Anidjar, Gil - The Meaning of Life PDF

The Meaning of Life
Author(s): By Gil Anidjar
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Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 697-723
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The Meaning of Life
Gil Anidjar
La vraie vie est ailleurs.
—ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “Lettre du voyant”
Executive number 1: Item six on the agenda: “The Meaning of Life.”
Now, uh, Harry, you’ve had some thoughts on this.
Executive number 2: Yeah, I’ve had a team working on this over the
past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced
to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren’t wearing
enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe, there are
many energy fields, which we cannot normally perceive. Some
energies have a spiritual source, which act upon a person’s soul.
However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox
Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a
process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely
achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from
spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
—Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life (dir. Terry Jones, 1983)
The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the

heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more
precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a
modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simul-
taneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of
history. With and without the science and apparatuses of biology, life
is—it would always have been— biological life (a pleonastic phrase). The
general, hegemonic acceptance of mere life as biological thus appears at
once modern and ancient. It is, at any rate, unproblematic, particularly so
Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer 2011)
© 2011 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/11/3704-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
697

698 Gil Anidjar / The Meaning of Life
when compared to the contested politicization of life, its technologization
(in legal, medical, or natural-scientific terms). What have we done to life
and since when? How should we treat it, relate to it, or alter it? What lives
on, survives, and how? These would be our old/new questions. What life is,
on the other hand, what the life is that, so interrogated, has been annexed
by power—this belongs, first of all and primarily, unequivocally, to the
domain of the biological, even if (especially if) life, human or not, can be
defined, manipulated and cloned, extended and reproduced, transformed,
or simply protected. To summarize: life is old (always biological, it awaited
its modern discovery as such), yet life is new (it is a novel, emergent ob-
ject). Either way, life is biological. However, has it always been that? If the
modernity of biology can be granted, must we not ask nevertheless about
the history, and the meaning, of life? What of the biological meaning, the
becoming-biological, of life? How did we become biocentric?
An even truer pleonasm, however, and the vector of answers that will
here be proposed for reflection, is that life is sacred. The sanctity of life is
not the universal it now seems. Nor is it something produced simply by
sacrifice (of this or that being or group thereof, living or not). Nor, but this
should be obvious, is it easily discoverable in ancient rituals or practices
now curiously and mistakenly conceived as having made sacred their of-
ferings. The sanctity of life corresponds instead to a particular and peculiar
dynamic of sacralization, a crucial moment in a transformative process
that corresponds neither to the bringing about of an entirely new object
nor to the slow seizure of an always already biological—and biologically
conceived—life. Instead, this sacralization, which followed a different line
of periodization, divided the being of a more expansive, and still discern-
ible realm (which, translation aside, may or may not be called life), and
extended this division down to that which confronts us today under the
name life. It fashioned and figured life, it condensed and reduced it into a
highly determined realm, instituting and institutionalizing a particular
division of being that was to become life itself, the attributes of which
would come to be called and identified as biological. Always political, this
sacralization constitutes one thread or moment in a biotheological surge
that has not only made this or that life sacred but has identified life (and its
others), lifted and isolated it, elevated it above all. Life became biological,
G I L A N I D J A R is associate professor in the Department of Religion and the

Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia
University. He is the author of, among other books, The Jew, the Arab: A History
of the Enemy (2003) and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (2008). He is
completing a manuscript entitled Blood: A Critique of Christianity.

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 699
in other words, at the moment it became sacred, in the process of becom-
ing so. How sacred? The historically determined albeit extended attribu-
tion of sacredness to life, to life above all, instituted the parameters
according to which the biological has been isolated and hoisted high. The
sacralization of life must be attended to and understood rather than ac-
cepted as always having been ubiquitous. More than a religion and less
than a universal, its moment remains uninterrogated as a potential and
privileged realm of answers regarding the meaning or meanings now given
to life. Minimally, it should be granted the relative integrity necessary for a
critical inquiry that has yet to take place, for it already constitutes the
ground for life within the limits of biological reason alone, a life that can
anachronistically but not inaccurately, at any rate hegemonically, be called
biological.
The Life of the Author

The arguable crumbling of Max Weber’s strict disciplinary divisions
notwithstanding, one might begin with the following assessment. There
are three modern spheres, three major discursive and institutional fields
that have now placed life at the height of their concerns. These are,
roughly, science (as in medicine and “the life sciences” and everything
beyond it that might go under the heading of biotech), law (Giorgio Agam-
ben’s reformulation of biopolitics as life and law will stand out here, but
consider as well the preeminence of the survivor or the statements of the
right to life in the political imagination from early versions of Homeland
Security in the US Constitution to your friendly, global neighborhood
human rights activist), and economics (sustenance and, again, survival, as
well as production, exchange, and circulation, insurance, and other finan-
cial products). Such broad divisions or mediations of kingdom come may
be capricious, seemingly random,1 but they have accrued more than
enough strength to maintain themselves and persist in their shifty being.
Their provisional assessment, even if partial and perfunctory, should at
any rate suffice to highlight the contingent, arbitrary, and enigmatic frame
and trajectory whereby life—among a vast array of objects, quasi-objects,
structures, systems, or the sheer facts of chance— has emerged as an essen-
tial concept and a principal matter of concern.2
1. Michel Serres, for example, proposes industry, science, and military strategy as “the most
powerful and productive triangle history ever put into place” (Michel Serres, La Traduction,
vol. 3 of Hermès [Paris, 1974], p. 78; my trans.). Note, however, that, proximate as it is, his
explicit concern is “thanatocracy.”
2. “What do we mean by ‘life’ in the first place?” is the way Tom Mitchell asks the question,
as he himself expands the vital field of our all-too-human visions (W. J. T. Mitchell, “Vital

The state of these divisions may also serve to indicate, in a different
register, the not-so-subtle shift we have been witnessing away from Michel
Foucault’s early mapping of “the new empiricities.” In particular, the
emergence of life and “le nouveau nouvel esprit biologique” has shifted
away from the medieval world or even from, say, Stoic asceticism into the
center of our very modern preserve.3 The mapping I am referring to con-
stituted an initial and important step in a series of contributions that oth-
erwise seem to have been jettisoned by Foucault himself. Indeed, and
strikingly so in the light of enduring debates over the antiquity of the
biopolitical— or the history of life—neither Foucault nor his major com-
mentators on the life issue appear to have paused very long to recall The
Birth of the Clinic or, and more importantly for my purposes, to consider
The Order of Things as a still-pertinent resource in tracking the biopolitical
in Foucault’s own work and elsewhere.4 “Though it is true,” Foucault
writes presciently, “that there is little awareness of the fact that ‘life’
reached the threshold of its positivity for the first time with the Leçons
d’anatomie comparée [Cuvier circa 1800]. There is nevertheless at least a
Signs, Cloning Terror,” What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images [Chicago, 2005],
p. 11). Judging by the proliferation of the word life in academic publishing, those who have
asked have been many, and Mark Taylor, who often tells me to get one (a life, I mean), kindly
pointed me in their direction, suggesting that I brush up on my readings, starting with Erwin
Schrodinger, Lynn Margulis, and the Santa Fe Institute. Taylor is right, of course, and he
himself has written eloquently about it; see Mark C. Taylor, “Refiguring Life,” After God
[Chicago, 2007], pp. 313–28, although the whole book is relevant. I do wish however to refrain
from fully joining the biologists and physicists, the jurists and the traders, the experts and
specialists among us in, say, seeking a definition. In their company nonetheless, I would be
meditating, asking at once distractedly, banally, and no doubt anachronistically about another
“astonishing distribution of vitality,” something akin to the good life, unless it is perhaps, and
against biocentrism or the naturalized conatus of our species-being, the good death (Richard
Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living [Minneapolis, 2003], p. 19).
3. I borrow Serres’s wry phrase, the “new novel biological spirit,” from Serres, La
Traduction, p. 60.
4. As one pertinent illustration among many, consider the following: “From the
Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, the knowledge of life was caught up in the
circle of life folded back upon and observing itself; from Bichat onwards it is ‘staggered’ in
relation to life, and separated from it by the uncrossable boundary of death, in the mirror of
which it observes itself” (Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [New York, 1973], pp. 145– 46). Aside from one remark
in “‘Society Must Be Defended’” and a few editorial notes, I could not find any revisiting of The
Order of Things, nor is the book mentioned in this context by Giorgio Agamben, Roberto
Esposito, Nikolas Rose, or other readers and commentators I am aware of, with the notable
exception of Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, “The Biopolitical Imaginary of Species-
being,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26 (Jan. 2009): 1–23.

diffused consciousness of the fact that Western culture began, from that
moment onward, to look at the world of living beings with new eyes.”5
I start therefore with bibliography as allegory and with a history of life;
that is, I wish merely to recall the existence (not to say the life or afterlife)
of “Labor, Life, Language” (chapter 8 of The Order of Things). I do so in
order to underscore the significance of novelty as a crucial attribute of a life
otherwise perceived as primevally enduring. This novelty is most forcefully
inscribed in The Order of Things but recedes and dims in the later work,
which demonstrates a lack of concern with that very novelty (by deploying
the term life, for instance, without revisiting the earlier claim on its mod-
ern emergence or without assessing its semantic or conceptual distinctive-
ness in relation to earlier usages and practices). This, in turn, is meant to
underscore the subtle shift, another becoming, that occurred since the said
awareness dawned (or, rather, didn’t) on “Western culture.” Foucault fa-
mously proposed political economy, biology, and philology as “funda-
mental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless unity the
secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and techniques with
unprecedented objects” (OT, p. 275). And if my opening remarks were
deemed not entirely incorrect, we would appear to have preserved two of
these, substituting in the process (as if this too was a wholly new develop-
ment) law for philology, culture for literature.6 Edward Said certainly did
his utmost to alert us to the fact that such shifts may not quite succeed in
articulating a significant difference. Philology is, after all, another name for
colonial rule.7 And when one follows in The Order of Things (that essential
5. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. pub. (1970;
New York, 2002), p. 306; hereafter abbreviated OT.
6. I merely touch on law in light of its particular pertinence for an understanding of the
biopolitical (read: life) and its equivocality. I have been guided in these waters by Samera
Esmeir and by her compelling inquiry into the human in “The Work of Law in the Age of
Empire: Production of Humanity in Colonial Egypt” (PhD diss., New York University, 2005),
as well as by conversations with Ayça Çubukçu; see Ayça Çubukçu, “Humanity Must Be
Defended” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008). Another introductory account can be
found in Ngaire Naffine, Law’s Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin, and the Legal
Person (Oxford, 2009). It is of course impossible here to engage in a serious way the debates on
the place of law in general or in Foucault in particular, though the latter has been elegantly
summarized and advanced in Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law (New York,
2009).
7. Marc Nichanian powerfully demonstrated that the treatment of philology in Edward
Said’s Orientalism constitutes a radical and extensive coda to Foucault’s The Order of Things, to
which Said himself may have failed to remain faithful. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New
York, 1979), and Marc Nichanian, Le Deuil de la philologie, vol. 2 of Entre l’art et le témoignage:
Littératures arméniennes au vingtième siècle (Genève, 2007), along with Aamir Mufti’s proximate
reading of the institution of literature in his “Orientalism and the Institution of World
Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010): 458 –93. My own, all-too-rapid, allusion to this
immense issue is merely meant to underscore the enduring and overwhelming rarity of an

antecedent to Orientalism) the intricate use and abuse of the word law, the
sacred history, as it were, of the joined labor of life and law is clear.8
Labor, Life, Law

True to what Louis Althusser had described of Montesquieu’s “new
theory of law,” Foucault cites and deploys the word law in a number of
striking, if unthematized, ways. Whether writing of “the law of resem-
blances” (OT, p. 273), “the law of the interdependence of the parts of an
organism” (OT, p. 294), or “the internal laws of grammar” (OT, p. 317),
Foucault closely follows Montesquieu, who had proposed “quite simply to
expel the old version of the word law from the domains which it still held.
And to consecrate the reign of the modern definition—law as a relation—
over the whole extent of beings, from God to stones. ‘In this sense, all
beings have their laws; the Deity his laws, the material world its laws, the
intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his
laws.’”9 So much for the equivocation of the word law, familiar to jurists at
least since H. L. A. Hart read John Austin.10
But what about life? One could in fact read “Labor, Life, Language” as
an extended, albeit unwitting, meditation on law and life, and on the ex-
panded operations (semantic and other) to which they are both subjected.
And recall that Foucault himself pertinently alludes at one point to “naked
existence [l’existence nue] of something like a language” (OT, p. 325). Con-
sider, in lieu of a more protracted commentary, two proximate sentences
that concisely summarize a peculiar crux of the shift to modernity accord-
ing to Foucault. “Perhaps for the first time in Western culture, life is es-
caping from the general laws of being as it is posited and analyzed in
representation. . . . The experience of life is thus posited as the most general
law of beings” (OT, p. 303). Pause, if you will, on the strangely marked, and
somehow opaque, historical and grammatical passage, within the space of
a few lines, from “general laws of being” to the “most general law of beings”
(from “lois générales de l’être” to “la loi la plus générale des êtres”— but
engagement with colonialism in philosophical discussions of the biopolitical (of the theologico-
political, too), Agamben being a convenient, but far from unique, case in point.
8. On the proximate shift to culture as a legal and juridical phenomenon (which did not
follow, but rather accompanied, the rule of philology) in the colonial context, see Karuna
Mantena’s masterful argument in her Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal
Imperialism (Princeton, N.J., 2010).
9. Quoted in Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1982), p. 33.
10. See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961), and John Austin, The Province of
Jurisprudence Determined and the Uses of the Study of Jurisprudence (Indianapolis, 1998).

the French doesn’t really help, does it?). And ask, following still the strict
laws of grammar, whether Foucault (or his subject) is here in the vicinity of
God or of man (or animals, all too often the foil for a crudely anthropo-
centric and reductive sense of life as primarily human life). Who is it, after
all, whose language “ceaselessly foments him in the shadow of his laws”?
Syntactically elusive, Foucault goes on to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, and
we too may “fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we
still believe in grammar” (OT, p. 325).
Law, then, is equivocal—at the very least. Other designators I have
invoked after Foucault, such as science and economy, are fluid or rigid,
too.11 Surely, though, none are as famously equivocal, not in the same
manner, as Aristotle’s being. Can we not ask (granted, a tad immodestly,
but hopefully slightly comically) about the meaning of life? I mean, pre-
cisely, to ask about the equivocations of the word life? I can hardly claim to
have surveyed the entirety of the literature on the topic, but it seems plau-
sible, first, to comment on the largely consensual, biological determination
of the term and then to venture and remark, in this specific context, on the
consistency of a certain lineage.12 If biology is the study of life and the
privileged mode of access to life (who would doubt it?), it may be less
because we have settled on the meaning of life than because we have in-
herited a certain frame of understanding and knowledge, an episteme,
such as Foucault described it for us.13 There is nothing earth-shattering
about this, merely the recognition that if we speak of laws today across so
11. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Dominique Pestre, who traces some of the mazes of
“science” in his Science, argent, et politique: Un Essai d’interprétation (Paris, 2003); on the
economy, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley,
2002).
12. Here I part company with Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, “The Biopolitical Imaginary of
Species-being,” who do not sufficiently insist, it seems to me, on the hegemonic inscription of
the biological as a meaningful and isolatable (if also plastic) field within otherwise widely
divergent rhetorical, philosophical, and political sites or agendas. There is an ontological
challenge, no doubt, but perhaps not enough interrogation of how life comes to trump the
human or even being as a privileged (or, again, isolatable) locus of reflection and action. I am
not arguing, however, that life is no longer equivocal at all, that Foucault does not attend to life
in a sense other than biological. My concern is with the dominant, biological determination of
life in Foucault and elsewhere, a determination that Foucault sees as novel, thus alerting us as
well to the attribute of novelty as constitutive of (biological) life.
13. “Capital can never capture all of life” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude:
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York, 2004], p. 146; hereafter abbreviated M).
Has it not managed to capture a few things uncannily akin to it? Referring to “recent
interpretations of the political centrality of life,” Negri makes the crucial point that he
develop[s] a reading of biopolitics that creates a sort of confused, dangerous, even destruc-
tive magma: a tendency which refers much more to a thanatopolitics, a politics of death,
than to a genuine political affirmation of life. This slippage toward thanatopolitics is in real-
ity permitted and fed by a great ambiguity that we lend to the word “life” itself: under the

vastly different fields it is at least in part because we find ourselves in the
lineage of Montesquieu (and a few others, I take it). But whose legacy is it
that we continue to inherit when we speak, equivocally no doubt— but
insistently in science, law, and economics—about life? What is it that we
still believe when we write— equivocally or not— of life or, as Nikolas Rose
puts it, of “life itself ”?14
André Pichot’s survey on the history of the notion of life, which reads
like a history of natural philosophy combined with a history of medicine,
should help. From Plato and Aristotle, by way of Galen, William Harvey,
and Descartes, to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Claude Bernard, and Charles
Darwin (with whom Pichot closes), we are reminded that “in Antiquity
(even after Aristotle), biology was not truly constituted as a science prac-
ticed by specialists.”15 Indeed, the very term biology is of recent coinage,
forged, Pichot says, by Lamarck and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus.16
Though he proves undeterred by his own historicism (he tells the history
of the notion of life from Plato to NATO), Pichot illustrates the distance
between our biological modernity and ancient views by noting that, with
regard to ancient Mesopotamia for instance, one might have supposed
instead that there existed “a magical and mystical character to the concep-
cover of a biopolitical reflection, we slide in reality to a biological and naturalistic under-

standing of life which takes away all its political power.
(Negri, “The Labor of the Multitude and the Fabric of Biopolitics,” trans. Sara Mayo, Peter
Graefe, and Mark Coté, Mediations 23 [Spring 2008]: 15). But rather than treating this slippage
as the erroneous consequence of a semantic confusion, it seems to me that one might ask about
the advent and history of this “biological and naturalistic understanding of life,” which has
sedimented in language and elsewhere. The qualification of life as “artificial life, a social life”
might conceivably exempt Negri from the account I am trying to elaborate (though I suspect
biologism is here merely replaced by anthropocentrism) (M, p. 193). What is clear is that Negri
(together with Hardt) does maintain life (biopower over, as, and beyond, the multitude [see M,
pp. 224 –25]) as the privileged, all-encompassing, and programmatic category of action and
analysis, “the fundamental category that demonstrates how all of the others are mutually
implicated” (M, p. 282). Is “the entire field of biopolitical existence” captured then (M, p. 157)?
“Nature and life as a whole” (M, p. 183)? “The entire realm of life” (M, p. 285)? Hardt and Negri
repeatedly affirm life, “life in common,” and reinscribe the vital and vitalist paradigm, defining
our age as “the age of biopower and biopolitics,” “the production of life itself” (M, p. 65; and
see, for example, the puzzling suggestion that the “military-industrial complex” be renamed
“military-vital complex” [M, p. 41]).
14. See Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the
Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J., 2007).
15. André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (Paris, 1993), p. 11; my trans.; and compare
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge,
Mass., 1982).
16. See ibid., p. 11 n. 2.

tion of life.”17 But such irrational suppositions are distant from us, as well
as from other, equally thoughtful and monumental, contributions made
by François Jacob and Georges Canguilhem. Their equation of life with the
biological (the organic, physiological, or medical) seems at once historical
and stable, as if secure for all eternity — or at least a segment of it.18 Chang-
ing registers, if somehow drastically, this hegemony of biology (“biology as
ideology,” as Richard Lewontin puts it) is maintained, I think, in Robert
Antelme’s celebrated L’Espèce humaine.19 The meaning of life may consti-
tute an unanswerable question, but the meaning of life does not. For even
in the epochal absence of biologists or other experts and regardless of a
recognizably bounded biological object or field, life is undoubtedly and
unequivocally biological.
To be sure, many have insisted on the constitutive role of multiple
agencies in the meaning of life, in the formation and transformation of life
itself. Twisting, so very slightly, the object of Donna Haraway’s words, we
would have to speak here too of “the bio-politics of a multicultural field.”20
Indeed, and as I mentioned earlier, not only science but law and economics
as well have contributed to the shaping of that which we call life, making it
“not less biological, but all the more biological.”21 The primacy of the
biological is thus by no means granted; rather, it is produced. And there is
no one source responsible for the current understanding of life, a life that
would be beyond equivocation.22 Consider UNESCO’s “Charter of the
17. Ibid., p. 12.

18. See François Jacob, La Logique du vivant: Une Histoire de l’hérédité (Paris, 1970), and
Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie (Paris, 1965). Both of these books, roughly
contemporary with The Order of Things, endorse a similar periodization, which is nothing if not
orthodox. On periodization, see Kathleen Davis’s magisterial study, Periodization and
Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia,
2008), pp. 19, 138 n. 51 (on Foucault in particular).
19. See Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York, 1993).
Robert Antelme famously affirmed “the almost biological claim of belonging to the human
species” as a reaction to Nazi incarceration (Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine [Paris, 1957], p.
11; my trans.). The Francocentrism of this all-too-rapid survey does not diminish, I hope, its
illustrative value.
20. See Donna Haraway, “The Bio-politics of a Multicultural Field,” Primate Visions:
Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York, 1989), pp. 244 –75. I
borrow this particular chapter heading, but the entirety of Haraway’s essential work should be
contended with at more length.
21. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 20.
22. A simplistic illustration might help here. From the carpenter’s perspective, trees may be
potential pieces of furniture, while a printer will instead see the paper in them. This does not
mean that everyone, even furniture or book lovers, will go looking for trees exclusively in the
carpenter’s shop or in bookstores (in the event that such artisanal places still linger in the
neighborhood). The carpenter’s perspective, in other words, may determine the fate of trees,
but it does not define our relationship to trees, much less the tree’s nature. In a proximate
fashion, one might consider looking for life elsewhere than in a biology manual, a test-tube, a

Book” and its call for reading as a “means of participating in the life of the
modern world” as well as Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell’s “tissue
economies”23 (“life is after all one of our most abundant commodities”)24
not to mention the creation of “synthetic life.” All these demonstrate the
active and complex collaborations among Foucault’s “fundamental modes
of knowledge” and power, together with the paradoxical expansion of a
narrow and obtuse empire.
Life is equivocal, too.25 Or at least it should be. Is that not what Foucault
meant when he wrote, for instance, “the human being who spends, wears
out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death” (OT, p. 280)?
There are more things to life than are dreamt of here; there are many lives,
in fact, not all of which are biological (nor for that matter human) in any
strict sense, if at all. And yet, for Foucault himself (if hardly for him alone),
life is and remains one grammatically singular and novel object of a new
regime. Life is first of all one, and it is one among a series of new “quasi-
transcendentals” (OT, p. 272). It is therefore important to recall its lineage
or at least the conditions of its emergence. Foucault ultimately insists that
we must not seek to construe [life and other empiricities] as objects
that imposed themselves from the outside, as though by their own
weight and as a result of some autonomous pressure, upon a body of
court of law, or in Aristotle’s De anima, for that matter; see for example Gareth B. Matthews,
“De anima 2. 2-4 and the Meaning of Life,” in Essays on Aristotle’s “De anima,” ed. Amélie
Oksenberg Rorty and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford, 1992), pp. 185–93.
23. I extract this citation of the UNESCO Charter from Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights,
Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York, 2007); and see
Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late
Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 2006). “One recent estimate suggested that the sale or trade of
human goods from a fully processed donor could yield more than $222,000, though the average
market value is closer to $80,000,” writes Kieran Healy about the human body (“a fully
processed donor”) in another crucial contribution that links the medical and government
establishment with insurance companies and personal ethics (the lack thereof?) (Kieran Healy,
Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs [Chicago, 2006], p. 111).
24. Mark A. Bedau and Mark Triant, “Social and Ethical Implications of Creating Artificial
Cells,” The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory,
ed. Bedau and Emily C. Parke (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 33.
25. Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas, the editors of Biosocialities, Genetics, and the Social
Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities (New York, 2008) seem to recognize this equivocality
when they open their introduction with the suspension of the word life in scare quotes. The
quotes disappear as mysteriously as they first appeared, briefly lifting, perhaps, the undeniable
hold of the “life sciences” on life as we know it and as the volume does, too. Paul Rabinow is of
course correct when he points out, in his afterword to that same volume, that the “referent of
the life sciences” has changed (Paul Rabinow, “Afterword: Concept Work,” in Biosocialities,
Genetics, and the Social Sciences, p. 189). This leaves no doubt though as to what sciences are
(put) in charge.

learning that had ignored them for too long; nor must we see them as
concepts gradually built up, owing to new methods, through the
progress of sciences advancing towards their own rationality. They are
fundamental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless
unity the secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and tech-
niques with unprecedented objects. The constitution of these funda-
mental modes is doubtless buried deep down in the dense
archaeological layers. [OT, p.275]
As an unprecedented object, life, the new life, “life as an unending string
of ‘new beginnings,’” is fundamentally without precedent, at least none
available without using a shovel.26 Such is the (non)lineage within which
we find it and ourselves. Such is our inheritance. Life is not quite an object
that would have been ignored earlier, nor would there have been some
unavoidable evidence. Like labor and language, life did not exist. Life, life
itself, would be without origins. This is true to the extent at least that we are
speaking of life as a fundamental mode of knowledge, a biological unit and
entity. Its integrity is constituted by its status as a quasi-transcendental, by
the co-constitutive agency of our modes of knowledge, those sites of pro-
duction (labor, language, life) that are and remain equally fundamental:
science, law, and economics.27
This Old Life

You might ask, if only because Monty Python did, where the philoso-
phers are in all this.28 Like Foucault himself, they have scarcely been silent,
and there is much to be said for their contributions, from G. W. F. Hegel,
Friedrich Schelling, Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson onward to Martin Hei-
26. Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, 2007), p. 101; hereafter abbreviated CL.
27. In other words, if “reimagining of the political” rightly means “to accord special
significance to the biopolitical incarnation of the political, that is, to the installation of
epistemic and political technics through which ‘human life’ emerges, and future regimes in
which human intelligibility and normativity are shaped,” it seems no less urgent to reimagine
life as well, along with the epistemic and political technologies involved in the emergence of
production of such life as life—and, accessorily, as human life as well (Athena Athanasiou,
“Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity,”
Differences 14, no. 1 [2003]: 143).
28. Tom Mitchell kindly directs me to Michael Thompson’s work, which he discusses in
What Do Pictures Want? An impeccably thorough philosopher, Thompson grants that life must
be more than “human life,” while giving up on the equivocations of so-called ordinary language
(not to mention historicity and figuration) and relinquishing entirely to biological “data” the
grounds of a definition; see Michael Thompson, “The Representation of Life,” in Virtues and
Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, ed. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and
Warren Quinn (Oxford, 1995), pp. 247–96 and Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice
and Practical Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

degger, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida (“I would like to learn to live
finally” is not the least striking among Derrida’s numerous and persistent
lines of interrogation).29 There is Lebensphilosophie, vitalism, and the per-
manence of the biopolitical, but most definitely, and again there is “a new
concept of life.”30 More recently, the polemical tone has risen, along with
yet another augmentation, in, of, and around life in any number of sci-
ences. A lightning rod of sorts for the supple energies of life thus deployed
is, of course, Agamben. But Agamben is not alone, and he himself rightly
enlists Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in order to
elaborate his striking contributions to the meaning of life— or at least
to the history of the meaning of life, which he suggests we may have
forgotten (and forgotten the forgetting, too). Agamben intervenes to
remind us that life is not only novel, as Foucault insisted, but also
ancient, even “immemorial.”31
Who seriously needed to be persuaded? In its numerous figurations and
equivocations, and with all due respect to the rigors of history, life can
hardly be considered an exclusively modern preoccupation. Might it not
be more precise after all to argue that the meaning of life has shifted,
perhaps along the lines suggested by Pichot? He took us from the distant
mists of a “magical and mystical” object toward something over which
science now adjudicates with more reason and sound empirical assurance.
In this context, Agamben’s contribution— hardly dismissive of the history
of biology, medicine, and eugenics—is an attempt to expand our disciplin-
ary gazes. He underscores the role of law, the role of metaphysics even, as
a particular, and particularly pervasive, deployment of law and life, of
politics and life, or, as Claudia Baracchi beautifully puts it, “of myth, life,
29. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), p. xvii. Derrida’s last interview
pursued the same interrogation; see Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean
Birnbaum (Paris, 2005); but his concern with life goes back at least to Edmund Husserl and
Antonin Artaud or to the moment when he addressed “tous les niveaux d’organisation de la vie,
c’est-à-dire de l’économie de la mort” in De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), p. 100; my trans.
Introducing Deleuze, on the other hand, Keith Ansell Pearson writes of a twice modern,
“neglected modern tradition, that of modern biophilosophy” (Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal
Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze [New York, 1999], p. 1).
30. See Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life
(New York, 2006), and Jason M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His
Time (Albany, N.Y., 2003).
31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1998), p. 6; hereafter abbreviated HS. But here I take inspiration from
Derrida’s insistence on the term in his own reading of Agamben in Derrida, The Beast and the
Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette
Michaud, 2 vols. (Chicago, 2009), 1:317.

and war,” through the Western tradition and since its ancient origins.32
Life, Agamben says, does have a lineage, a longer history, origins even. Nor
are these so irretrievably buried in “dense archaeological layers.” Life is
rather found at the heart of Western thought—lodged at its core and at its
roots—waiting to emerge in its full horror, with a little help from our
fiends, as biological—as bare life.33 Such is hardly a radical or even novel
interpretation of Agamben, obviously. On the contrary, it has served as the
precise ground and occasion for intense accusations: Agamben dismisses
history, he renders banal modern atrocities, and he simply misunder-
stands the meaning of life (well, at least, in the original Greek).
What seems to have escaped notice is that Agamben strenuously at-
tempts to pay his dues to the benevolent empire of historicism and to the
Herderian hegemony that accompanies it, to which many have altogether
succumbed (from multiculturalism to the clash of whatever). Agamben’s
attempt, when brought to bear on the debates over the antiquity of the
biopolitical and the novelty of life itself, sheds a paradoxical light on one of
the most striking obfuscations regarding the lineage of the life that is our
inheritance.34
To repeat: although the exclusivity of biology can hardly be granted, the
dominant understanding of life since the eighteenth century at least, has
conceded it. We have relinquished and abandoned ourselves to biology.
Life is now first of all biological. This is not a simple tautology. It corre-
sponds to what Foucault explained and argued, and it remains generally
accepted. Nor is there serious room to deny or underestimate the massive
change (some still call it progress) brought about by the modern life sci-
ences.35 It is only since then that life has been determined by (and somehow
confined to) a biological understanding, sedimented in law and put into
circulation by the discipline of economics, the right-to-life and tissue
economies, and the genealogy of the biopolitical (I schematize, I know).
32. Baracchi effectively breaks the containment field that continues to surround life as the
dominion of the biologically inclined (especially those who, at the Santa Fe Institute and
elsewhere, seek to expand that dominion). She shows us that the history of life (assuming that
history is what we have to do or make) must engage a more expansive terrain that can be
neither strictly material or spiritual. See Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s
“Republic” (Bloomington, Ind., 2002) and Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge,
2008). Pierre Hadot’s work, much of which inspired Foucault, is also pertinent here.
33. Lorenzo Chiesa writes that biopolitics is “nothing else than Agamben’s name for
metaphysics as nihilism” (Lorenzo Chiesa, “Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology,” in The
Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, ed. Chiesa and Alberto Toscano
[Melbourne, 2009], p. 151).
34. See for example Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York, 2006).
35. See Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
(Stanford, Calif., 1997).

These discourses and institutions either share an understanding of life as
biological or partake of a shaping and elevation of a new life, a new bio-
logical (and/or hybrid) form of life, new and emergent forms of life itself.
And though we may easily allow that life is equivocal, that it cannot be
reduced to the biological (and even that such reduction channels and fo-
calizes our fears and hopes at their starkest),36 it remains the case that the
biologization of life (and the politicization of the biological) is the very
novelty that Foucault described and that most of us endorse; it is the nov-
elty of life and its modernity.37 Modernity, one could further assert, is life as
novelty, life as new. Or, as Arendt might put it, modernity is the subjection
of life to the rhythm of the new and renewed, the rhythm of the biological.
It is the subjection of everything to life, elevated.
Yet, and against Foucault (and the rest of the historical profession in its
more rigorous sensibilities to historicity), to claim that the biopolitical— or
whatever else we might want to call law, labor, life— constitutes a new re-
gime does not acknowledge the historical novelty of life itself, that is, of life
as biological. For, as Pichot and numerous others have made impeccably
clear, whereas its precise and scientific discovery may be recent, there is no
impediment to looking for life earlier. Nor is there any reason to search
anywhere else than in biology (the acknowledged nonexistence of the field
and practice of biology in actual history notwithstanding), physiology,
zoology, medicine, and their alleged ancestors and predecessors. There
was never any time, in other words, when life on earth was anything but
biological (the primacy of the biological amounting to the possibility al-
ways already of its being isolated as a given). That is why any history of life
could now never be told otherwise than as a history of biological life, a
history of life itself, or a history of the incessant scientific advances in
physiology, zoology, medicine, biology, and engineering that enabled us to
understand life as it is. Once again, is there any other kind of life, “another
thinking of life”?38
36. As the Schiavo case made clear, in the US, at any rate, the legal reduction of life to the
biological can easily be perceived as having little to do with the life of an organism. See Joshua
E. Perry, “Biopolitics at the Bedside: Proxy Wars and Feeding Tubes,” Journal of Legal Medicine
28 (Apr. 2007): 182, and Medical Futility and the Evaluation of Life-Sustaining Interventions, ed.
Marjorie B. Zucker and Howard D. Zucker (Cambridge, 1997).
37. On the novelty of life in politics, on the emergence of “biopolitics as a recognized field
within political science,” see Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, “Review Article: Biopolitics
after Three Decades—A Balance Sheet,” British Journal of Political Science 28 (July 1998): 559 –71.
38. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:120.

Labor, Love, Life
Of course there is. But I am not seeking to revive tired tropes. I am not
saying, for example, that life is “constructed” from scratch (indeed, the
constructivists among us seem joined at the hip with the essentialists or
whatever they’re called these days, all too often isolating the biological
substrate as a given, fragile or plastic as it may be, upon which culture’s
magic, the black arts of politics, or the miracles of science are performed).39
Nor am I saying that life has been or should be deconstructed. Nor am I
suggesting that I have some privileged access to what the biological is,
suggesting that it is, as in, really. I am merely trying to call attention, on the
one hand, to the well-known biologization of life, its becoming-biological
(in a sense that may well be disputed),40 and to propose that Agamben has
contributed in plausible ways to a richer understanding of life, looking for
its meaning elsewhere than in medical or physio-zoological treatises. Yet,
and equally important, this very contribution (barely acknowledged in the
literature I have come across) is also the very site of the massive obfusca-
tion I have alluded to, an operation for which Agamben alone could hardly
be blamed but that he exemplarily performs nonetheless and for which he
provides a conveniently vivid illustration. He may even be a symptom of
sorts. So let me first attend to the indisputably important aspect of his
contribution, this essential moment in the history of life itself, namely, the
fact that life, before it could be “merely” biological, had to become sacred.
For whatever life had otherwise been, and multifariously, Agamben ex-
39. Bruno Latour most visibly, and a few others before and after him, have taught us better
than that, of course. Still, the biological persists, let us say, rhetorically. But aside from
language, there is labor, and there is science. Here and elsewhere, then, I am trying to turn up
the volume on Claude Meillassoux’s wonderful Mythes et limites de l’anthropologie: Le Sang et
les mots (Lausanne, 2001), on the biological prejudices of anthropology, symmetric and
otherwise, among the disciplines.
40. Robin Blackburn importantly remarks that “images of the good life are menaced by
consumerism and by the increasing commercial colonisation of private life and fragmentation
of the public sphere” (Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death, or, Investing in Life: The History and
Future of Pensions [London, 2002], p. 35). And, indeed, what Bauman calls the “annexation and
colonization of life by the commodity market” is a parallel phenomenon that cannot be blamed
on economic structures alone (though it would be good enough if it were), much like biology is
not the sole site of biologization (CL, p. 62); and see how Bauman describes that
if reduced to its archetypical form of the metabolic cycle of ingesting, digesting and excret-
ing, consumption is a permanent and irremovable condition and aspect of life, bound by
neither time nor history; one of the inseparable elements of biological survival which we,
humans, share with all other living organisms. Seen in that way, the phenomenon of con-
sumption has roots as ancient as living organisms—and most certainly it is a permanent,
integral part of every form of life known from historical narratives and ethnographic re-
ports. [CL, p. 25]

plains, it was not always sacred (and do note this “it” in “it was not always,”
for therein lies the difficulty of our problem):
The principle of the sacredness of life has become so familiar to us
that we seem to forget that classical Greece, to which we owe most of
our ethico-political concepts, not only ignored this principle but did
not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that
we indicate with the single term ‘life.’ Decisive as it is for the origin of
Western politics, the opposition between zoe៮ and bios . . . contains
nothing to make one assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as such.
[HS, p. 66]41
Agamben is therefore agreeing with his critics and (more importantly, no
doubt) with Foucault, acknowledging that life, what we so easily call life,
has a history that is not simply the history of biology and medicine. He is
implicitly disagreeing with Foucault, however, insofar as he sees a different
rupture, minimally an additional chapter, in that more expansive history,
which, I repeat, has little to do with biology. Where Foucault sees life as a
novelty, a becoming-biological, Agamben sees life as an ancient problem,
the site of an older division between biological life (“the simple fact of
living common to all living beings” or zoe៮) and political life (“the form or
way of living proper to an individual or a group” or bios) (HS, p. 1).42
Agamben justifiably falls under one kind of critique here (namely, the
anachronism of the biological, more on which below) because a determin-
ing moment, for him, occurs when life (and not only human life) became
sacred. How determining? Depending on what you make of the centrality
of homo sacer in the history of Western thought and politics, you might say
either significantly so or not at all. But when recalling what life it is that is
qualified by the attribute sacred and in what manner it is so determined
you might consider thinking otherwise (if not necessarily anew).
Nothing much else by way of events happens in Agamben’s profoundly
historical rendering of Western metaphysics between Roman law (and its
sacer esto) and the institution of habeas corpus, which seals the fate of life
in law (and roughly signals the emergence of the biological in Foucault’s
orthodox periodization). Nothing, except that life— understood, once
again, as unequivocally biological—becomes sacred. What was it before-
hand? Agamben suggests that it was no such thing, no thing but life as such
41. Recall that Agamben had earlier identified the sacred as an enigma, “the enigma of a
figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first paradigm of the
political realm of the West” (HS, p. 9).
42. Agamben goes on strangely to write that “the classical world” was in fact familiar “with
the idea [of] natural life, simple zoe៮ as such” (HS, p. 1; emphasis added).

and that ancient societies, “like classical Greece, celebrated animal sacri-
fices and occasionally immolated human victims” (HS, p. 66). The Greeks
practiced sacrifice alright, though here is not the place to argue over what
that might mean, what sacrifice is or could be.43 More pertinent for our
purpose is that sacrifice was hardly confined to the living, much less an
instrument for the definition of the living or its elevation above all. Did
sacrifice make anything sacred? This can be seriously doubted, but who-
ever or whatever the subject of sacrifice is (executor, victim, audience or
addressee, all or none of the above) life was not it and certainly not life as
such. For the Greeks, at any rate, “life in itself was not considered sacred”
(HS, p. 66). So what in heaven or on earth happened? As I have already
said, nothing at all except that “life became sacred” (HS, p. 66). You could
say that, in this transition, we are silently witnessing, by way of an uncer-
tain feedback loop, the birth of the biotheological. And so I ask again: how
so? And the answer is: “through a series of rituals whose aim was precisely
to separate life from its profane context.”44 Now that is less than the ex-
pansive account we might have expected of an epochal shift, of the emer-
gence of a brand new biotheological object. But what exactly were you
expecting? The Spanish Inquisition? Well-rounded characters, perhaps? A
tragic plot? A catastrophe (in the technical sense, obviously)? Still, you
have a right to wonder: when and how did this arresting development
happen to have taken place? And what was its nature? The laws of its
occurrence? Agamben does not say, nor does he provide the rudiments of
an answer. And therein lies the obfuscation.
Let us get closer and a bit personal and return to bibliography as alle-
gory. Agamben was astonished that Foucault had ignored Arendt’s The
Human Condition: “Almost twenty years before The History of Sexuality,
Arendt had already analyzed the process that brings homo laborans—and,
with it, biological life as such— gradually to occupy the very center of the
43. Speaking of equivocation, it might be pertinent to recall that the word sacrifice has a
singular history, that it constitutes an overdetermined translation of numerous ancient terms in
a vast number of languages. Otherwise put, theories of sacrifice—from gift giving to expiation,
communion, exorcism, communication, and consecration— continue to be debatable enough
not to settle on a notion that sacrifice is the sacralization of life (as opposed, minimally, to the
sacralization of the world or parts of it, human and not, living or not); see for example, Jill
Robbins, “Sacrifice,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Taylor (Chicago, 1998), pp. 285–
97, and Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader, ed. Jeffrey Carter (London, 2003).
44. The complete passage thus reads: “even in those societies that, like classical Greece,
celebrated animal sacrifices and occasionally immolated human victims, life in itself was not
considered sacred. Life became sacred only through a series of rituals whose aim was precisely
to separate life from its profane context” (HS, p. 66); this makes clear that acts like animal
sacrifice, human sacrifice (or even death in combat), if they sacralized anything at all, did not
sacralize life. Such sacralization, in Agamben’s rendering, happened later and otherwise.

political scene of modernity” (HS, p. 3; emphasis added). Recall that
Agamben will go on to disagree with the dating of that process, though not
with its characterization as having to do with “biological life as such.”
Arendt, Agamben continues (underscoring that this is her position), “at-
tributes the transformation and decadence of the political realm in mod-
ern societies to this very primacy of natural life over political action” (HS,
pp. 3– 4). And now for the finishing off of Foucault’s reading skills, with an
apologetic touch: “That Foucault was able to begin his study of biopolitics
with no reference to Arendt’s work (which remains, even today, practically
without continuation) bears witness to the difficulties and resistances that
thinking had to encounter in this area” (HS, p. 4). Tell me about it. But
Agamben doesn’t tell, and he rather quickly moves ahead, going on in turn
to fault Arendt herself for having ignored her own searching lines of
thought, the continuities between The Human Condition and The Origins
of Totalitarianism. But what does that have to do with bare life, which is
also, you remember, sacred life? What does all this have to do with the
becoming-sacred of life as such?
Funny you should ask (I did mention the comic mode) because, chance
would have it, there are those, they are not many, who think that the rise of
life as sacred has to do very precisely with the “transformation and deca-
dence of the political realm in modern societies,” the emergence of homo
laborans and the establishment of the “primacy of natural life over political
action.” This process has everything to do with Arendt and The Human
Condition, where that process is carefully described as “a victory of the
animal laborans” and the “reason why life asserted itself as the ultimate
point of reference in the modern age and has remained the highest good of
modern society.”45 What precisely is that reason? It is the “modern rever-
sal” whereby life came to be placed above all else (life über alles, if you will);
that reversal “operated within the fabric of a Christian society whose fun-
damental belief in the sacredness of life has survived, and has even re-
mained completely unshaken by, secularization, and the general decline of
the Christian faith” (HC, p. 314; emphasis added). The reason why life has
risen to the top of our priorities and has become the matter of our concerns
is Christianity.46 Christianity made political activity (in the Arendtian
45. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago, 1998), pp. 313–14; hereafter
abbreviated HC.
46. I should point out that while not aiming to be exhaustive, Samuel Moyn provides a
most subtle account of Arendt on Christianity, but he quickly glosses over The Human
Condition; see Samuel Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” New German Critique 35 (Fall
2008): 71–96, and, for a more extended, if puzzling, discussion of the lines I quote here, see
Elizabeth Brient, “Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt on the ‘Unworldly Worldliness’ of the
Modern Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (July 2000): esp. 515, 526 –27.

sense) sink; Christianity has made the world (which political activity
makes) “even more perishable than man,” a gathering of wasted (but sa-
cred) lives. Christianity substituted “individual life for the political life of
the body politic” (HC, p. 315). Christianity made us biocentric.47
What is the point of all this? “The point is that Christianity . . . always
insisted that life, though it had no longer a final end, still has a definite
beginning” (HC, p. 316). Life is sacred, but also it is essentially new. A
permanent novelty with no lineage or genealogy, life is always, and exclu-
sively, the beginning— glorious or not. And indeed “life on earth may be
only the first and the most miserable stage of eternal life; it still is life,” life
after all, and above all. And “only when the immortality of individual life
became the central creed of Western mankind, that is, only with the rise of
Christianity, did life on earth also become the highest good of man” (HC,
p. 316). Lest you think otherwise, let me remind you that we have not left
the vicinity so aptly described by Foucault. We are far from religion and
from sacrifice and closer to “labor, language, life,” closer, that is, to the
biotheological shift that leaves secularization in its tracks (I mentioned
earlier that Foucault’s periodization was utterly orthodox, as is Arendt’s).
We are still with Christianity and with the biological as theological:
Christian emphasis on the sacredness of life tended to level out the
ancient distinctions and articulations within the vita activa; it tended
to view labor, work, and action as equally subject to the necessity of
present life. At the same time it helped to free the laboring activity,
that is, whatever is necessary to sustain the biological process itself,
from some of the contempt in which antiquity had held it. . . . One
could no longer with Plato despise the slave for not having committed
suicide rather than submit to a master, for to stay alive under all cir-
cumstances had become a holy duty, and suicide was regarded as
worse than murder. Not the murderer, but he who had put an end to
his own life was refused a Christian burial. [HC, p. 316]
Labor, language, and life. That is, if you prefer, labor, law (I mean love, of
course), and life. But what difference does it make? Although it has hardly
47. Alpar Losonc, from the University of Novi Sad, kindly read an earlier version of this
essay and pointed me to “the biocentric philosophy” elaborated and critiqued by Ludwig
Klages. It is hardly sufficient to thank him here—I do owe him the word biocentric and more—
but I am hoping to do better on another occasion. Rosi Braidotti deploys a proximate term,
arguing that “living matter itself becomes the subject and not the object of enquiry and this
shift towards a biocentred perspective affects formation of social subjects” (Rosi Braidotti,
“Locating Deleuze’s Eco-Philosophy between Bio/Zoe-Power and Necro-Politics,” in Deleuze
and Law: Forensic Futures, ed. Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, and Patrick Hanafin [New York,
2009], p. 97).

provoked serious or extended discussion (not that Arendt, along with
Marx before her, wasn’t trying), the argument about (and the obfuscation
of) the sacredness of life is not quite the single-handed work of Agamben.
He only plays, as I mentioned above, the role of a convenient foil. Since
Homo Sacer he has in fact powerfully engaged with the Christian inheri-
tance of economic theology (labor, life),48 as did Foucault, by the way,
when describing modern governmentality as the persistence of “pastoral
power.”49 For what matters here is the sacredness of life itself, the singular
and highly contingent, if also older, understanding according to which
life—sacred life—is institutionalized as biological and where the survivor
has long become the ultimate political ideal, the ideal (life above all)
whereby the world is not what must be made through political action but
what must rather be survived.50 What matters, then, is that with Christi-
anity, as Christianity, the modern world continues “to operate under the
assumption that life, and not the world, is the highest good of man” (HC,
p. 318). Rather than a world inhabited or made, there is life preserved, a life
that must be lived and preserved, protected at all costs (alright, almost at all
costs), life as such no matter what— hence Sputnik or the recent bombing
of the moon. For life is sacred, more sacred than the world itself, more
sacred than anything, and it is sacred even if (and perhaps precisely be-
cause, precisely when) it is bare of all attributes, political or others, and
utterly abandoned.51 This is a world of saviors and survivors only.52 In it,
48. See Agamben, Il regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del
governo (Vicenza, 2007), and, for different approaches to Agamben’s rapport to Christianity,
Chiesa, “Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology,” and Jeffrey S. Librett, “From the Sacrifice of
the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of Metaphysics,” Diacritics
37 (Summer–Fall 2007): 11–33.
49. See Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978
(Paris, 2004). There, Foucault expresses reservations regarding the use of the word Christianity,
but he quickly gets over it. He is thus unambiguous in his description of “a religion that claims
in that manner to a daily government of men in their real life [dans leur vie réelle] under the
pretext of their salvation and on the scale of humanity as a whole, that is the Church and we
have no other such example in the history of societies. . . . The Christian religion as the
Christian Church, this pastoral power was no doubt transformed over the course of fifteen
centuries of history. No doubt it was displaced, dislocated, transformed and integrated into
different shapes, but at bottom it was never truly abolished” (pp. 151–52; my trans.).
50. Consider the resonances here with Elias Canetti’s critique of survival, of the figure of
the survivor in politics and in the political imagination in his Crowds and Power, trans. Carol
Stewart (New York, 1984), esp. 227–78. I have discussed Canetti more extensively in Anidjar,
“When Killers Become Victims: Anti-Semitism and Its Critics,” Cosmopolis 3 (2007):
bit.ly/g0GGj3.
51. For an alternative and pertinent account of the emergence of the sacred, see Talal Asad,
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 2003), pp. 30 –37.
52. See Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
(New York, 2009).

sacred life is bare life, as Agamben, and Marx and Arendt before him,
impeccably explained. Whether exalted or abandoned, life is the biotheo-
logical ground, the elevated ground, that is or constitutes its naked bearer;
God protect him or her—for who else will? Oh, right. The saviors. The
Church and its missionaries, Amnesty International, the US military, and
last but not least “civil society.” Speaking of which, have you read “On the
Christian Question” lately?
Civil society reaches its completion in the Christian world. Only un-
der the rule of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral
and theoretical relationships external to man, could civil society sepa-
rate itself completely from political life, tear apart all the species-bond
of man, substitute egoism and selfish need for those bonds and dis-
solve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals con-
fronting each other in enmity.53
Agamben (along with a large number of other people, among whom are
most of his critics) steps lightly over a few intramonotheistic disputations,
Barcelona and beyond, and (accessorily) over Arendt herself. And not only
that, between Roman law and the habeas corpus, Agamben skips over
Christianity as a whole, dismissing the Christian contribution to, well,
political theology (I was going to write, “to the bio-theo-political” but it
seems silly to propose yet another moniker for Christianity). He jumps
over the very tradition—labor, love, and life—that Marx, and after him
Carl Schmitt (and Ernst Kantorowicz) and arguably Foucault as well, af-
firmed as Christian, the very tradition Marcel Gauchet too affirms as
Christian, and the very Christianity that made life at once sacred and bio-
logical, in other words, biotheological. I shall not quibble here over the
undoubtedly trivial matter of a final evaluation, of the precise nature (re-
ligious, legal, scientific, cultural, political—none, or all, of the above) these
eminent people attribute to Christianity. More than a religion, less than
universal.
Is this at all plausible? Is it not rather another huge conspiracy against
Christianity (admittedly conceived in somehow broader terms than per-
secutedchurch.org)? Toward an answer, one might have expected from
Agamben some extended uptake of Benjamin’s suggestion. “It might be
well worth while,” Benjamin famously wrote, “to track down the origin of
the dogma of the sacredness of life.”54 In a way, this is what both Arendt
53. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and
Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 240.
54. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical

and Agamben have done, at different levels of explicitness and elaboration.
After all, what Benjamin calls “mere life” or “bare life” (das blo␤e Leben)
has everything to do with “words whose ambiguity is readily dispelled,”
words like freedom and life (“CV,” p. 299). And recall as well that, for
Benjamin (as for Arendt and Agamben), the position debated is not so
opaque.
Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in
him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not
even with the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is
(or that life in him that is identically present in earthly life, death, and
afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vul-
nerable to injury by his fellow men. [“CV,” p. 299]
Away from biological experiments, indeed, in persistent opposition to
their legalized rule, financial backing, and underlying prejudices, Agam-
ben’s inquiry into “the dogma of the sacredness of life,” its intimate rela-
tion to “mere life,” should have contended with Christianity (Benjamin
refers to this dogma as “the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western
tradition” [“CV,” p. 299], while Arendt suggests it is closer to its first such
attempt, but the first might be last, or something). It should have provided
the rudiments of a critique of Christianity or at least something other than
the massive obfuscation, minimally, the strange and considerable avoid-
ance of Christianity we continue to witness (many, all too many, are gen-
erously willing to extend the critique to all religions, some more than
others, even to pagan or “national” religions, as if the discriminating work
of understanding our inheritance, the Christian question, had already
been done). And recall, if I have not said it enough, that the foregoing
argument should make clear that by Christianity something quite different
is meant than a mere religion, something finite but far more expansive,
something that (Christian apologetics, à la Ratzinger, notwithstanding) far
exceeds the usual suspects of “secular critique.”
Obviously, Arendt too is not completely alone. In Bı́os, for instance,
Roberto Esposito recognized the problem with sound acuity, even if he did
not quite bring it to the last meal, I mean, to the main table.55 It should be
obvious, at any rate, that I am hardly saying anything that has not already
Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, 1978), p. 299; hereafter
abbreviated “CV.”
55. See Roberto Esposito, Bı́os: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell
(Minneapolis, 2008); hereafter abbreviated B.

been said, explicitly or implicitly, albeit marginally, in an open source kind
of way. This is not about the new on its way to more progress. Referring to
Arendt, Esposito acknowledges that “Christianity constitutes the decisive
step within such an interpretive scheme, representing in fact the original
horizon in which the concept of the sacredness of individual life is affirmed
for the first time” (B, p. 149). Interestingly, it might be notable that Es-
posito insists from the very beginning on, well, the beginning, on the “spe-
cifically modern genesis” of biopolitics, thereby disagreeing with Agamben
(B, p. 9). It is no accident, at any rate, that Esposito deems the “body
politic” no more than an “influential metaphor” (B, p. 165); that he affirms
and endorses biotechnology as “a non-Christian form of incarnation” (B,
p. 168); that his understanding of modernity and of the biopolitical is
articulated as “the biologization of law,” but in a good way (B, p. 183).56 A
more extended discussion will have to wait of Esposito and of the unfin-
ished project of Christianity (le rôle positif du colonialisme, as they put it in
France), indeed, of what Kenneth Cauthen enthusiastically called some
time ago Christian Biopolitics: A Credo and Strategy for the Future.57
There is no such thing, then, as a merely biological life. We have never
been biological, one might add, à la Latour. Which is to say (if I may
continue with the banality of it all) that whatever life is it is not biological.
True, biology and law (and a few other actors and actor networks, partic-
ipatory democrats and all) have exercised considerable effort to bring life
to life, as it were. Yet life is not —not unless it is isolated and produced as
life itself, the life that, exalted at the same time as it is offered to the knife (of
the surgeon, military lab worker, and atom or gene splicer, not to mention
your local judicial activist), takes precedence in the bloody imaginations of
doers, makers, producers, and other do-gooders.58 Put another way, one
could say that life is not enough, that there is more to life than so-called
56. From the author of Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans.
Campbell (Stanford, Calif., 2009), one might have, on that “metaphorical” account, wished for
some engagement with, say, Louis Marin, Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore,
1989), or Henri Cardinal de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the
Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds, Richard Price, and Christopher Stevens (1949; Notre
Dame, Ind., 2006), and its famous sequel, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A
Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; Princeton, N.J., 1997), and perhaps even with
Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
57. See Kenneth Cauthen, Christian Biopolitics: A Credo and Strategy for the Future
(Nashville, 1971)—a trailblazer of sorts, considering the date of publication.
58. “Humanity is never naked,” write Hardt and Negri, “never characterized by bare life,
but rather always dressed, endowed with not only histories of suffering but also capacities to
produce and the power to rebel” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth [Cambridge, Mass., 2009],
p. 53). I take it this is another way of saying (the anthropocentrism visible here
notwithstanding) that life is not.

living. Being and the world, to paraphrase Benjamin and his critique of
biocentrism, cannot be said to fully coincide with life, with the mere life in
or around them, no more than with any other of their conditions, attri-
butes, and isolated qualities. More modestly, and since it is hardly a matter
of fact, much less a matter of choice, life as such probably deserves even less
to be a matter of concern. Let it be acknowledged instead as a matter of
Christian concern, at least, while those otherwise inclined sustain or en-
tertain other manners and customs. This (should it need to be said) is not
to make death, murder, and even less mass murder (you know, all for the
salvation of their souls, their own good, and the triumph of democracy the
world over) any less grave an offense. On the contrary. To consider murder
outside of the sanctity of life might lead us to acknowledge something like
a disputation, a clash of theologies (should you want to hang on to that
word, too), and the power of revenge.
Speaking of which, and since I have suggested that Christianity—as the
religion of a love still preached— has been the massive object, the hege-
monic subject obfuscating “discussions” of life, what, for instance, of the
sanctity of Jewish life? Obviously, no full discussion of the matter is possi-
ble here since it would lead us back to the equivocations of the word law,
which are slightly more conceivable than the word life (that is somehow
less sedimented, while other forms of law, as opposed to other forms of life,
have maintained a loose, slightly less fragile, institutional existence).59
There are those who will claim that there are monotheisms out there that
have long affirmed the sanctity of life just as forcefully as Christianity has.
Other religions might have done the same, too. But what I have been trying
to point to in this essay is a certain failure of a critique of Christianity— call
it the persistence of the Christian question. The critique of Christianity, in
other words, its decolonization, is still ahead of us. And it cannot be es-
caped by a glorified version of the argument that others did too, uh-huh!
It’s not only us, nuh-uh! They did not, and it is. But that does not exempt
me, of course, from providing the rudiments of an answer, the elements of
an alternative. Let us start at the beginning then. Or very close to it. Let us
start with blood, which Esposito (in contradiction with himself on a num-
ber of counts) calls “a biological given” (B, p. 183). Let us start with life or
something like it, according to Noah:
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave
you green plants, I give you everything. Only, you shall not eat flesh
59. For a pertinent discussion of law, and the possibility and impossibility of its
translations, see Wael B. Hallaq’s indispensable Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations
(Cambridge, 2009).

with its life, that is, its blood. For your own lifeblood I will surely re-
quire a reckoning: from every animal I will require it and from hu-
man beings, each one for the blood of another, I will require a
reckoning for human life. Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a
human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God
made humankind. [Gen. 9:3– 6]
Note first that I am reading, not as a woman, unfortunately (this fashion is
old), but as a kind of Christian, sola scriptura and all that (that is also why
I quote from the New Revised Standard Version). It will have to do for the
purpose of the exercise. Note as well that reading as a Christian does not
mean merely ignoring a long tradition of commentaries that, hardly dis-
tinct from “the text as such,” have ended up placing the Bible—Holy
Writ—in a definite subordinate position (that which is sacred or holy is
not always, we know, to be envied). It does mean inheriting the unknown
power of a different kind of commentary that has enforced its obviousness
as “the literal.”60 Take life, for example. How would you separate it, in
Genesis, from the law as you find it in the law (and not with it or under it)?
Aside from the fact that it sustains a number of interpretations that are
hardly biologizing (life is the law, the law is the life), it is that which con-
stitutes the shared condition that puts the creature in a balance held by the
ultimate avenger, who will take life for life. But will he now?
At this juncture, I should probably mention that aside from the living
things that are here designated with variations on the Biblical word for life
(namely, hay or hayim), there are no apparent signs of life in the passage I
quoted, no proof of life. There is no lifeblood, no “flesh with its life,” and
no “human life.” Not that the translation is quite consistent, but the word
that repeatedly appears here as “life” (as opposed to the “living”) is nefesh,
for which the Greek text gives psyche and the Latin anima. I have explained
this in more detail elsewhere, but suffice to say that whatever the distinc-
tion between blood and soul might be it is a distinction that is by no means
evident and could not be read with any certainty as sustaining an opposi-
tion between flesh and spirit or even life and death.61 It does involve a series
of plausible exchanges, in which justice (or is it revenge?) mediates be-
tween that which is endowed with blood and soul (you can easily see where
the Christian fathers, all the way to Descartes, were starting to get nervous:
60. I bow in anticipation of the forthcoming work of Oded Schechter on this matter (or is
it spirit?), some of which I was fortunate to read in manuscript form; see Oded Schechter, “Is
There Plain Sense Meaning? Is There a Meaning? A Reading in the Talmud,” lecture,
Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, July 2009.
61. See my “Blutgewalt,” Oxford Literary Review 31 (Dec. 2009): 153–74.

animals with a psyche!). Is blood soul or life? Is it biological or spiritual?
Whatever else the text enables in this unauthorized version, it does not
include an understanding that would sustain such categories and divi-
sions. It does not sustain vita nuda any more than it figures, sola scriptura,
anything like sola vita. So much then, for “Jewish life” (not that you’ll find
Jews in the Old Testament either, but let us leave that matter, if not in its
carnality, at least in its suspended marginality).62
One more thing might be asked, I think. For what is it that could have
made the word life inscribe itself with such insistence, with such potency,
on the many and multifariously disseminated translations of the Bible (it is
not, after all, only Luther’s fault)? What idea, ideal, or practice is it that,
more than a religion and less than a universal, could have made life, before
Foucault’s modernity, so sacred in its relation to blood but beyond that in
its relation to law (to be sharply distinguished, you recall, from love)?
What made us so enthusiastically biocentric? I have done no more than
allude to the absence of colonialism in philosophical discussions of the
biopolitical and to the following, related matter: the critique, indeed, the
decolonization of Christianity has yet to begin. This is not least because
Christianity continues to be thought of in reductive terms according to
religious parameters, as one religion among many.63 But if Christianity is
the biotheological surge that brought about the sacralization of life, and if
modernity has consisted less in a break with than in the intensification of
this particular vector, then Christianity might be more plausibly under-
stood as the unique and complex apparatus that brings into the world this
singular division (along with the specific terms of that division). Christi-
anity is the institution of the biotheological, its imperial expansion and
ongoing, intensifying sedimentation.64 Now, I know you are already famil-
62. Well before Shlomo Sand’s terrifying, and nonetheless wondrously applauded, “return
to Renan” (ah, the good ol’ times of la destruction de la chose sémitique!), Shaye Cohen made
impeccably clear that the beginnings of Jewishness— distinct from the beginnings of life—are
not quite found in the Old Testament, where “Jews” (as opposed to Israelites or Judaeans) are
difficult to find. See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties,
Uncertainties (Berkeley, 1999).
63. Ruth Marshall puts it as follows: “the two central vectors of the civilizing mission were
religious and political—Christian mission and the colonial state— but the historical
relationship of these two vectors, in terms of their techniques, institutions, imaginaries and
aims, was complex and contradictory, at once complicit and antagonistic” (Ruth Marshall,
Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria [Chicago, 2009], p. 7); the
implications of Marshall’s own title are, I think, equally telling, for more than a religion, and
less than universal, Christianity’s own divisions, its internal antagonisms, must be understood
as the intricate and contradictory unity of state and mission, a spiritual politics, a unique and
transformative, biotheological, and political complex.
64. As he affirms the singularity, and relative integrity, of the Western legal tradition (he
calls it “la civilisation issue du romano-christianisme”), Pierre Legendre comes up with the

iar with one inaugural and not insignificant element on this global trajec-
tory. Allow me nevertheless to remind you of this first and last detail about
life, at once sacred and abandoned—merely biological, perhaps, at least for
a little while, the next three days, say, or a few more centuries, give or take
twenty. Let me reminisce with you about a down-and-up life that may be
sacrificed but not killed (to recall, and reverse, Agamben’s precise formu-
lation), and about he who made all things new and novel (with and with-
out lineage, we are told), he whose blood became pure and sacred. For
those who believe, he is definitely the One, the one said to have said, “I am
the way and the truth and the life.” Check out the good sources, the good
news, for yourself in a Bible or with a search engine near you. At the end
that was also the beginning, he is said to have added: “Eli Eli lama
sabachthani?”
notion that the genealogical nature of law (double genitive) is “the institution of the living
[l’institution du vivant],” though interestingly he grants that formulation a general application
rather than recognizing the peculiar and particular sedimentation of the meaning or meanings
of life thereby involved and instituted. Legendre insists on the semantic charge of the word
institution, which includes at once the process of instituting, the particular and changing form
of its buildings and institutions, and the product of these institutions, the offspring of a
particular system of kinship or the pupils of a given system of education (Legendre recalls the
significance of the obsolete word for teacher: instituteur). See Pierre Legendre, L’Inestimable
object de la transmission: Étude sur le principe généalogique en Occident (Paris, 2004).


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The Meaning of Life

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The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the

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G I L A N I D J A R is associate professor in the Department of Religion and the

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The Life of the Author

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Labor, Life, Law

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cover of a biopolitical reflection, we slide in reality to a biological and naturalistic under-

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17. Ibid., p. 12.

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This Old Life

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