Stasis: Civil War, Revolution and Destitution in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series

This article presents a critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series via the rather obscure but central concept of civil war. Already in the first volume of this series, Agamben argued that civil war constituted the original political structure: sovereign power’s production and elimination of bare life in and as the state of exception. Agamben also identified this structure with the revolutions of the twentieth century, which he argued were always already caught in the state of exception and thus invariably bound to reconstitute sovereign power. I argue that Agamben’s deployment of Carl Schmitt’s state of exception to conceptualize these revolutions produces a fundamental political aporia in his works that he tried (unsuccessfully) to overcome in the subsequent volumes of the series. However, I also show that the final volume Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm provides the necessary but unexplored conceptual resources to overcome this aporia and develop a concept of destituent power that combines the two meanings of stasis – civil war and inoperativity – that may potentially break the incessant cycle of constituent and constituted power and thus, finally, move beyond the paradigm of the exception and the sovereign state.