New release: When the Inside becomes the Outside. Sociological Questions to Giorgio Agamben. By Johannes Scheu
24. February 2009
In: Soziale Systeme. Zeitschrift für Soziologische Theorie, 14 (2008), H.2, 294-307.
The article aims to embed the political theory of Giorgio Agamben in an explicitly sociological context. First, Agamben’s notion of an ‘inclusive exclusion‘, which he works out with respect to the ‘bare life‘, will be compared with concepts of exclusion developed in systems theory, new approaches to poverty, as well as poststructuralist social analysis in order to examine its sociological usability.
Secondly, against the background of the structural analogy between the ‘sovereign‘ and ‘bare life‘, the point will be made that the notion of the ‘political community‘ used by Agamben is only imaginable as an ‘excluded community‘, which – since every inclusion is nothing more than an attribute of an overarching exclusion – cannot be described in terms of biopolitics. The closing section will introduce the scapegoat-theory of René Girard, hitherto hardly known in the field of German-speaking sociology. Girard offers a nuanced socio-analytical perspective on the mutual relation between inclusion and exclusion, which could constructively supplement Agamben’s political theory. (Abstract)
Johannes Scheu is research associate in the Center's research group “Idioms of Social Analysis“. Dissertation project “Critiques of Exclusion: On the Phenomenon of Social Exclusion in the Field of Social Theories”.