Conclusions

Summary

The defence given for a form-of-life lived beyond any inscription within the laws and normative boundaries that would otherwise seek to define it is Agamben's most significant and original contribution made through the Homo Sacer series, but it is not the only conclusion that he reaches regarding our modern configurations of politics, ethics, ontology and theology. His genealogical explorations and ontological reformulations of these fields probe deep and lay a solid foundation for the conclusions of this major philosophical series. There is also, for example, his unceasing commentary upon the fiction of sovereignty as what lies beneath every representation or linguistic system. To face the force of sovereignty means to face the potential dissolution of every identity and community, along with each of their political and social dynamics included. Moreover, the sheer prevalence of his remarks on sovereignty is what has caused his critical studies of sovereign power to appear to many as a call to do away with all forms of law, politics, theological or doctrinal claims and even languages (which are no more important ‘than bird song’, as he had put it). Yet if sovereignty is what underlies every existent identity and community, how are we to reimagine our relationship to these most commonly utilised associations?

In order to understand the creativity of Agamben's response, this is precisely where we must keep in mind that what repeatedly appears throughout the series alongside every critique of the structures and representations that do exist in our world is likewise a staunch defence of the idea, of critical, philosophical thought itself, as applicable to every paradigm or field of inquiry. It is the power of contemplation that Agamben has signalled as an essential suspension of activity at the heart of the political. The power of the suspension for any normative order, as with the worker's strike that Benjamin had once found so inspiring, is where we can locate the terrain of abstract thought – the only thing that is capable of remaking reality as we know it from within. The creativity of making a space available for thought itself is what we encounter in the suspension of all activity that otherwise characterises (political, social and economic) life in this world.