Table Of Content

Agamben and Colonialism A series of edited collections forging new connections between contemporary critical theorists and a wide range of research areas, such as critical and cultural theory, gender studies, film, literature, music, philosophy and politics. Series Editors Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong James Williams, University of Dundee Editorial Advisory Board Nick Hewlett Gregg Lambert Todd May John Mullarkey Paul Patton Marc Rölli Alison Ross Kathrin Thiele Frédéric Worms Agamben and Colonialism edited by Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall Badiou and Philosophy edited by Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy Lamelle and Non-Philosophy edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith Forthcoming titles in the series Ranciere and Film edited by Paul Bowman Virilio and Visual Culture edited by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop Visit the Critical Connections website at www.euppublishing.com/series/crcs Agamben and Colonialism Edited by Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall EDINBURGH University Press © editorial matter and organisation Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall, 2012 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRo 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 o 7486 4394 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 o 7486 4393 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 o 74 8643950 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 o 7486 4926 6 (epub) ISBN 978 o 7486 4925 9 (Amazon) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism Simone Bignall and Marcelo Svirsky L Colonial States of Exception 1. Imperialism, Exceptionalism and the Contemporary World Yehouda Shenhav 2. The Management of Anomie: The State of Exception in Postcommunist Russia Sergei Prozorov 3. The Cultural Politics of Exception Marcelo Svirsky II. Colonial Sovereignty 4. Indigenising Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the 'Peculiar5 Status of Native Peoples Mark Rifkin 5. Reading Kenya’s Colonial State of Emergency after Agamben Stephen Morton 6. Colonial Sovereignty, Forms of Life and Liminal Beings in South Africa Stewart Motha IIL Biopolitics and Bare Life 7. Encountering Bare Life in Italian Libya and Colonial Amnesia in Agamben David Atkinson 8. Abandoning Gaza 178 Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir 9. Colonial Histories: Biopolitics and Shantytowns in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area 204 Silvia Grinberg IV. Method, History, Potentiality 10. The Paradigm of Colonialism 229 Leland de la Durantaye 11. ‘The work of men is not durable5: History, Haiti and the Rights of Man 239 Jessica Whyte 12. Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community 261 Simone Bignall Notes on Contributors 285 Index 289 Acknowledgements Like all collections, this work has in many ways been a group effort and we are grateful to the people who have offered assist ance and advice along the way. From the start, Ian Buchanan and James Williams were enthusiastic supporters of the project, which has immeasurably benefited from their early input. We also give our thanks to those individuals working within the fields related to our subject matter, who so generously gave their advice or help at many points along the way: Peter Fitzpatrick, Paul Patton, Daniel McLoughlin, Stewart Motha, Paul Muldoon, Yoni Molad, Andrew Schaap, Ewa Ziarek, Alex Murray and Steven DeCaroli. We offer our very special appreciation to David Atkinson for step ping into the void at short notice. Especially in the final stages of production, we were privileged to receive the assistance of Eliza Wright, Carol MacDonald and the editorial team at Edinburgh University Press. A version of the chapter by Mark Rif kin first appeared in Cultural Critique, 73 (Fall) 2009: 88-124, Copyright© 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota. We thank the author and the University of Minnesota Press for allowing us to reprint this article in the current collection. The chapter by Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir is a revised version of material first published in Hebrew in 2008 by Resling Press. A previous version of Yehouda Shenhav’s chapter first appeared in Hebrew in Theory and Criticism, 29(Fall) 2006: 205-18 and is reproduced with permission of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. We are grateful to the authors and their publishers that we have been able to include English translations of these articles, which appear here as significantly revised versions of the originals. Simone would especially like to thank Greg Dayman and Katija Daly. She also thanks Marcelo Svirsky for inviting her Vll participation in the project. Marcelo would like to thank Simone Bignall for her partnership. Finally, we have been blessed to work with the contributing authors, who have been unfailingly gener ous and responsive to our efforts to shape the collection to its final form: we extend our appreciation and thanks to each. Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism Simone Bignall and Marcelo Svirsky Although Giorgio Agamben is concerned with the origins and development of Western political and legal thought and the ways in which it supports exclusionary structures of sovereign power and governance, he does not explore the ways in which the geopolitical entity of ‘the West5 emerged as such through its imperial domina tion of others. And while he carefully explicates erudite aspects of the determining political thought of the Greeks, with the formal separation of bios and zoë defining the capacity of some subjects to live as citizens, he does not dwell on how this was predicated on the fact of slavery as a condition for the realisation and operation of the polis. Agamben5s references to slavery are made merely in passing - chiefly in the context of his analysis of messianic time and klësis in his discussion of Paul's Letter to the Romans - and they do not reflect upon its material conditions or imperial causes (for example, Agamben 2005b: 12-14, 19ff.; 2004: 37). Likewise, he makes only swift and oblique reference to colonisation and to colonial prison camps (Agamben 1998: 166). His essay Metropolis (2006) describes Agamben’s most focused engagement with tropes of colonial and postcolonial analysis, but here, too, he is not overtly concerned with concrete histories of colonisation and the material legacy of colonial violence on colonised peoples. Italy’s own colonial history, which in the 1930s involved the internment and genocide of the Cyrenaican nomads according to a particular colonial logic of political and legal exception that characterised Italian rule in Libya, is nowhere acknowledged or interrogated in the work of this Italian philosopher. Nor does he engage with the broad field of enquiry defining postcolonial criticism, or with the thinkers and writers of the postcolony. Agamben’s intellectual lineage begins with Aristotle and is drawn almost exclusively from the scholarship of luminary thinkers working (often critically) within the Western tradition, such as Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Somewhat scandalously, Agamben’s thinking on the sovereign exception takes inspiration from the work of Carl Schmitt, the chief juror of the Third Reich. He also is heavily indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, whose historical account of the emer gence of biopolitics he claims to ‘correct’ or ‘complete’ (Agamben 1:998: 9; cf. Fitzpatrick 2005: 56-8; Patton 2007; Derrida 2009: 315-34); his later books pay close attention to the series of lec tures on the topics of power, biopolitics and sovereignty, given by Foucault at the Collège de France during the 1970s (Foucault 2003; 2008). While the influence of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is palpable at many points in his work, Agamben’s interests fall more to the paradigmatic analysis of the exclusions internal to European society and which he sees as underlying total itarian tendencies within Western political society, rather than to investigating the imperial origins and influences that Arendt points to (Arendt 1966: 185-221). Accordingly, although he is often con cerned with the status and treatment of Europe’s oppressed others and the legal anomalies and forms of state-sanctioned violence that make such oppression possible, this concern is largely focused in his discussion of the internment and attempted extermination of the European Jewry in concentration camps during the Second World War. Similarly, although he claims that his work is directed towards finding an answer to the question: ‘What does it mean to act politically?’ (Agamben 2005a: 2), the biopolitical themes he investigates are not considered outside of the circumscribed arena of ‘Western’ politics, as if the ‘West’ can be thought of as sealed off from its defining globalising processes. When Agamben suggests that the camp is the ‘fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ and we must therefore ‘rethink the political space of the West’ (Agamben 1998: 188), this project is conceived without reference to colonialism and so also outside of the critical interven tions that have already been made by colonised peoples engaged in revolutionary retaliation against their oppression by a properly imperial logic of control based upon racial exclusions. This in turn occludes analysis of the important ways in which the very ‘Western’ processes that Agamben is concerned with - the capture of ‘life itself’ within the political realm by way of an ‘inclusive exclusion’, originating with the ancient political separa-