nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the
new biopolitical body of humanity.
(Agamben 1998: 8–9)For Agamben, one of the questions is how to produce a notion of bare life that
constitutes a politics but does not weigh it down with state imperatives. But his
answer is pessimistic. Such a revitalization of bare life cannot be born.
Bare life remains included in politics in the form of an exception, that is, as
something that is included solely through an exclusion. How is it possible to
‘politicize’ the ‘natural sweetness of rot’? And first of all does zoéreally need
to be politicized, or is politics not already contained in zoe as its most priceless
centre? The biopolitics of both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass
hedonism and consumerism certainly constitute answers to these questions.
Nevertheless, until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded
on the exception of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain
improvised and immobile and the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship
only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the
society of the spectacle condemns it (Agamben 1998: 8–9).
What Agamben seems to argue for, in part, is a revitalization of the body, in
new forms of life: ‘we are not only, in Foucault’s words, animals whose life as living
beings is at issue in their politics, but also – inversely – citizens whose very politics
is at issue in their natural body’ (Agamben 1998: 188). What this article has argued
is that such an emancipatory politics of bare life, founded in practices such
as contemplation and mysticism, both already exists – and continues to come into
existence which is a ‘product of the double investment of the body by space (the
information coming from the physical world) and the investment of space by
the body (as a certain kind of receiver-encoder of information)’ (Gil 1998: 28).
This is a politics of enhancement of the anticipation and conduct of certain bodily
skills which, at the same time, contains its own premises though the effects of those
skills.
This ‘politics of the half-second delay’ has the potential to expand the bio-
political domain, to make it more than just the site of investment by the state or
investments by transnational capitalism. It may well explain the deep affective
investments that are made by so many in a politics of nature, investments which
move far beyond the cognitive and which are often figured as a restitution of all
that has been lost. Perhaps, though, as this article has argued, the outcome might
be figured more accurately as new appreciations and anticipations of spaces of
embodiment, best understood as a form of magic dependent upon new musics
of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement.
But: ‘Step inside the great outdoors’^13
Let’s not overdo this. There are powerful contra-forces. For there is another politics
of bare life which I have so far only touched on. This is the politics that arises out
of the enormous efforts currently being made to foreground the background of
70 Part I