States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t all do it at once): they just don’t like anyone else to kill them

Malcolm Bull

  • State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell
    Chicago, 104 pp, £8.50, January 2005, ISBN 0 226 00925 4

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and, unlike like most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to forego an academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. What is at stake, he explains, is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state’. Fingerprinting makes ‘the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity . . . the body’s biological life’ part of the system of state control. And though it is hard to see how fingerprints, as opposed to the monstrous Other in a passport photo, might constitute an aspect of anyone’s subjectivity, Agamben’s unwillingness to share this information with the American state is still a significant refusal.

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[*] State of Exception is the second in the series. The first, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, was published in English by Stanford in 1998. The third, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, was first published in English by Zone Books in 1999 and reissued by them in paperback in 2002.

[†] It isn’t surprising that Agamben, as the editor of Einaudi’s edition of the works of Walter Benjamin, is struck by the etymological link between iustitium and solstitium, which resonates with Benjamin’s concern with standstills. He also identifies the state of exception with the ‘supplement’ in deconstruction, and with Alain Badiou’s definition of the event as ‘an element of a situation such that its membership in the situation is undecidable from the perspective of the situation’.