ABSTRACT
Arendt’s formulation of this perplexity has been taken up by a number of thinkers intent on the somewhat suspicious examination of the rhetoric of human rights.6 But perhaps the most influential recent work to follow explicitly from Arendt’s discussion has been that of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, the perplexing condition of the stateless exile is just one example of a more generally queasy modern politics of the natural, a politics that produces the figure of ‘bare life’ as the disruption and displacement – but also disavowed condition – of modern citizenship.7 Agamben therefore extends Arendt’s analysis, locating the problem not just in the challenge posed to the Western conjunction of man and citizen by the streams of refugees created in twentieth-century Europe, but more fundamentally in Western discourses of sovereignty and the state. In this, for Agamben, Thomas Hobbes is implicated, despite the radical differences between Hobbesian and Arendtian conceptions of law and right. This is partly because Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty engages with the theoretical account offered by the reactionary German jurist Carl Schmitt, who saw himself as developing Hobbesian ideas.8 But it is also because Agamben follows theorists such as Leo Strauss and Norberto Bobbio in seeing Hobbes’s political philosophy as centrally concerned to articulate the relation between the status civilis and the status naturalis, as therefore thinking civility through its limits, and seeking to test the relationship between different kinds or moments of nature and right.9 Clearly, it
Justice For All? The Claims of Human Rights’, ed. Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2/3 (2004), 277-96.
