Freedom without being: Kant’s corrective as the philosophical crux of Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series

Kant’s corrective

In the 1784 essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, a 60-year-old Kant extols the Enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ (1991a: 54). ² To spur ‘man’s emergence’, he explains, ‘all that is needed is freedom’ (1991a: 55). The role that freedom plays in Kant’s thought cannot be overstated. Freedom is philosophically grounded in the concept of autonomy and is the basis of his corrective to the dilemma of authority that characterised the Enlightenment. ³ Though some scholars rightly warn against a broad strokes generalisation of Enlightenment-era thought, ⁴ it is nevertheless worth considering how the precepts of individual freedom and reason came to dominate political philosophy at the time. At its core, what informed much of the thinking during the Enlightenment was a dilemma of authority. ⁵ This dilemma arises from the swath of economic, political, and religious changes that were taking place – none more contested than the apparent shift from the Divine Sovereign to the sovereign individual. The corrective to this dilemma of authority does not absolve itself of the salvific logic commonly found in religious teachings, but instead translates it into a discourse of self-legislation, which conceives of the individual as both author and subject in relation to law. To grasp these intricacies, it is useful to excavate the author/subject corrective as specified by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (‘CPR’).

In CPR, Kant systematically outlines the limits of reason in relation to experience and knowledge by distinguishing the faculty of reason from the faculties of intuition and understanding. Rather than espouse what he perceives as dogmatic philosophical postulates (2003: 32–33; Bxxxv–Bxxxvi), he pursues the middle ground on two related fronts. ⁶ In the first part of CPR, Kant seeks an ontological midpoint between idealism and actuality (or realism, roughly speaking) (2003: 241–4; B269–76); in the second part, on the more epistemological front, he attempts to strike a balance between empiricism and transcendentalism (or rationalism, roughly speaking) (2003: 427–8; A471/B499–A472/B500). He begins by sketching out a system of a priori knowledge, which he defines as ‘not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience’ (2003: 43; B3). Such knowledge is a priori because it exists ‘prior to all actual perception’ (2003: 82–3; B60), and, accordingly, is a precondition for experience. Experience, ‘itself a synthetic combination of intuitions’ (2003: 50; B12), is based on senses, whereas understanding is ‘to think the object of sensible intuition’ as a logic (2003: 93; A51/B75). Kant’s famous a priori concepts play a key intermediary role in this movement between intuition and understanding (2003: 42; A2). He avers that a priori concepts must be given in advance in order to make not only the perception of an object possible but also to relate consciousness to experience in general. This is what he identifies in the Transcendental Analytic as the concepts of ‘pure understanding’ that relate a priori to experience (2003: 261; A242), what Colin McQuillan holds up as ‘Kant’s “philosophical archaeology”’ (McQuillan, 2010: 41).

By asserting that all objects of experience necessarily conform to and find expression in a priori concepts, his logic of a priori knowledge turns on the primacy of idealist autonomy (Kant, 2003: 82; A42). Kant’s ultimate goal of speculative reason, namely the ‘systematic unity of the manifold knowledge of understanding’ (2003: 535; A648/B676), can only be achieved if the individual submits to the regulative schema that paradoxically enshrines the autonomy of his/her capacity to reason. Stated otherwise, to exercise autonomy in a commanding manner, the individual must first yield to ‘unalterable’ but content-free rules. These rules are authoritative because they uphold the individual’s autonomy, and as such, the individual is subject to these rules only to the extent that they function as the redeeming apparatus of pure reason in the first instance. Autonomy as the primary operative principle is thus constituted in a dialectical manner on two intersecting planes: first, as negative freedom reflective of Kant’s ontological midpoint between actuality and idealism, and; second, as positive freedom reflective of his epistemological midpoint between transcendentalism and empiricism. I posit the former as the locus of the individual’s role as an author, and the latter as the locus of the individual’s role as a subject.

The juridical turn

The commanding force of reason that results from idealist autonomy gives rise to the subject’s duty, and in a circular manner, it is the subject’s duty to guarantee reason’s force as the formative element of moral law (Kant, 1998: 55; 4: 450). This is the moral thrust of the author/subject corrective, which is inconceivable without harkening back to CPR. ⁹ Again emphasising the primacy of autonomy in relation to morality, Kant expels the empirical from the moral with his insistence that the outcome of the action is no indication of moral worth – only the guiding principles for the act count (1998: 19–20; 4:407–4:408). He then asserts that ‘the essentially good in the action consists in the disposition, let the result be what it may’ (1998: 27; 4:416). This justification lends further credence to the self-generating facet of reason as it pertains to morality. Morality is in disposition; disposition is not an inclination but the type of response to duty that emerges from an idealist good will; and finally, good will forms a command (i.e. ‘categorical imperative’) by means of the legitimising potency of the autonomous processes of reason (1998: 31; 4:421). It is the task of the author/subject corrective to perform this complicated mediating role by ensuring that morality does not restrict freedom, but in fact, that moral duty is a cause and/or expression of freedom.

Even when Kant shifts his focus to the juridical order of the state, the transcendental idealist tenets at the core of the corrective remain paramount (1996: 24–25; 6:231). Here, respect is the watchword: the individual acts dutifully out of respect for the law, but this motivating concept of respect is only possible if the law itself reflects the transcendental ends of subjective reason. The commanding force exercised by the state is therefore intrinsically entwined with the autonomous mode of reasoning deployed by the individual insofar as the validity of the state rests on its independence from any interest, and it is this appeal to autonomy that secures individual respect. ¹⁰ Jeremy Waldron makes this explicit when he writes that, according to Kant, ‘the state acts in the name of the whole people (as though it were set up by contract)’ (2006: 187). The resultant narrative of state authority in liberalism is attributable to the ‘idea of reason’ (2006: 187), wherein the state inherits (from ‘the whole people’) a duty towards the autonomous processes of reason that it then independently deploys apart from ‘any particular conception of the good’ (Sandel, 1982: 1). This gradual self-alienation from ‘the whole people’ proves necessary in order to uphold the principle of legal autonomy, the very principle that secures individual respect. The fulcrum in this equation is the ‘right to freedom’ insofar as an individual’s ‘right to freedom’ may be infringed only in the name of freedom itself (Hodgson, 2010: 791). As long as the state is motivated by and towards the ‘right to freedom’, its commands are incontestable because it acts in the service of the autonomous processes of reason (Kant, 1991b: 81).

By affixing his understanding of obligation to a subjectively ascribed conception of idealist autonomy, Kant separates duty from interest with fateful consequences. In this mode of validation, the apolitical schism stems from and supports the assumption that both the individual and the state have indistinguishable objectives, that is, a duty-bound compulsion to promote autonomy in order to secure the legitimacy of the command. Expressed in its more reductive form, ‘political power is legitimate and enforceable because freedom requires it’ (Ripstein, 2009: 29). Given that individual freedom necessitates the validity of the state’s juridical order, challenges to sovereign power are unlikely to materialise because doing so is tantamount to undermining one’s own authority as an autonomous individual, which seems self-defeating and deeply illiberal.

However, at least four presumptions must already be at work for this self-referential mode of validity to function in a manner that makes this cohesion possible: first, the individual must be inherently capable of an authoritative stance in relation to law; second, the law itself must be subject to the authority of the autonomous individual; third, the respectability of the law must be in some fashion indicative of the relative freedom of the subject, and; fourth, respectability must be the best measure of the law’s validity. Each of these presumptions must be upheld to some degree for the circle of self-referentiality to close in such a way that guarantees valid commands; moreover, these presumptions are predicated on the logic of the corrective as articulated in CPR. Only through compulsive autonomy can the ultimate conflation between the individual’s interest and the state’s interest be achieved. The fallacy that informs this conflation holds that individual autonomy and legal autonomy are not only compatible but complementary ideals, effectively expunging the tension between individual freedom and juridical order that makes state law vulnerable to political challenge. Consequently, as long as the commitment to idealist autonomy reigns, the validity of the juridical order and the individual’s subjectivity in relation to it is a foregone conclusion.

Intrinsic to the absolutist commands of the state, therefore, is the bracketing of the ‘ontology of substance’ that sets the corrective in motion. To achieve this standard of authority, the individual must adopt a rational posture that is conducive to self-alienating autonomy; in other words, the individual must exist at the threshold of actuality. Such ‘idolatry of the autonomous subject’ (Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 128) serves the purification of interests in the name of self-referential authority, the self-perpetuating logic of which suppresses human experience, history, and life as such, rendering individual interests indistinguishable from state interests. This is the sole manner by which the four aforementioned presumptions can be met. Indeed, the validity of law is a deceivingly straightforward matter to explain if the objects of one’s study are the ‘always already’ (Agamben, 1998: 25) obedient, apolitical, rights-bearing liberal subject and the depoliticised nation state. As Sherene Razack explains:

[r]ights thinking is based on the liberal notion that we are all individuals who contract with one another to live in a society where each of us would have the maximum in personal freedom. Starting from this premise, there then are no marginalized communities of people and no historical relations of power. Each man, and the prototype is male, makes himself anew. (1998: 17)

The crux

Kant’s influence on Agamben’s thought was evident early on. ¹¹ In his first book, fittingly titled Man Without Content from 1970, he refers to ‘Kant’s failed attempt’ to understand the possibility of judgements that have no ‘foundation’, and deems this ‘original blemish’ as a ‘burden’ on Western philosophy (Agamben, 1999: 44). This is the burden of the corrective – that foundational break with the ‘ontology of substance’ – which Agamben strives to comprehend and overcome throughout his writing. To this point, Agamben cites evocative passages from CPR in the introductory lines of Stanzas from 1977 (1993b: xv), examining Kant’s imagery of the ‘“island of truth” surrounded by an “ocean of illusion”’ to decode what I refer to earlier as the illusion-producing power of the transcendental dialectic (Kant, 2003: 257: B294/A235; Murray, 2015: 217–218). Alex Murray interprets this ‘island of truth’ as the ‘essence’ of the ‘Kantian critical project’, one that is necessarily self-alienating in order to rescue experience for the sake of producing objectively valid knowledge (2015: 218). Later, in Infancy and History from 1978, Agamben arguably draws on this island metaphor when he remarks, ‘[t]he Critique of Pure Reason is the last place where the question of experience within Western metaphysics is accessible in its pure form’ (1993a: 32). In relation to Kant, Agamben develops an ‘“historico-transcendental” apparatus’ that ‘become[s] a central tenet of [his] work in the Homo Sacer series’ (Murray, 2015: 228). ¹² Whereas Kant prescribes the corrective as an antidote to the illusion-producing force of the transcendental dialectic, Agamben targets the corrective – a manifestation of the ‘historico-transcendental’ apparatus – as the main illusion-producing culprit. This is the legacy that I attend to when I bring Kant’s First Critique to bear on the ‘Homo Sacer’ series.

Across the nine volumes, Agamben weaves in assorted narrative aids to add both historical and explanatory depth to his account of modern governance. While Holy Scriptures and theological studies rank highly among his preferred sources, Kant’s philosophy often operates as the pivot between divine power in the ancient world and totalising power in the modern sense. Agamben states as much in the fourth volume, arguing that Kant’s writing is the turning point from theological discussions about God to ontological discussions about ‘absolute being’ (2011: 52), a division he refers to in Stasis as consisting of ‘[t]he kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God’ (2015b: 52). Yet it is in the titular book of the series that he makes Kant’s role patently clear, specifically when he theorises bare life, a theme that carries over into the second volume, State of Exception.

The ‘burden’ of Kant’s corrective logic is that it necessitates submission to content-free rules by making it the operative realm of the self-legislative command; in the first two volumes, Agamben demonstrates that this logic is the philosophical template for the state of exception. This is evident when he observes that ‘[i]n Kant the pure form of law as “being in force without significance” appears for the first time in modernity’ (1998: 51), and quickly confirmed when he asserts that ‘[i]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago … was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (1998: 52). In writing about the Kantian notion of the ‘pure form of law’, Agamben refers to that type of law that applies, but in lacking content, does not signify (1998: 51); what is more, he recognises that ‘law is all the more pervasive for its total lack of content’ (1998: 52). To this end, he queries, ‘[w]hat, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify?’ (1998: 51), later adding, ‘life under a law that is in force without signifying resembles life in the state of exception’ (1998: 52). Bare life is the product of this ban, which is ‘neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself’ (Agamben, 2004: 38) – a type of qualified existence highly reminiscent of author/subject paradox that places the individual at the threshold of actuality. Indeed, Agamben’s ‘threshold’ experience of bare life is the corrective experience par excellence, given that, for Kant, the empirical realm is the vanishing ground for Kant’s self-legislating subject, an observation that becomes more pronounced in Agamben’s account of bare life and sovereign power.

‘[F]rom the point of view of sovereignty’, writes Agamben, ‘only bare life is authentically political’ (1998: 106). Where Hobbes claims that there is a move out of the ‘state of nature’ into the political realm, Agamben suggests that the state of nature that Hobbes refers to is the political realm, which is lost as a result of the sovereign ban (Rasch, 2007: 101). At the core of this originary moment is the sovereign decision, which creates bare life by a relation of abandonment and substantiates the perpetuation of the qualified political life through unlocalisable sovereign power. Agamben later writes,

[t]he fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man … solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground … of the citizen. (1998: 128) ¹³

For Agamben, that a law can be in force without content perfectly depicts the anomic quality of the state of exception, which ‘separates the norm from its application in order to make its application possible’ (2005: 36). The exercise of sovereign power through exception turns on the capacity of the state to self-alienate, which is accomplished through the ‘de-localization and dis-location’ of the ‘juridico-political’ order (Agamben, 1998: 38). The sovereign in this paradigm of exception derives its power from this concerted ostracising, which imbues law once again with the force of content-free rules, the fulcrum of its commanding force. As Agamben observes, law is in force in the state of exception only ‘as pure potentiality in the suspension of every actual reference’ (1998: 20) – this accounts for its catastrophic quality. Agamben learns about the catastrophic dimensions of the state of exception from Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, but a salient connection that garners less attention is the link between the state of exception and Hans Kelsen’s ‘pure theory of law’ (PTL). So as not to rehearse arguments I made elsewhere, ¹⁴ I will briefly comment that it was Kelsen’s PTL that was the direct target of Schmitt’s most pointed rebukes regarding the eventual incapacity of the sovereign to decide on the exception (2005: 6). Kelsen, a committed Kantian, attempts to circumvent the destabilising influence of politics on state law by adhering to a system of legal validation that prioritises legal autonomy above all else (1961: 285). What Schmitt expressly spurns regarding Kelsen’s PTL is its Kantian self-referentiality; more precisely, Schmitt is suspicious that the commanding force of the state can be either purified or sustained when it is beholden to those content-free laws that circuitously enshrine its autonomy (2005: 21). Whereas Schmitt frets over the possibility of the state subverting its true power because this self-referentiality prohibits the sovereign from deciding on the exception, Agamben sees in this self-referential absolutism a distinct species of sovereign power.

The undecidability of this predicament is the source of the sovereign’s totalising force in the sense that the state must ‘blur’ the relation between fact and norm so that it can command (Agamben, 1998: 170, 2005: 29). It is from this position that the sovereign decides on the life of homo sacer, which is the biopolitical facet that reinforces the role of the individual as the necessary ‘referent’ of the exception (Agamben, 1998: 85, 2005: 3), thus:

the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (Agamben, 1998: 84)

In the fifth volume, The Kingdom and the Glory, we find only a single passing reference to Kant, yet overall this text offers among the more intriguing elaborations of the corrective. Agamben lays out an ontological paradigm of governance across seven theses; of particular interest is the seventh thesis, which stipulates that liberal democratic systems of governance presume that the governed subjects can lay claim to some form of foundational, even if only fictional, authority (2008: 219). He deploys a genealogical lens to locate the basis for this authority in the impotence of divine power: God is King in relation to whom all humans immediately adopt a position of subjection, but because God cannot govern as such, human beings are also immediately authoritative in their own right, which is necessary for the administration of divine power. Lest divine power remain impotent, there must be an authorisation of human agency. This is epitomised by the ‘always already’ moniker that Agamben uses to underscore the simultaneous subjection and authorisation of the individual (2008: 108). The ‘zone of indistinction’ (1998: 25) that arises from this relation of authorship/subjection is the locus of the corrective. In this zone, individuated praxis is ‘always already’ an expression of both authority and subjection: it reinforces authoritative praxis in relation to the non-being of sovereign power, yet this authority is itself dependent on the individual’s originary subjection in relation to a higher authority. The commanding force of the individual stems from an act of submission, while sovereign power relies on individual praxis as an outlet of its own authority.

For Agamben, the totalising nature of the authoritative command in the state of exception is manifest in the closure that it achieves through the ‘functional correlation’ (2008: 191) between the interests of the subject and the interests of the state. With corrective resonances, this ‘functional correlation’ speaks to the self-referential play between the conditioned realm of authority and the unconditioned realm of subjectivity. At the centre of Agamben’s ruminations on governance, therefore, is an evolving understanding that instead of a unidirectional causality in which the modern nation state creates the subject, the subject’s self-legislative command is born of and gives rise to the sovereign command. Arguably, this is the logical corollary of the banishment of the ‘ontology of substance’; the relegation of ‘esti [being]’ creates a vacuum in which ‘estō [having-to be]’ is compulsory, enshrining not only the validity but also the necessity of the commanding force. ‘In this ontology’, Agamben contends, ‘being becomes something that does not simply exist but has to be brought about’ (2013a: 118). The non-being of God’s sovereign power means that it ‘has to be brought about’, and as the sovereign’s referent, the individual is likewise ‘brought about’ as an outlet of this power.

Agamben expounds on this in the sixth volume, Opus Dei, where we find Kant ‘[a]t the threshold of modernity’, heralding ‘the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philosophy’ (2013a: 122). It is in this volume that we can appreciate the Kantian corrective as a ‘salvific praxis’, the theological origins of which predate the modern nation state (2013a: 30). As Agamben ponders the notions of respect and duty in the context of liturgical acts, he describes how the indistinguishability between duty and virtue represents an ontology of command that becomes the basis for absolute obedience (2013a: 76). The individual sacrifices self-interestedness as a duty, and in doing so expresses a compulsion to be a subject, or more concisely, a compulsive subjection (Agamben, 2013a: 88). Using familiar (Kantian) concepts, Agamben explains that ‘[a]s an empty or zero-degree feeling, respect is only the shadow that duty—that is, compulsion before the command of the law—throws on the subject’ (2013a: 116). He then cites Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals in order to express this compulsive subjection in moral philosophical terms, observing that ‘[i]t is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office [ufficio] finds its most extreme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics’ (2013a: 111). The specific catastrophic legacy that Agamben attributes to Kant is the latter’s failure to anticipate how the obedience of an ‘external command’ can, through ‘the morality of duty’, be internalised and contorted into ‘an act of freedom’ (2013a: 123). Plainly, this catastrophe is the philosophical imposition of the corrective – the price of the transcendental sacrifice of being. Instead of safeguarding subversive freedom, the corrective and the self-referential closure that it necessitates ultimately cannibalises freedom by making compulsive subjection the ontological foundation of the absolute command. Once conceived of as a sanctuary by Kant, the ‘island of truth’ is revealed by Agamben as the figurative realm of solitary confinement, where the compulsive relegation of being is a testament to the impossibility of freedom.

Thanos Zartaloudis further elaborates that, in this paradigm, ‘[l]ife as a juridical institution (where life and law are collapsed into a zone of indistinction) becomes the enabling device through which the law can exceed itself and maintain its office intact’ (2015: 172). ¹⁵ The only type of act that the individual can undertake in this realm of ‘disruptive self-referentiality’ (2015: 171) is ‘pseudo-sacrificial’ (2015: 179), wherein corrective praxis operates to secure the authority of the office itself. Agamben refers to this as ‘perfect circularity’ of the office ‘in which being dissolves into its practical effects’ (2013a: xii) – the effectual subsumption of life by law and the total identity of state and subject. This eventuality does not merely reverberate throughout Kant’s moral and political writings, but is the consistent outcome of the corrective as it was first stipulated in CPR, where Kant’s ‘ontology of command and having-to-be’ (2013a: 121) is most systematically detailed. The transcendental idealist parameters of the corrective are integral to the self-legislative principle that is so valued in liberal legal philosophy; however, this salvific praxis, when rendered in juridical terms, portends the catastrophic condition of modernity that is the state of exception.

Agamben offers only two significant references to CPR across the nine volumes: one in the standout middle volume, Remnants of Auschwitz (2002: 109), and the other in the final volume, The Use of Bodies (2015a: 229). In the former, Agamben discusses the ‘originary structure of subjectivity’, locating in CPR a self-generating paradox wherein the individual can only be affected by those categories of understanding that are ‘implicit in our intuition’ (2002: 109). On this page we not only find a most apt rendering of the corrective, but also the paradox that dominates the entire series when Agamben writes, ‘[s]ince everything takes place here inside the subject, activity and passivity must coincide. The passive subject must be active with respect to its own passivity’ (2002: 109). This paradigm, in which activity presumes passivity, is the same paradox that informs bare life under content-free law, the administrative praxis of divine power, and the ‘empty or zero-degree feeling’ of compulsive subjection. The binding element across each of these instances is the demotion of the ‘ontology of substance’ that ‘brings about’ the ‘ontology of command’; once we make this connection more obvious, we discover a deeper continuity across the series as a whole.

By detailing the epistemological and ontological facets of the corrective in Kant’s CPR, we have a better picture of what is at stake for Agamben in the final volume as he grapples with Kant’s catastrophic legacy. What is lost in the state of exception is that which Kant’s transcendental idealist corrective vanquishes: being, in ontological terms. Agamben’s penultimate volume in the series, The Highest Poverty, presents Franciscan monasticism as the last point in theology when life and form were unified. Unlike the ‘economy of salvation’ (2013b: 143) outlined in Opus Dei, in which it is respect for law that commands compulsive subjection, the monastic ‘form-of-life’ is distinguished by its ‘radical extraneousness to law’ (2013b: 121); in substantive ontological terms, ‘[f]orm of life is the purely existential reality that must be liberated from the signature of law and office or duty’ (2013b: 136). Rather than life born from rule, Agamben sets out to discover how rule can be born from life (2013b: 58).

Due to the burdensome inheritance of Kant’s corrective, we lose our ability to understand being, or what it means to be, in actuality. To implement the corrective, the individual must sacrifice absolute freedom in the empirical realm to redeem qualified freedom in the idealist realm, and because of this compulsive subjection the individual can lay claim only to the most vacuous type of experience. Life, in this instance, is qualified; therefore, what it means to ‘be’ in the state of exception – the bare life of homo sacer – is ‘always already’ a study of non-being. Because of this, as Agamben avers, we abort our philosophical capacity to develop an ontological understanding of ourselves (Agamben, 2015a: 169). In the campaign for individual freedom, being and life are the immediate casualties; but what is the point of this type of salvific praxis if there is nothing to save? Such is the predicament of homo sacer: ‘anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight’ (Agamben, 1998: 183). That homo sacer avoids death only through endless retreat is significant. Keeping this in mind, Agamben’s commentary on Kant’s CPR in the final volume of ‘Homo Sacer’ becomes all the more poignant.

With Kant, the preponderance of the command compels a retreat to the ‘island of truth’ or the ‘citadel of the transcendental’ (Agamben, 2015a: 169), ¹⁶ which Agamben points to as an obstacle in his effort to conceptualise an ontological modality. As Paolo Bartoloni explains, ‘Agamben insists that a new time – and a new ontology of life outside the law, duty and obedience – must be arrived at through a transformation of modalities of relation that are predicated upon pure forms of life’ (Bartoloni, 2015: 165). In unequivocal terms, Agamben sees in Kant the moment when philosophy ‘definitively loses its relation to being and politics enters into a decisive crisis’ (2015a: 370). ¹⁷ It is most fitting, therefore, that Agamben’s final word on ‘Homo Sacer’ is about the body. In the earliest pages of CPR, Kant denies substantive being by withholding actuality from the individual; this is the genesis of the corrective and a pillar of his transcendental idealist philosophy as a whole. By suppressing actuality from the outset, he ‘saves’ the individual from all those autonomy-compromising desires, interests, and whims, and closes the individual on the island citadel of self-legislative command. For Agamben, however, this closure is the paradoxical realm of the state of exception, the catastrophic meeting point between the compulsion to be and the denial of being. His final volume is an attempt to reckon with this Kantian inheritance (2015a: 169).

Across his multivolume study of governance, Agamben theorises this compulsion and denial as a ‘decisive crisis’. That his last two volumes focus on life and the body demonstrates the extent to which his decades-long analysis is in many ways a meditation on, and response to, the crisis of the corrective itself. In the epilogue of the final volume, Agamben rejects the idea that he is likewise offering any corrective to Western political philosophy (2015a: 359), instead he proposes the conceptual opposite to operative corrective: inoperativity. Neither reformative nor restorative, Agamben suggests idleness and deactivation as the radical path forward (2015a: 377), in pursuit of that point when ‘[h]uman life can turn into its own inoperativity’ (Zartaloudis, 2015: 182). By placing corrective praxis as the fount of the sovereign command, Kant’s transcendental idealism becomes the engine of absolute command; if such praxis is the crux of the state of exception, Agamben calls for idleness. ‘Destituent power’ – as opposed to constituent power – is the terminal concept of the final volume, which he believes dwells in that anarchic element that the state of exception, despite its efforts, can never completely domesticate (Agamben, 2015a: 378). Destituent power is ‘an affirmation of life’ (Zartaloudis, 2015: 179), an unrelenting negation of the negation that is Kant’s island citadel. With echoes of the monastic form of life, Agamben seeks to recuperate that potentiality of being that was abandoned when individual freedom came to necessitate juridical order, or when life was relegated in the name of the self-legislative command. Law, deactivated, is stripped of its commanding force (Agamben, 2015a: 372), and the imperative of compulsive subjection fades in its wake; this inoperativity in practice affirms instead of relegates the potentiality of life (2015a: 372).

Conclusion

The conflation of individual and state interests that is achieved via the author/subject corrective – and the self-referential closure that this occasions – causes more than a philosophical conundrum; it exacts real political problems. The end result of this appeal to the individual as both author and subject of the law is a form of state authority that is predicated as much on the prioritisation of the role and power of the autonomous individual as it is on the autonomy of the legal system. The sanctity of the corrective demands a type of formalism that breeds absolutism and alienation. Some might be tempted to circumvent this reality in order to salvage the core principles of Kant’s thesis on self-legislation. However, to deny this eventuality is to err on two counts: first, in order to avoid this exclusive formalism one must wrench the corrective from its transcendental idealist basis, and; second, the disavowal of the philosophical bases of the corrective requires the rejection of those premises that give the corrective any commanding force whatsoever, which results in the least desired outcome from the liberal standpoint: the undermining of the self-validating force of autonomy. Plainly, one cannot have it both ways. The corrective stripped of its transcendental idealist tenets is the corrective stripped of precisely those principles that give it any weight in liberal political philosophy.

From this fraught position, we can comprehend Kant’s relegation of the ‘ontology of substance’ not simply as a radical vision of freedom, but more disconcertingly, as a political retrenchment that gives rise to a new crisis. On the one hand, we encounter the philosophical roots of the self-legislative command, and on the other hand we arrive at the state of exception. Importantly, what this analysis teaches us is that not only are both eventualities possible, but also that – thanks to the logic of the corrective – the former in fact assumes the latter. By reading Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series through the lens of the corrective, we see the Kantian dimensions of the modern catastrophe in philosophy. Kant, as an exemplary Enlightenment-era logician, represents this pivotal historical episode in modern philosophy, while his writings both document it and describe it. In his efforts to develop a response to the Enlightenment’s dilemma of authority, Kant’s author/subject corrective strips the humanity away from the individual, ostracises politics from law, and renders the subject indistinguishable from the state. It has been Agamben’s concerted aim these last 20 years to explain this phenomenon, and further, to bring the individual back to life.