Agamben's Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons

In this paper I would like to give critical consideration to the political claim Giorgio Agamben makes in his contention that the camp is the “fundamental political paradigm of the West.”1 In particular, I would like to treat this contention in relation to the requirements that, I think, render “political theory” a coherent intellectual discipline. Reduced to its most basic form, political theory deals with institutional mechanisms of governance, or, more prosaically, with the rules and authority used to govern collectivities. Every time a part of a collectivity wants to rule over the whole, to use Pierre Clastres’ definition, we must deal with politics.2 As a general point, one would like to see by means of theory behaviors, events, and mechanisms explained, which otherwise would remain obscure. At the very least one expects of theoretical work this contribution to lucidity. Thus there must be an ever-repeated going back to those things that a theory purports to illuminate. I do appreciate fine objections or warnings against naı̈ve realism. Nonetheless, I think this so-called “test of reality” must be accepted in however refined a version one would care to make it, and of course the more refined the better. As an example I can cite Michel Foucault who sets up a dual test for political theory. He asks that political theory be able to speak across “a population of dispersed events,” that it not impose a reductive explanatory principle on complex phenomena; and, further, that alongside its explanatory capacity to render legible a field of “dispersed events,” it must add a willingness to test its hypotheses against real situations.3 This dual test comes out of Foucault’s longstanding concern with methodology. In “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” he identifies as the key obstacle to understanding complex social practices the prior commitment to models of explanation unsuited to what they intend to explain.4 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault follows this insight when he notes that the study of “the juridical structure of society alone” does not get at “the concrete systems of punishment.”5 Similarly, in his Lecture of January 14, 1976, he states that the problems and topics that are central to the canon of political philosophy cannot offer adequate resources for studying the shifts that occurred in the age of disciplinary power. This is because the approach the canon recommends specifically eschews the analysis of how institutions work in favor of the question of defining what constitutes sovereign power.6 I would like to examine Agamben’s propositions about the camp from this perspective; I wish to focus on the explanatory capacity of his political theory. It is a striking feature of Agamben’s approach to politics that his reasoning typically proceeds from extreme cases or threshold states, such as the position of a concentration camp inmate or the juridical aporia of the state of emergency. Such extreme examples provide far more than illustrations of Agamben’s theses about the biopolitical determination of the West. They are, in his view, both the provocation to an explanation for contemporary theory and the definitive test against which the explanatory claims of other political theories are found wanting. In this respect, Agamben uses “limit” cases that are said to test the explanatory adequacy of “traditional” political theory and defends his procedure as more adequate to the requirements of explanation. He takes the rationale for this position from Kierkegaard’s view that the