"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell criticizing "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.

Orwell said that political prose was formed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that, because this writing was intended to hide the truth rather than express it, the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless. This unclear prose was a "contagion" which had spread even to those who had no intent to hide the truth, and it concealed a writer's thoughts from himself and others. Orwell advocates instead Plain English.

Extracts and analysis

Causes and characteristics of unclear writing

Orwell related what he believed to be a close association between bad prose and oppressive ideology:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

One of Orwell's major points follows:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

The insincerity of the writer perpetuates the decline of the language as people (particularly politicians, Orwell later notes) attempt to disguise their intentions behind euphemisms and convoluted phrasing.

Orwell said that this decline was self-perpetuating. It is easier, he argues, to think with poor English because the language is in decline. And as the language declines, "foolish" thoughts become even easier, reinforcing the original cause:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks [...] English [...] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

"Translation" of Ecclesiastes

To give an example of what he is describing, Orwell "translates" Ecclesiastes 9:11—

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

—into "modern English of the worst sort,"

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

The headmaster's wife at St Cyprian's School, Mrs. Cicely Vaughan Wilkes (nicknamed "Flip"), taught Orwell English and used the same method to illustrate good writing to her pupils. She would use simple passages from the King James Bible and then "translate" them into poor English to show the clarity and brilliance of the original. Walter John Christie, who followed Orwell to Eton, wrote that she preached the virtues of "simplicity, honesty, and avoidance of verbiage", and pointed out that the qualities Flip most prized were later to be seen in Orwell’s writing.

Remedy of Six Rules

Orwell said it was easy for his contemporaries to slip into bad writing of the sort he describes, and says the temptation to use meaningless or hackneyed phrases was like a "packet of aspirins always at one's elbow." In particular, they are always ready to form the writer's thoughts for him to save him the bother of thinking, or writing, clearly. However, he concludes that the progressive decline of the English language is reversible and offers the reader six rules which will help them avoid most of the errors in his previous examples of poor writing:

# Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. # Never use a long word where a short one will do. # If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. # Never use the passive where you can use the active. # Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. # Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell's sixth rule means that the writer should break the previous rules when necessary for a proper sentence. Also, the writer should not use the English language to manipulate or deceive the reader. He mentions that each of the five are used by people who believe in barbarous things but must communicate them to a civil society. John Rodden claims, given that much of Orwell's work was polemical, he sometimes violated these rules and Orwell himself concedes he has no doubt violated some of them in the very essay in which they were included.

Summary

Orwell criticises bad writing habits which spread by imitation. He argues that writers must rid themselves of these habits and think more clearly about what they say because thinking clearly "is a necessary step toward political regeneration."

Orwell chooses five specimen pieces of text, by Harold Laski ("five negatives in 53 words"), Lancelot Hogben (mixed metaphors), an essay on psychology in Politics ("simply meaningless"), a communist pamphlet ("an accumulation of stale phrases") and a reader's letter in Tribune ("words and meaning have parted company"). From these, Orwell identifies a "catalogue of swindles and perversions" which he classifies as "dying metaphors", "operators or verbal false limbs", "pretentious diction" and "meaningless words". (see cliches, prolixity, and weasel words).

Orwell notes that writers of modern prose tend not to write in concrete terms but use a "pretentious latinized style," (compare Anglish) and he compares an original biblical text with a parody in "modern English" to show what he means. Writers find it is easier to gum together long strings of words than to pick words specifically for their meaning. This is particularly the case in political writing when Orwell notes that "[o]rthodoxy ... seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style." Political speech and writing are generally in defence of the indefensible and so lead to a euphemistic inflated style. Thought corrupts language, and language can corrupt thought. Orwell suggests six elementary rules that if followed will prevent the type of faults he illustrates although "one could keep all of them and still write bad English."

Orwell makes it clear that he has "not been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing thought." He also acknowledges his own shortcomings and states "Look back through this essay and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against."

Publication

"Politics and the English Language" was originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon (volume 13, issue 76, pages 252-265).

From the time of his wife's death in March 1945 Orwell had maintained a high work rate, producing some 130 literary contributions, many of them lengthy. Animal Farm had been published in August 1945 and Orwell was experiencing a time of critical and commercial literary success. He was seriously ill in February and was desperate to get away from London to Jura where he wanted to start work on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The essay "Politics and the English Language" was published nearly simultaneously with another of Orwell's essays, "The Prevention of Literature". Both reflect Orwell's concern with truth and how truth depends upon the use of language. Orwell noted the deliberate use of misleading language to hide unpleasant political and military facts and also identified a laxity of language among those he identified as pro-soviet. In The Prevention of Literature he also speculated on the type of literature under a future totalitarian society which he predicted would be formulaic and low grade sensationalism. Around the same time Orwell wrote an unsigned editorial for Polemic in response to an attack from "Modern Quarterly". In this he highlights the double-talk and appalling prose of J. D. Bernal in the same magazine, and cites Edmund Wilson's damnation of the prose of Joseph E. Davies in Mission to Moscow.

Critical reception

In his biography of Orwell, Michael Shelden, an American professor of English, called it "his most important essay on style" although Bernard Crick, an English politics professor made no reference to the work at all in his original biography, reserving his praise for Orwell's Polemic essays which cover a similar political theme. Terry Eagleton praised its demystification of political language although he later became disenchanted with Orwell. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum called the essay "dishonest and stupid", criticizing it for "its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all phrases and word uses that are familiar."

Introductory writing courses frequently cite this essay.

Connection to other works

Readers can observe Orwell's preoccupation with language in protagonist Gordon Comstock's dislike of advertising slogans in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an early work of Orwell's. This preoccupation is also visible in Homage to Catalonia, and continued as an underlying theme of Orwell's work for the years after World War II.

A perfect example of this development is the way the themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One analyst, Michael Shelden, calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers (like those Orwell describes in "Politics and the English Language") because it reduces the number of choices available to them." Developing themes Orwell began exploring in this essay, Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose."

See also

Bibliography of George Orwell

The Elements of Style

Fowler's Modern English Usage

Humphrey Appleby

Logorrhoea

LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii

Obfuscation

Plain English

Anglish

Pleonasm

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

Original text:

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* Complete text with several pages of notes from Orwell's diary that he used to write the essay.

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* Complete essay with search option, which cites source as Horizon, April 1946

Reformatted for online reading and printing

Category:English language Category:Essays by George Orwell Category:1946 works Category:Essays in literary criticism Category:Works originally published in Horizon (magazine)

Coordinates	38°53′51.61″N77°2′11.58″N
Region	Continental Philosophy
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Giorgio Agamben
Birth date	April 22, 1942
Birth place	Rome
School tradition	Aesthetics
Main interests	Aesthetics Political philosophy
Notable ideas	Homo sacer"State of exception""Whatever singularity"
Influences	Aristotle Foucault Benjamin Derrida Heidegger Arendt Bruno Nietzsche Warburg Schmitt

Giorgio Agamben (born 22 April 1942) is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer.

Agamben teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, Evanston, and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.

Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006.

Biography

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote an unpublished thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Stanzas (1977).

Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" (in The End of the Poem) and "Parody" (in Profanations). He has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he collaborated, for a short while, as counsellor of the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and others.

His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Agamben edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and viewed Benjamin's thought as "the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger." In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agamben's own later work were Benjamin's manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History. Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in Agamben's study State of Exception (2003). His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, whom he calls "a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years".

Agamben's political thought was originally founded on his readings of Aristotle's Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and treatise On the Soul, as well as the exegetical traditions concerning these texts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In his later work, Agamben intervenes in the theoretical debates following the publication of Nancy's essay La communauté désoeuvrée (1983), and Maurice Blanchot's response, La communauté inavouable (1983). These texts analyzed the notion of community at a time when the European Community was under debate. Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community (1990). At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who does not react, and "prefers not" to write.

In the Homo Sacer series, Agamben responds to Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. Since 1995 he has been best known for this ongoing project, the volumes of which have been published out of order, and which currently includes :

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995),

State of Exception. Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003),

The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Homo Sacer II, 2 (2007),

The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II, 3 (2008),

Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (1998).

In the projected final volume of the series, Agamben intends to address "the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles." "What I call a form-of-life," he explains, "is a life which can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something like bare life. [...] [H]ere too the concept of privacy comes in to play."

Work

In The Coming Community (1993), Giorgio Agamben writes:

This reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of an homo sacer, reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between 'bare life' (la vita nuda, Gk.ζωή: zoê) and 'a particular mode of life' or 'qualified life.' In Part III, section 7 of Homo Sacer, “The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern”, he evokes the concentration camps of World War II. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The conditions in the camps were "conditio inhumana," and the incarcerated somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the exception laws of Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct.

“In United States criminal law, people accused of committing crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves verbally, but can be compelled to incriminate themselves physically.” In the process of creating a state of exception these effects can compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his voice and represent themselves- the individual has can not only be deprived of their citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. “Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life.” Within the state of exception, the distinction between bios(citizen) and zoe(homo sacer) is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9–11.

Agamben mentions that basic universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside of the law, he is according to Agamben, reduced to 'bare life' in the eyes of the judicial powers. Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has deprived the individual of power, and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one’s humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison also operate outside of the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding not allowing them to die. During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February 2006, The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC , voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breach of the government’s power and was against the rights of the prisoners.

The Coming Community (1993)

In The Coming Community, published in Italian in 1990 and English translation by Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. The beauty and brevity of the text is augmented by the book layout, filled with design, white space and random dots. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of “whatever singularity” as that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”. It is important to note his understanding of “whatever” not as being indifference but based on the Latin translation of “being such that it always matters”

He starts off by describing “The Lovable”

Following the same trend, Agamben employs, amongst others, the following to describe the “watershed of whatever”:

Example – Particular and Universal

Limbo – Blessed and Damned

Homonym – concept and idea

Halo – Potentiality and Actuality

Face – common and proper, genus and individual

Threshold – inside and outside

Coming Community – State & Non-state (humanity)

Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.

Unlike other continental philosophers he does not reject the age-old dichotomies of subject – object, potentiality – actuality etc. outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable.

The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors , he nonetheless shows a concrete example of whatever singularity acting politically:

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998)

In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody—while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.

Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a Homo sacer, although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer was therefore excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (Basileus) – a king, emperor, or president – who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).

Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated. But if Schmitt's aim is to include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on the contrary demonstrates that all life cannot be subsumed by law. As in Homo sacer, the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" (zoe, as opposed to bios: qualified life) is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity – from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (zen), but existing with regard to the good life (eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord with its 'bios') by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception) of what is to remain outside of the political body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition ('zoe'). According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.

Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading "State of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture at European Graduate School describing the eclipse that politics has undergone. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State. He quotes Mommsen, who explains that auctoritas is "less than an order and more than an advice".

While potestas derives from social function, auctoritas "immediately derives from the patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charisma. This is why the tradition ordered, at the king's death, the creation of the sovereign’s wax-double in the funus imaginarium, as Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated in The King's Two Bodies (1957). Hence, it is necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure the continuity of dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas). Moreover, in the person detaining auctoritas – the sovereign – public life and private life have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes.

The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and Nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben:

Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.

Agamben concludes his chapter on "Auctoritas and potestas" writing:

Agamben’s thoughts on the state of emergency leads him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is thin indeed, as rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance. Agamben often reminds that Hitler never abrogated the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the whole duration of the 3rd Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933. Indefinite suspension of law is what characterizes the state of exception. Thus, Agamben connects Greek political philosophy through to the concentration camps of 20th century fascism, and even further, to detainment camps in the likes of Guantanamo Bay or immigration detention centers, such as Bari, Italy, where asylum seekers have been imprisoned in football stadiums. In these kinds of camps, entire zones of exception are being formed: the state of exception becomes a status under which certain categories of people live, a capture of life by right. Sovereign law makes it possible to create entire areas in which the application of the law itself is held suspended, which is the basis of Bush administration's definition of an "enemy combatant".

Interregnum, justitium and nomos empsuchos (the sovereign as "living law")

In the chapter preceding "Auctoritas and potestas", Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of justitium, a technical term referring to the state of exception, declared to cope with tumultus state (rebellion, uprising, riots...), at the end of the Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during interregnum periods:

The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treatise "On law and justice" by pseudo-Archytas, conserved by Stobaeus with Diotogene's treatise on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of legitimacy. This theory must be radically distinguished from natural rights theory or Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" by which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion).

Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign (basileus), who is the law, from the magistrate (archōn), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law (nomos empsuchos), hierarchically superior, and a written law (gramma), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas:

:"I say that all communities are composed of an archōn (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign (ho men empsuchos ho basileus), and the inanimate one is the letter (gramma). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."

Criticism of US response to "9–11"

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to 11 September 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (zoe) and was akin to the tattooing that the Nazis did during World War II.

However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he points out in State of Exception (2005), rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been since then generalized and abused. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has become a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the Jews deportation in France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from identity cards. Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he explains is intrinsically related to the state of exception.

Endnotes and references

Bibliography

Agamben's major books are listed in order of first Italian publication (with the exception of Potentialities, which first appeared in English), and English translations are listed where available. There are translations of most writings in German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There is also an updated list of publications including translations to other languages and links to texts available at his faculty page.

L'uomo senza contenuto (1970). Translated by Lisa Albert as The Man without Content (1999). 0-8047-3554-9

Stanze. La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (1977). Trans. Ronald L. Martinez as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992). 0-8166-2038-5

Infanzia e storia: Distruzione dell'esperienza e origine della storia (1978). Trans. Liz Heron as Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993). 0-86091-645-6

Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività (1982). Trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt as Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1991). ISBN 0-8166-4923-5

Idea della prosa (1985). Trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt as Idea of Prose (1995). ISBN 0-7914-2380-8

La comunità che viene (1990). Trans. Michael Hardt as The Coming Community (1993). ISBN 0-8166-2235-3

Bartleby, la formula della creazione (1993, with Gilles Deleuze). Agamben's essay trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen in Potentialities, below (1999). ISBN 0-8047-3278-7. Deleuze's essay trans. in Deleuze, Essays Clinical and Critical (1997). ISBN 0816625697

Homo Sacer: Il potere soverano e la vita nuda (1995). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). ISBN 0-8047-3218-3

Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica (1996). Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino as Means Without End: Notes of Politics (2000). ISBN 0-8166-3036-4

Categorie italiane. Studi di poetica (1996). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999). ISBN 0-8047-3022-9

Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L'archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III) (1998). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (2002). ISBN 1-890951-17-X

Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (1999). First published in English translation and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen. ISBN 0-8047-3278-7. Published in the original Italian, with additional essays, as La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenza (2005).

Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani (2000). Trans. Patricia Dailey as The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005). ISBN 0-8047-4383-5

L'aperto. L'uomo e l'animale (2002). Trans. Kevin Attell as The Open: Man and Animal (2004). ISBN 0-8047-4738-5

Stato di Eccezione. Homo sacer, 2,1 (2003). Trans. Kevin Attell as State of Exception (2005). ISBN 0-226-00925-4

Profanazioni (2005). Trans. Jeff Fort as Profanations (2008). ISBN 189095182X

Che cos'è un dispositivo? (2006). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9

L'amico (2007). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9

Ninfe (2007).

Il regno e la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo. Homo sacer 2,2 (2007). Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini as The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (forthcoming August 2011). ISBN 978-0804760164

Che cos'è il contemporaneo? (2007). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009). ISBN 0-8047-6230-9

Signatura rerum. Sul Metodo (2008). Trans. Luca di Santo and Kevin Attell as The Signature of All Things: On Method (2009). ISBN 978-1-890951-98-6

Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento. Homo sacer 2,3 (2008). Trans. Adam Kotsko as The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (2011).

Nudità (2009). Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella as Nudities (2010). ISBN 978-0804769501

Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (ed. Emanuele Coccia and Giorgio Agamben). Neripozza, Vicenza 2009.

La Chiesa e il Regno (2010). ISBN 978-887452-226-2.

La ragazza indicibile. Mito e mistero di Kore (2010, with Monica Ferrando.) ISBN 978-8837077174.

Altissima povertà. Regola e forma di vita nel monachesimo (forthcoming, 2011). ISBN 978-8854505452.

Various articles published by Multitudes, available here.

The State of Emergency, extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland Barthes-

Further reading

Calarco, Matthew and Steven DeCaroli, eds. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Clemens, Justin, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, eds. The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

de la Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1. Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoff Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 91-96, 315-334.

Dickinson, Colby. Agamben and Theology. London and New York: T&T; Clark International, 2011. [Forthcoming.]

Geulen, Eva. Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2005.

Kishik, David. The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. [Forthcoming.]

LaCapra, Dominick. "Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben". In History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 144-194.

Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

Murray, Alex. Giorgio Agamben. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

Murray, Alex and Jessica Whyte. The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. [Forthcoming.]

Norris, Andrew, ed. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Ross, Alison, ed. The Agamben Effect. A special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 107, Number 1, Winter 2008.

Wall, Thomas Carl. Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Watkin, William. Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

Zartaloudis, Thanos. Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

Video lectures

Agamben, Giorgio. Aristotle's De Anima and the Division of Life. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. Forms of Power. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio (and Judith Butler). Eichmann, Law and Justice. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. The Problem of Subjectivity. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. Liturgia and the Modern State. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. The Process of the Subject in Michel Foucault. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. Literature and the Paradox of Monasticism. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. The Relation of Rule and Life. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. A Genealogy of Monasticism. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. The Sacrifice in Liturgy. European Graduate School. 2009

Agamben, Giorgio. On Contemporaneity. European Graduate School. 2007

Agamben, Giorgio. The Power and the Glory. Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). 01/11/2007

Agamben, Giorgio. What is a Dispositive? European Graduate School. 2005

Agamben, Giorgio. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand. European Graduate School. 2003.

Agamben, Giorgio. What is a Paradigm. European Graduate School. 2002

See also

Agamben's explanation of Auctoritas

Agamben's response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to decide state exception

Basileus

Homo sacer

Interregnum

Justitium

Unlawful combatants

External links

Giorgio Agamben Faculty Page at European Graduate School

Agamben Entry at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Review of Agamben, Profanations, by Daniel Ross

On Giorgio Agamben's Profanations, by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life

Review of State of Exception, by Brett Neilson

/ The Ripe Fruit of Redemption, by Toni Negri

French

">"État d'exception" de G. Agamben, by Sandra Salomon

Italian

filosofico.net Italian page dedicated to Agamben

Polish

Projekt Agamben

Hebrew

Review of State of Exception, Yehouda Shenhav, Sfarim Haaretz, 23.11.2005.

Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:People from Rome (city) Category:20th-century Italian philosophers Category:Italian political theorists Category:Academics of the Warburg Institute Category:Political philosophers Category:Emergency laws Category:University of Düsseldorf alumni Category:University of Verona faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Northwestern University faculty Category:European Graduate School faculty