he claims that actual politics in the ancient world was marked by this same relation. Finally, Agamben claims both that this passage is “canonical for the political tradition of the West” and that the opposition it contains defines the end of the political community.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this one passage, Agamben claims to have unearthed the hidden biopolitical paradigm of Western politics.

I assert that every one of these claims is either straightforwardly false or at very least unwarranted and misleading. To begin, Agamben's reading focuses on what he says is Aristotle's use of two different words for life in ancient Greek, zoē and bios. Agamben maintains that in Aristotle and in ancient Greek, these words form a conceptual dyad, an uropposition that grounds an array of subsidiary distinctions and oppositions, such as those between bare life/politics, mere life/the good life, voice/speech, and private life/public life.Footnote ⁴²

This assumption clearly departs from Aristotle's usage. Take, for example, the word bios. Agamben notes that bios in Attic Greek has an ethological sense, meaning “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group.”Footnote ⁴³ He implies, though, that the term refers only to human lives.Footnote ⁴⁴ Aristotle entertains two different candidates for the highest form of the good life (which, notoriously, he has some trouble reconciling): the bios theōrētikos, contemplative life, and the bios praktikos, the life of practical virtue.Footnote ⁴⁵ These are, indeed, two ways of living the good life peculiar to humans. A good life achieves the telos of eudaimonia (or “happiness”), which Aristotle defines as “activity of the soul expressing virtue.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although it is true that for Aristotle only human beings (among mortals) are capable of living the life of contemplation and practical virtue, it is not the case that only human beings have “ways of life,” and Aristotle does not reserve the term bios exclusively for humans. Throughout his biological writings (and Aristotle was as much a biologist as a philosopher), he refers to the different “ways of life” (and the different characters or dispositions) of various species of animal.Footnote ⁴⁷

The noun zōon, by contrast, literally means an ensouled, and in this sense living or animated, being. It is more an ontological than an ethological noun. Its primary sense in fourth-century Greek is not “animal,” although many people including Heidegger have claimed that it is.Footnote ⁴⁸ Agamben, to give him credit, notes that the term is applied equally to “animals, men or gods.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The closely cognate noun zōē [ζωή] is more abstract and means life, or living, or (just like bios) way of living.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Aristotle, zōē and zōon do not carry the pejorative connotation they came to have when, much later, they came to denote the life of beings with a value below that of humans, that is, beings that lacked a Christian soul or human dignity, “animals.”Footnote ⁵¹ As Hans Jonas puts it, zōa are ensouled beings in a wide and nonpejorative sense, which excludes plants, but includes animals and gods: the word “does not mean animal (= bestia), but every ensouled (= living) being, excluding plants but including demons, Gods, ensouled stars, indeed the ensouled universe as the greatest and most perfect living being itself.”Footnote ⁵² The human realm, the realm that according to Aristotle constitutes the domain of ethical and political inquiry, is more narrowly restricted than the realm of zōōn, for the human realm is suspended between the beasts below and the gods above. Human beings are distinct from beasts and gods, but at their worst and at their best they have something in common with both.Footnote ⁵³

Agamben maintains that zoē and bios form a dyad in Aristotle's political theory, that they are mutually opposed, and that the latter excludes the former, just like their equivalents: mere life/good life, bare life/political way of life.Footnote ⁵⁴ Considered as a claim about Aristotle's use of language, this is simply untrue. For Aristotle, zōē and bios are not a conceptual pair like dynamis and energeia, nor are they systematically linked in Greek philosophy and political culture, as, for example, physis and nomos. They are just two ordinary polysemous Greek nouns with a slightly different, partially overlapping range of meanings.Footnote ⁵⁵ Certainly, there is no opposition or mutual exclusion between the terms or their referents. The human being, whom Aristotle famously characterizes as a zōon politikon, can lead a practical or a contemplative life (bios), and each animal species has its own distinctive character and way of life.Footnote ⁵⁶ Besides, no responsible analysis of the meaning of these words in Aristotle warrants inferences about the ancient Greek language in general: as Dubreuil points out, Aristotle's Politics is not the entire Greek corpus.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even less can it warrant historical and sociological claims about a relation of opposition and mutual exclusion at the heart of actual Greek political society and culture.

Not only, then, do the words zōē and bios not capture the distinction that Agamben claims exists between bare life and politics, but also it cannot be the case that mere life and the good life in Aristotle are related by mutual opposition, that the latter excludes the former, and that they thus constitute what Agamben calls an exception. To see why none of this can be true, we need to look at the immediate context of passage (i), Politics I, 1 1252b29–31. Book one comprises a narrative account of the development of the polis from its origins in the household and the village, and an account of its elements. It provides an argument for two related theses: that the polis exists by nature tōn phusei hē polis esti and that man is by nature a political animal (hō anthrōpos phusei politikon zōon).Footnote ⁵⁸ Aristotle's argument is that, if all the constituent parts of a whole exist by nature, then a fortiori the whole exists by nature; that the polis (the whole) comprises the household and the village (its parts), and that, therefore, the household and the village exist by nature. This is clear enough from the sentence directly following the one on which Agamben bases his interpretation.

The context alone signals that Aristotle does not and cannot claim that the material and biological origins and constituents of human association (i.e., what Agamben terms “bare life” or “zoē”) are opposed and excluded by its end—what it is by nature and in essence—namely, a polis or political community. Aristotle's narrative of origins of the polis in namely the family, the household, and village supports his argument, not by revealing the essence of the polis—according to Aristotle the essence of a thing lies in its final end not in its beginnings—but by analyzing the underlying natural bases of human association. These are:

1. (i) the natural (unchosen) desire of man and woman to couple;Footnote ⁶⁰

2. (ii) the natural hierarchies of master-slave and man-woman, and their mutual interest of self-preservation;Footnote ⁶¹

3. (iii) the social instinct of naturally gregarious human beings to live in groups among their own kind;Footnote ⁶² and

4. (iv) the economic and material interdependence of beings that are by nature needy, unlike gods and some beasts that are self-sufficing.Footnote ⁶³

Together these make up what Aristotle calls variously—but always in contrast to the good life—“life,” “mere life,” or “life itself.” He does not deny that these are also natural and normal bases of association in the polis, and as such necessary conditions of political life. Indeed, in a passage Agamben himself cites but fails to take into account, Aristotle claims that “human beings congregate together and maintain the political community also for the sake of mere life.” Aristotle only denies that these biological, instinctual, and material bases of association are sufficient conditions of political life.Footnote ⁶⁴ A properly political order has to have, in addition to this material, economic, and instinctual basis, a deeper (and more worthy) basis in citizenship, civic friendship, and justice. The political order proper is something that is inscribed in the constitution, laws, practices, institutions, and the collective life of the polis and instilled in the ethos or character of its individual citizens through education and upbringing.

Aristotle's distinction between mere life and the good life is, then, not captured by the semantic differences between the words zōē and bios. Recall that zōē applies also to the gods, who do not have needs and are not compelled to associate for economic reasons, while bios is applied not just to humans, but also to animals. Furthermore, far from conceiving the relation between mere life and the good life to be one of exclusion or opposition, Aristotle thinks of them as two internally related and continuous, albeit qualitatively distinct, layers of life.Footnote ⁶⁵ Revealingly, he does not even use the term bios in the passage Agamben cites ([i] above) but uses the same word [zēn] in both cases.Footnote ⁶⁶ The relation between the mere life of family and village and the good life of the polis that Aristotle envisages is nicely articulated by A. C. Bradley: each lower level of human social existence is “preparation and material for the higher.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Again, as W. L. Newman puts it, necessity is “the friend, if often the inconsistent friend, of the Good.” The necessary conditions of the polis may “be positive contributors to the End, almost rising to the level of its efficient cause.”Footnote ⁶⁸ That said, necessity does not always conduce to the good and the best. For example, the territory may be unfavorable to the well-being of the polis; and although citizens must have a supply of material goods, the pursuit of these may entice them away from the pursuit of higher goods.Footnote ⁶⁹ Still this relation is anything but one of discontinuity, opposition, and exclusion.

Mere life and the good life, in fact, relate to one another in much the same way that material, moving, formal, and final causes relate to one another in Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics: they cooperate in directing a being toward its essence and inner perfection.Footnote ⁷⁰ Broadly, Aristotle views i–iv above—”life,” “mere life,” or “life itself”—as the efficient cause of the polis; its citizens, territory, walls, and so forth as its material cause; the constitution, laws, and so on as its formal cause; and eudaimonia or the happiness of its citizens and the polis as a whole as its final cause. When all goes according to nature, all four causes push (or pull) in the same direction. Between the necessary and the good is a harmony, and a being traces its natural path from one to the other.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, the polis naturally becomes both all that it can be and all that it truly is. To quote Newman again: “[M]an is started by nature on an inclined plane which carries him in the direction of the Best.”Footnote ⁷² Thus, the assertion that Aristotle claims that mere life is opposed to and excluded from “the good life’” (even where there is simultaneously an inclusion of the one within the other) does not accommodate the argument of the Politics. It finds support neither in the very sentence Agamben adduces as evidence for it nor in the immediate context of that sentence. Moreover, it flatly contradicts Aristotle's views as set out in the Physics and the Metaphysics.

Agamben also claims that Aristotle “defines man as a politikon zōon.”Footnote ⁷³ He is in good company in assuming that for Aristotle “political” is a “specific difference that determines the genus zōon,” for this is a longstanding and widely held view.Footnote ⁷⁴ Foucault, on whose authority in this matter Agamben rather unwisely relies, holds it: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Pace Foucault, however, this is not and cannot be one of Aristotle's various definitions of man.Footnote ⁷⁶ The property of being politikon cannot be the specific difference that determines the genus zōon, for the simple reason that the attribute political, as Aristotle understands it, is not specific to human beings. In his biological writings, Aristotle maintains that there are several different kinds of “political animal.” For example in the History of Animals, he distinguishes between gregarious animals and solitary animals. Some gregarious animals, he notes (not those that merely herd or flock together or swim together in shoals), are political animals.

So political is in the first instance a biological property of a subclass of gregarious animals. Man is a political animal, but he shares this “way of life” with all animals whose living together is characterized by a common activity. This thought is evidenced by the reference to bees and other gregarious animals in Aristotle's alleged “definition”:

The specific difference that determines the genus of political animals is that human beings have logos, for Aristotle claims that “man is the only animal who has speech/reason” [logon de monon anthrōpos echei tōn zōōn] (1253a9).Footnote ⁷⁹ “Logos” here means speech or reason, and Aristotle appears to have both in mind for he says that speech goes beyond mere voice, which other animals have, for indicating pleasure and pain. Furthermore, the purpose of speech is “to make clear what is beneficial and what is harmful, and so also what is just and unjust.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The shared collective endeavor that marks human beings as political animals is organized on the basis of practical reason, which is peculiar to humans and makes them the most political among animals.Footnote ⁸¹ Thus, man's political nature has a biological, instinctual, and material basis, but also a deeper and more specifically human essence. If there is a definition here, it is that man is an animal with speech and reason, a capacity for ordering his political existence on the rational basis of mutual advantage and justice.Footnote ⁸²

In fine, then, we have shown contra Agamben that

1. (i) the terms “zoē” and “bios” do not mean what Agamben says they mean, for there is no general Greek distinction between them of the kind he asserts;

2. (ii) Aristotle's contrast between what he calls variously “life” (zēn)—“life itself” or “mere life”—and “the good life” (eu zēn) in the Politics is not equivalent to Agamben's distinction between “bare life” and “politics,” and cannot be adequately captured by the difference in meaning between the Greek nouns “zōē” and “bios”;

3. (iii) Aristotle does not define man as a political animal, and does not cleanly separate man's animality from his sociality or his political way of living;

4. (iv) Ancient Greek political life was, in all probability, not marked by an all encompassing opposition and exclusion between bare life and politics of the kind Agamben postulates. Aristotle's Politics certainly gives no evidence that it was.

Consequently, there is no evidence in Aristotle's Politics to support any of the central claims Agamben makes in support of his thesis; rather there is evidence against them. Moreover, that counterevidence also weighs against both the assertion that there is a single biopolitical paradigm of Western politics (in Agamben's sense of biopolitics) dating back to the Greeks and against the Heideggerian-sounding claim that the entire Western tradition of politics—and with it our modern political self-conception—rests on a definition in Aristotle. The conception of politics that stems from Aristotle, insofar as there is one, is quite different. Aristotle's Politics shows rather that human beings are by nature cooperative animals that live together most successfully when they are part of a stable political order that works for the common interest. In addition, the physical, biological, and material necessities that drive the productive and cooperative life of the polis conduce, when all goes well (which is not always), to a just political order and to the good life. Contra Agamben, so far as Aristotle is concerned, human nature—even in the physical and biological sense of the term—and the forms of life it brings forth are in no way inimical to political association and its institutional, juridical, and administrative forms. Hence, it makes no sense to read Aristotle Politics as the canonical text of a paradigm of Western politics understood as a perpetual biopolitical struggle of the state and the political order to exclude, confine, and oppose bare life.

IV

Agamben's reading of Aristotle is so unreliable because it is stained by a preexisting agenda, which is not so much inferred from the textual evidence as projected onto it. It is not unheard of for glaring misinterpretations to become powerful and influential. Take the example of the eighteenth-century German classicist Johannes Joachim Winckelmann, who in his essay “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works” famously attributes to Greek sculpture the ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and, furthermore, takes this ideal to hold not just for the plastic arts, and art in general, but for literature and philosophy too. Winckelmann claims to discover this ideal embodied in the Laocoön Group, a sculpture that depicts a man and his two sons vainly struggling to escape the clutches of two monstrous sea snakes.Footnote ⁸³ Winckelmann and his followers were determined to find the ideal of simplicity and serenity embodied in the Laocoön, whatever the evidence of their senses, just as Agamben, spurred on by Arendt and Foucault, is predisposed to discover his biopolitical paradigm in Aristotle's Politics, whatever it says. The truth is that Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nor does he discover the hidden foundation of Western politics and its origin in the relation between bios and zōē. Claims to such discoveries recall Nietzsche's waspish remark about Kant: “When someone hides a thing behind a bush, and then seeks and also finds it just there, there is not a lot to boast about in this seeking and finding.”Footnote ⁸⁵

At this point, supporters of Agamben might claim in his defense that it does not matter whether Agamben gets Aristotle wrong. I dispute this contention. It really does matter that Agamben's reading of Aristotle's Politics makes no sense of the text, no sense of the immediate context of the passages he himself quotes, and makes Aristotle's Politics contradict doctrines laid out in the Metaphysics and the Physics.Footnote ⁸⁶ It matters, in itself, and it matters because, as Dubreuil notes, Agamben's theory, though based on highly specialist material, is not addressed to scholars and specialists of Greek philosophy, and thus not aimed at, and not usually read by, readers who are in a position to verify his claims.Footnote ⁸⁷ Many of his readers will simply take his statements at face value. In the relevant discussions on the web, as Dubreuil has recently noted, and in the growing Agamben literature, the spurious zoē/bios distinction has developed a life of its own. Furthermore, it has solidified into a generally accepted fact about ancient Greek language and culture, independent of any reference even to Agamben's thought let alone Aristotle's.Footnote ⁸⁸

This situation is exacerbated by Agamben's reputation as a classical scholar. The back cover of the English edition of Homo Sacer claims that it is “based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Even Agamben's harshest critics are wont to praise his “dazzling classical erudition.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Whether or not Agamben is a great classical scholar, I leave to others to decide. My objection is that he offers no argument and no textual evidence for most of his interpretative claims. For the most part, he contents himself with ex cathedra assertions that brook no further discussion. Take the following sentence of Homo Sacer: “In the classical world … 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’ (Politics 1252a, 26–35).”Footnote ⁹¹ Such a sentence does not offer itself as a provocation, exaggeration, hypothesis, or a playful or creative reading. It announces itself as a statement of fact, bolstered by the reputation—and implicit claim to authority—of the classical scholar. Yet the passage cited does not begin to support the claim made on its behalf. Agamben's interpretation of Aristotle's Politics is further marred by the fact that he does not cite, and appears not to have consulted, any of the relevant voluminous literature on Aristotle. Rather he rests his interpretation on a passing remark by Foucault and some tendentious observations by Arendt, which have subsequently been exposed and refuted by Aristotle scholars.Footnote ⁹²

This brings us to a second reason why Agamben's misreading matters. Misreadings are the more adhesive for being propounded and repeated by influential figures, which makes it even more important to confront them with the textual evidence. Agamben's misreading is borrowed from Arendt who exerts a powerful influence on much current political philosophy. Yet this was surely one of her worst ideas. Arendt's claim that the biological and animal basis of human association is opposed to and excluded from the realm of politics—as zōē is opposed to and excluded from bios, a claim for which she offers the evidence of the Politics—is entirely colored by her own agenda, and unsupported by the textual evidence. For one thing, Aristotle maintains just the opposite, namely, that the material, biological, and economic bases of human association are continuous with political association and that oikonomia, or household management, is in fact part of political science.Footnote ⁹³ For another, it is dangerous to draw inferences about the political reality of Athenian society (or, as Agamben does, about “the classical world”) on the basis of Aristotle's Politics, which is richly evaluative and in many respects highly critical of Athenian society.Footnote ⁹⁴ Finally, it is, to say the least, bizarre to claim, as Arendt does, that for the Greeks and for Aristotle “everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded” from the political realm.Footnote ⁹⁵ Whatever is necessary to political life cannot be excluded from it, and whatever is useful probably won't be.

One might be tempted to defend Arendt's reading of Aristotle not as an historical and interpretative claim, but as a speculation that is motivated by her attempt to construct a radically anti-instrumental ideal-type of political action, purified of everything social and economic.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such a defense would find support in the observation that Arendt's animus against “the necessary or useful” contains an implicit claim that practical reason in the modern era, after Hobbes, Bentham, and Weber, has atrophied to a merely instrumental rationality, namely, a calculus of the best or most efficient means to given ends. The trouble is, of course, that to enlist Aristotle and the Greeks in the project of separating politics out from merely instrumental calculation is implicitly to saddle them with a modern notion of practical reason that is foreign to their way of thinking. David Wiggins has aptly described this modern conception of practical reason as a “pseudo-rationalistic irrationalism, insidiously propagated … by technocratic persons, which holds that reason has nothing to do with the ends of human life, its only sphere being the efficient realization of specific goals in whose determination or modification argument plays no substantive part.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Seeing that Aristotle had no such narrowly instrumental notion of deliberation and practical reason, he also had no reason to exclude it from the political realm. Thus, this proposed strategy would not exonerate Arendt's readings of Aristotle, indeed, it would impugn them, but it would also relegate their importance below that of the main target of her criticism in The Human Condition: a conception of political action based on a modern technocratic, pseudo-rationalistic, narrowly instrumental notion of praxis.

A defence of Agamben along similar lines would suggest that what is important about Homo Sacer is the analysis and diagnosis of the pathologies of modern politics, not what it says about Aristotle and ancient Greece, which is incidental to, and separable from, that analysis. If it could be shown that Agamben brings to light something important about our current political situation that does not rely on the credential of his reading of Aristotle or the spurious bios/zoē distinction, the damage to his social and political thought would be mitigated.

The trouble facing this line of defense is that the bios/zoē distinction plays too pervasive a role in Agamben's social and political theory to be easily separable from it. One can see this if one compiles a list of the various phenomena that Agamben cites as instances of bare life:

1. (a) Homo sacer;Footnote ⁹⁸

2. (b) the inhabitants of the concentration camps;Footnote ⁹⁹

3. (c) those on whom medical experiments were conducted in the camps (Versuchspersonen);Footnote ¹⁰⁰

4. (d) people who are declared “brain dead”;Footnote ¹⁰¹

5. (e) the sadomasochist and “Sade's entire work (in particular…120 Days of Sodom)”;Footnote ¹⁰²

6. (f) refugees;Footnote ¹⁰³ and

7. (g) the global poor including “the entire population of the Third World.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

This jumble of different phenomena makes up most of the content of Homo Sacer. It is all brought together under the rubric of “bare life” and subjected to the same basic analysis, an analysis that utilizes the distinction between bare life and politics that supposedly rests on and stems from the bios/zoē distinction.

The obvious objection here is that it is unlikely that these different phenomena are all instances of the same thing – “bare life” – and thus analyzable in terms of the same biopolitical paradigm. One has to take great care even when comparing historical phenomena that are superficially alike, as Agamben does when he compares the inhabitants of the concentration camps with the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. The flouting or circumventing of the Geneva Convention and the usual protections it affords prisoners of war is relevantly different from the suspension of constitutional law within a state, and the protection it affords its citizens that is brought about by the declaration of a state of emergency. By designating both of these “states of exception” in the same sense and treating them as instances of the same biopolitical paradigm, Agamben eliminates the crucial differences between international law and constitutional law.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ His conclusions, that “the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” and that “[t]oday it is not the city but the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,” striking as they are, owe most of their plausibility to the leveling of these differences and the low level of historical, empirical, and analytic resolution at which his analysis operates.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Another difficulty facing this proposed line of defense is that Agamben's diagnosis of the modern politics is almost entirely contrastive: it depends on the contrast between ancient and modern politics. Take for example the following passage.

It is hard to tell exactly what Agamben means here. Given his contention that a single biopolitical paradigm straddles two-and-a-half millennia of Western politics, it is natural to read the “if anything” as implying that the only significant difference between ancient and modern democracy is the latter's attempt to make zoē into bios.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Historically, there is little to commend this view of the difference between ancient and modern democracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The point to grasp, though, is that his analysis of both ancient and modern democracy, and of the difference between them, is couched in terms of the spurious bios/zoē distinction.

A second focus of Agamben's theory of modern politics is the relation of private and public life. Once again, he contrasts the relation between public and private in modern political society with that in ancient political communities.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Here again Agamben follows Arendt's view of the Greek household as a private realm of human labor and reproduction, which is opposed to and excluded from the public realm of speech and action, the bios politikos.Footnote ¹¹² However, Agamben's analysis is vitiated by the insistence that the public/private distinction sits flush with, and indeed stems from, the alleged bios/zoē distinction.

Agamben's tendency to think about public and private spheres through the optic of the alleged bios/zoē distinction gives rise to a number of further difficulties. For example, he succumbs to and propagates the myth that there is a single fixed category: “the private” and its counterpart “the public.” The truth is that the meaning of the adjective “private” depends largely on the noun it qualifies. Private parts are not private in the same way that private secretaries or private gardens are private. Consequently, as Raymond Geuss has argued, there is not just one private/public distinction, but rather a whole family of related conceptual distinctions.Footnote ¹¹³ In ancient Greece, notions of privacy were very different from our own. For example, ancient Greek city-states, in contrast to modern states, were marked by pervasive legal regulation and the complete absence of moral and religious freedom. For another, the polis was, though perhaps not a face-to-face society, nonetheless an open air, Mediterranean society. Almost every aspect of life was open to public scrutiny and government regulation.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Finally, as Judith Swanson has shown, Aristotle certainly did not identify the private with the household, and the household with necessity, as Arendt and Agamben maintain. He neither exalted the public realm over the household as a realm of freedom over necessity, nor did he “conceive the household to be radically separate and opposed to the good life offered by the city.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Furthermore, there are good reasons to assume that such public/private distinctions as existed were not opposed and mutually exclusive, and hence not binary. The classical concept of truth and falsity is binary. So are zero and one in computer code. The relation between the household and the various public spheres of ancient Greek society—the council, the assembly, the citizen jury, and the marketplace—is not binary. Neither is the relation of bios and zōē, nor that between what Aristotle calls “mere life” and “the good life.” There are, then, good reasons to reject the idea that Greek thought and Greek political culture were marked by the logic of exception, or that since the Greeks something called the private realm, which Agamben assumes to be equivalent with bare life, has been excluded from and opposed to politics and the public sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This, in turn, throws into question a diagnosis of ancient and modern politics that makes use of a single invariant opposition between private and public.

It turns out, then, that Agamben's diagnosis of modern Western democratic politics in Homo Sacer cannot be salvaged by cutting it free from his reading of Aristotle and his account of ancient politics, because it is not incidental to and separable from that account. The very term “bare life” is, by Agamben's own admission, “the subject” of the book. The spurious distinction between bios and zoē plays too pervasive a role in his social theory for there to be anything of substance left over once it has been set aside.

V

I have argued that Agamben's egregious misreading of Aristotle matters in itself, and, what is more important, that the social and political theory laid out in Homo Sacer and related works is vitiated by this reading. His diagnosis of what is wrong with modern Western politics is closely tied to and heavily dependent upon the alleged bios/zoē distinction. However, another defense of Agamben is possible. One might claim that Agamben's Homo Sacer should be regarded as a literary text, the value of which is largely immune to the fact that its claims are untrue or unwarranted. From this view, the value and significance of Agamben's social and political thought lies not in its explanatory and diagnostic power, but in its practical political upshot. Homo Sacer does have an explicitly political and practical intent. Throughout the work, Agamben holds out the prospect of a “new politics,” and indeed “a completely new politics” that will see the emergence of the political from its concealment and thereby “return thought to its practical calling.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Insofar as he takes on the task of bringing about wholesale political and social change, Agamben situates his work squarely in the tradition of Marxian social theory and early critical theory. The practical aims of Agamben's critical theory are not just refreshingly radical, but self-consciously eschatological.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Unfortunately, Agamben's suggested remedy for the various pathologies of modern politics that he diagnoses fares no better than his diagnosis. Agamben's proposed remedy is a politics that would “take the fundamental bio-political fracture into account” and thus overcome the logic of sovereignty that continues to this day to captivate people and render them “imprisoned and immobile” and bereft of political understanding and agency.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Presumably, he is not claiming that Homo Sacer is such a politics, but rather that a politics informed by the diagnosis laid out in Homo Sacer would have beneficial practical effects. Even so, it is a risky claim. Certainly, if the bios/zoē distinction and the biopolitical paradigm were, as he said, somehow responsible for blinding political agents down through the centuries to the causes of the many calamities, catastrophes, and iniquities that have blighted modern politics, he would then have disclosed something of real social and political importance. However, if the bios/zoē distinction and the biopolitical paradigm do not vouchsafe the deep hidden structure or essence of historical and political actuality and are, as I claim, inventions of the theorist, then overcoming them will make no practical or theoretical difference, because there is nothing to overcome.

Of course, no one would disagree with the laudable practical aims of combating totalitarianism and ending concentration camps, eugenics, world poverty, and even, allowing for poetic license, “the civil war that divides people and cities of the earth.”Footnote ¹²⁰ However, no one needs to read Homo Sacer to know this, and doing so will provide no further insight into how it is to be done, or why. That said, it is a real question whether such eschatological aims are appropriate ones for social theory, or for that matter, academic works of literary criticism. For such aims are the very ones from which postmodernism, in its hostility to teleological grand narratives, turned away, and which, before that, pragmatism jettisoned as illusory metaphysical remnants. Even the critical theorists were forced to give them up. They reluctantly reached the conclusion that the diagnosis of what is wrong with society comprised the lion's share of their work, which is not to level the familiar but glib objection of resignation or quietism. A theory that provides compelling reasons why something is bad and ought to be changed is critical enough.

Although one might regard that retreat from praxis as cause for regret, there were good reasons for it. First, critical social theorists and social philosophers became more respectful of the limitations proper to theory: theorists are rarely in a position to bring about “a completely new politics,” even if they are able to say what the new politics would be. The mature Heidegger, chastened perhaps by his brief and calamitous political engagement of the 1930s, did not thereafter succumb to any such delusion about the power of his own theory, or, if he did, he kept silent about it. Although for different reasons, Adorno and the later Frankfurt School critical theorists did not harbor any illusions that critical theory would deliver social transformation.Footnote ¹²¹ Of course, by criticizing, critics cannot help but to suggest and imply ways in which the object of criticism—society or certain institutional arrangements within it—could escape the criticism. They may even be able to make concrete suggestions as to how, starting from here and now, society can be improved or transformed for the better. However, any implied remedy will have at best the status of advice, which can be taken up and acted upon by the members of the criticized society. Whether it is actually taken up, or whether it falls on deaf ears, or whether it is taken up but fails to be realized successfully for some other reason, none of this is up to the critical theorist.Footnote ¹²²

Moreover, irrespective of the question of the power and capability of theory and theorists to bring about change, there is the question about whether theorists are suitable agents of political change. Habermas, for example, maintains that critical theorists as experts, and usually also academics, should not arrogate to themselves the role of social engineer or agent of political emancipation.Footnote ¹²³ Philosophers can, of course, lobby for practical change like anyone else, but they do so not as experts; they do so as individual citizens. To fail to see this is to mistake the locus of political agency in Western democratic politics, and to revert to a paternalism and epistocracy that is fundamentally antidemocratic. Ironically, no one put this point more tellingly than Hannah Arendt, who explicitly denied that her book, The Human Condition, could offer an answer—by which I take her to mean a practical solution rather than a response—to the problems of modern society it diagnosed. Such answers, she observed, “are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many: they can never lie in theoretical considerations or in the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible”Footnote ¹²⁴