[Felix Hoenikker]

Bare Life and the Occupied Body
7:3 | © 2004 Diane Enns

· In 1940 Walter Benjamin wrote: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight."1 These words have lost none of their relevancy, according to Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that power no longer has any form of legitimization other than emergency. In fact, not only does power appeal to emergency but labors secretly to produce it. We have only to think here of the U.S. government's post-9/11 warnings of the imminence of terrorist attacks, whether provoked by actual or fabricated threats, for the express purpose of maintaining public support for its foreign policies and goading other nations into a war on terror.
· Agamben warns that we currently face the most extreme and dangerous developments of the paradigm of security in the name of a state of emergency. Rapidly imposing itself as the basic principle of state activity, security, he argues, is becoming the sole criterion of political legitimization while traditional tasks of the state surrender to a gradual neutralization of politics.2 Ironically, the more security reasoning is promoted, the more vulnerable we become. This is the ultimate risk. Security and terrorism have become a single deadly system in which they legitimate and justify each other's actions. The risk is twofold according to Agamben: not only does the paradigm of security develop a "clandestine complicity of opponents" in which resistance and power are locked together in a mutually reinforcing relationship, but it also leads to "a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence."3 This is the result of the dependency of security measures on maintaining a state of emergency.
· Nearly three decades ago, Michel Foucault remarked that the question of power was raised anew around 1955, against the background of what he calls the "two gigantic shadows" created by the "black heritages" of fascism and Stalinism.4 Today, we must revisit the question again, under the new shadows that darken our world: these metamorphosed modalities of power and resistance that are escalating with frightening rapidity on a global scale. In the desperate cycle of state terror and insurrectionary terrorism that has gripped the world we need more than ever to understand power both in its repressive and resistant forms.
· In the following reflections I wish to revisit Foucault's ideas on power to highlight what I argue is a failure to adequately account for the power of resistance. I address this via an excursion into Agamben, who takes up Foucault's question concerning power over natural life: a biopolitics in which living itself is at stake. Despite Foucault's argument that resistance and power are inseparable -- since one can never escape power relations -- dominating power proves to be an intriguing exception. Collective revolutionary struggles appear to remain an enigma for him. The implications of this problematic will be drawn out with reference to the occupied body: the individual stripped of political and human rights, reduced to a bare existence, who sometimes turns to self-sacrifice in the name of revolt against the occupiers. In what sense can this body be said to be resisting power? In what sense complicit? What hope is there for resisting repressive regimes if the contemporary paradigms of security and terror recuperate into their violent vortex all modes of struggle?
The enigma of revolt

· In March of 1968, two months before Parisian students and laborers would riot in the streets surrounding the Sorbonne, Foucault witnessed the revolts of their counterparts in Tunisia. He discusses this experience ten years later, asking the question: "[W]hat on earth is it that can set off in an individual the desire, the capacity, and the possibility of an absolute sacrifice without our being able to recognize or suspect the slightest ambition or desire for power and profit?"5 In comparing the two events Foucault expresses an attraction to the commitment of the Tunisians, but bitter disappointment with the "muttering of political speeches" in France. Beyond "all those cold, academic debates on Marxism" in Paris, he says, beyond mere analysis, the Tunisian students expressed "a kind of moral force." Everyone was drawn into Marxism -- intensely, violently, powerfully -- "I felt disillusioned and full of bitterness" Foucault confesses, "to think of how much a difference there was between the way the Tunisian students were Marxists and what I knew of the workings of Marxism in Europe."6 In the Tunisian struggle for liberation from the conditions of capitalism and colonialism, theory was not the essential thing, he concludes. What was required was "direct, existential, physical commitment," at a price far higher than one found in the Paris battles, which although violent, did not lead to fifteen years in prison.7
· Foucault invokes a similar fascination and perplexity with respect to the revolution in Iran in 1978, a unique revolt in his opinion, for its demonstration of an "absolutely collective will." "What gives it such beauty, and at the same time such gravity," he suggests, "is that there is only one confrontation: between the entire people and the state threatening it with its weapons and police." On one side the will of the people, on the other, the machine guns.8 This collective will he refers to as the "soul of the uprising," "a light that lit up" in everyone, "the revolutionary experience itself" that was born of the Iranian people's desire not only to change the regime and depose the Shah but above all, to change themselves in their way of being, with others, with things and with God; a radical transformation without which there would be no true revolution.9 The soul of the revolt however, its force, remains an enigma for Foucault. The power of a movement that can overthrow an expertly armed regime, must be attributable to religion, he muses: "Promises of the afterlife, time's renewal, anticipation of the savior or the empire of the last days, a reign of pure goodness" -- these themes, he proposes, lend themselves easily as the mode of expression for a people in need of revolt.10
· These passages stand in curious contrast to Foucault's complex ideas on power and resistance. His sentiments are disturbing: enthusiasm for a struggle only when the stakes are high; disdain for what he perceives to be the petty squabbles in the Paris of '68 where life itself was not threatened; dismissal of theoretical debates, now dry and cold compared to the passion and excitement of action. Disturbing for what could be a romanticizing of the desire for liberation, for the exuberance but also for the suffering and sacrifice that occurs in its name. He appears baffled -- what can set off in an individual the desire for absolute sacrifice without wishing for profit or power? Perhaps most disturbing is that he would find a confrontation between a people's revolutionary will and the machine guns of a sovereign power both grave and beautiful. In these unusual passages Foucault has inadvertently put his finger on the element that is missing from his theoretical explorations of power and resistance: an understanding of the force of the desire for emancipation in its collective expression. In short, the power of resistance.
· Particularly in The History of Sexuality, written during the same period as the revolution in Iran, Foucault's analysis of the multiplicity of force relations comes at the expense of an understanding of state or sovereign power, what he refers to as a repressive power based on the juridico-institutional model. Through an extensive study on the discourses of sexuality that arose in the seventeenth century he gives a brilliant exposé of the network of force relations that produced them, exposing the regime of power, knowledge and pleasure that has sustained discourses on human sexuality in the western world ever since. In what has become one of the most well known contemporary theses on power, he describes an "incitement" to discourse which points to an operation of power very different from the "no" of repressive power. Rather than prohibit, it incites, inviting the subject to take up a particular identity, to identify itself with a subject position, in this case, a sexed or sexual identity. Thus Foucault describes a productive or positive notion of power: a multiplicity of force relations that is everywhere because it comes from everywhere; omnipresent because it is produced at every moment, at every point of relation; a power that is not acquired or seized, not held at all, but comes from below, running through the social body at the level of local oppositions and convergences; a power inextricably related to resistance.11
· Under these conditions, it makes no sense to look for the headquarters that presides over power, Foucault insists, to the protests of emancipatory discourses such as feminism or Marxism. In the early reception of his work many feminists worried about what they considered to be an undermining of political agency necessarily ensuing from Foucault's unwillingness to name sovereign power as patriarchy. Likewise, Marxists balked at his audacity in declaring that power isn't localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will change unless the mechanisms of power that function alongside the State apparatuses on a much more minute level, are also changed.12 Particularly problematic for these emancipatory discourses was their implication in the very power structures they sought to overcome.
· Foucault reasons that the ultimate consequence of staking the revolution on the State apparatus is the risk of repeating the Soviet experience. The revolutionary movement must capture the State with this apparatus intact or move toward complete destruction. The danger of this model lies in the revolution's use of the very same power it attempts to overthrow, namely repressive power -- fascist power. Foucault was anxious to avoid the replication of totalizing power and regarded collective liberation movements with wariness and skepticism.
· Nowhere is this more obvious than in his preface to Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, in which fascism appears as the totalizing or repressive power Foucault refutes in The History of Sexuality. Couched in the terminology of warfare, he names the enemies of the book: the dangerous "sad militants" and "terrorists of theory," the "bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth" as well as "the poor technicians of desire" -- those psychoanalysts and semiologists who reduce desire to structure and lack.13 He concludes his list with the following:
Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. . . . And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini -- which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively -- but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.14
· How does one keep from being fascist, he asks; a question relevant even for the revolutionary militant. "How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?" The answer, Foucault tells us, lies in freeing political action "from all unitary and totalizing paranoia." The group must not be the organic bond that unites hierarchized individuals, but a "constant generator of de-individualization."15
· In light of these passages, it is surprising that Foucault would suggest that the beauty of the Iranian revolution lies in the collective will of the people facing machine guns. Could it be the result of a contradiction between Foucault's rhetorical activism and his theoretical skepticism? Does he admit in practice what he is unwilling or unable to grant in theory?16 Certainly when speaking of political acts of resistance in his numerous interviews, Foucault uses the terms of confrontation and rebellion, of an unproblematic emancipation, in a style surprisingly against the grain of his theoretical analysis. He speaks of attacking institutions, of striking against a power that forms solid obstacles, of destroying established values and knowledges, employing throughout the very terms of repression and liberation he contests elsewhere.17
· Very few have commented on this remarkable inconsistency between Foucault's public attitude towards resistance and his philosophical analysis of power. I believe more is at stake here than a tension between theory and praxis and would argue that it points to an inadequate analysis of resistance. Does he manage to take resistance as his starting point, as he suggests,18 or is he absorbed by a particular model of disciplinary power relations that forces him to conclude domination is something else entirely? This leaves a disturbing gap in an analysis that would otherwise have more to offer than a perplexed admiration for the collective will of a people in revolt. Edward Said could be right in his suggestion that Foucault's interest in dominating power is critical but not finally as contestable or as oppositional as on the surface it seems to be. This leads to the paradox, Said points out, that Foucault revealed power to be cruel and unjust, but let it go on more or less unchecked.19
· Perhaps Foucault had an inkling of this, for in his later work he amends some of his ideas on power, broadening the scope of his analysis to incorporate both domination and a third form of power having to do with governing. While in The History of Sexuality he largely ignores sovereign power, using it only as a foil for a multiplicity of force relations, he nevertheless does not deny the forces of domination, describing them as the "institutional crystallization" of micro-power relations.20 In one of his last interviews he refines his understanding of this crystallization, defining domination as a "total power" over an individual or group, such as in a situation of colonialism or slavery. In such a state, Foucault argues, if one were completely at another's disposal and became an object of "boundless and limitless violence" there would be no power relations, for there is no possibility of resistance.21 "Even when the power relation is completely out of balance, when it can truly be claimed that one side has 'total power' over the other," he adds, this power can be exercised only insofar as the other has the option of killing himself, or of killing the other person.22
· Clearly in this text Foucault's disciplinary power relations are incommensurable with power as domination. In fact, he must keep these two modalities of power distinct if he is to maintain that resistance and power are inseparable at the local level of force relations, for when it comes to totalizing power, only an extremely limited resistance can be exercised. Why doesn't Foucault acknowledge the problem this causes for his understanding of resistance? Could one appeal to ethics? For some powers are simply worse than others. When Foucault considers power in its dominating forms -- of slavery or colonization for example -- he could have acknowledged this fact. Surely, any theory of resistance must take into account an ethical distinction between a state power that represses, occupies and terrorizes a people, and the disciplinary, institutional forms of power that produce subjects. Wouldn't the recognition of this ethical disparity lead to an account of the power of resistance?
· Foucault remains baffled by the enigma of the revolt, by the soul of the revolt manifested in its collective voice, because theoretically he cannot account for it. In his emphasis on the multiplicity of force relations, on local forms of power, perpetually emerging from under the social body, he misses what is crucial to understanding resistance against state power -- its birth in the wellspring of desire for an end to oppression. Resistance is qualitatively different when one is struggling against repressive power, or against institutional force relations, a fact that Foucault would need to investigate in order to understand the distinction between sovereign power and the power of resistance. In effect then, he can't help us much in understanding the very political practices in which we most need to think about resistance: in situations where entire communities or peoples are living in subordination to a dominating power. If relations of power can never be escaped, can repression? What hope is there if one can only escape such power by killing oneself? How for example, are we to analyze power as it is exercised by state terror versus the revolutionary terrorism that struggles against it? What indeed inspires in an individual a desire for freedom that will require the ultimate self-sacrifice?
Bare life and the occupied body

· These theories of power develop out of Foucault's preoccupation with the body, its insertion into a web of discursive relations that regulate its behavior and normalize its functions, pleasures, and desires. His intensive studies of sexuality, incarceration, and madness demonstrate, as he puts it, a unique twist to Aristotle's assertion that man is a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence: it is rather the case that modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.23 It is no longer simply a legal subject over which a sovereignty exercises power, but a living being: life itself has been brought into the realm of the mechanisms and calculations of power.
· Agamben suggests that Foucault did not go far enough on this trajectory. He claims that it is this very encroachment of politics into "natural life" -- what Agamben calls "bare life" -- that forms the point of intersection which Foucault failed to recognize, between a negative, repressive power, and a productive, disciplinary power. Agamben views these models as two directions taken in the final period of Foucault's thought that don't connect: the first moves towards the study of the political techniques used by the State to take care of the natural life of individuals; and the second, towards an examination of the technologies of the self by which the processes of subjectivization bring one to bind oneself to an identity and at the same time to an external power. Despite what one would expect, Agamben points out, Foucault did not bring these interests to bear on the politics of the twentieth century totalitarian states, what could well be "the exemplary place of modern biopolitics."24
· Where is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with a dominating, objective power, Agamben asks?25 Foucault is strangely unclear on this point, as I have argued, anxious as he is to deflect the traditional preoccupation with sovereign power in political thought. Agamben claims it is bare life that joins the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. The two cannot be separated, he writes; "the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original -- if concealed -- nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.�26
· Agamben's conceptualization of bare life (la nuda vita) derives from the Greeks' use of two terms to signify what we usually mean by life: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings, and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. Bare life recalls Aristotle's distinction between mere life and the good life; between private life and the public life of the polis where justice arises from the human community's capacity to reflect on what is best and necessary for the common good. In the interests of exploring limit concepts, Agamben describes bare life as the life of homo sacer, the obscure and paradoxical figure in ancient Roman law whose life was included in the political order only by way of its exclusion; a life judged unworthy of being lived; a life that could be killed with impunity and whose death therefore had no sacrificial value.27 This figure, manifest in a continuum of examples from the landless refugee to the Muselmann of Auschwitz, has an essential function in modern politics as democracy's strength yet inner contradiction, Agamben seeks to demonstrate.28 It is "a two-faced being" or corpus, "the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties."29 Unless we analyse this "interlacing" of politics and life -- become so tight it is difficult to unravel -- we will not succeed in illuminating the opacity at the center of the political nature of bare life; an essential task for Agamben, if we are to understand the coming politics.30
· The facticity of birth, for example, becomes what is at stake in the question of rights for the refugee. Agamben refers us to Hannah Arendt, who points out that in the system of the nation-state the so-called sacred rights of man disappear the moment they no longer take the form of citizen's rights. It is the pure fact of birth, or bare life, that in this case appears to be the source and bearer of rights, Agamben concludes. Birth, or the principle of nativity, is responsible for man's passage from subject to citizen: birth becomes nation.31
· The refugee therefore provides a limit concept, according to Agamben, demonstrating the inclusion of bare life into politics, as does the euthanized life -- the life judged unworthy of being lived -- the life in limbo, hovering between birth and citizenship or between life and death. The most radical case for Agamben is the Muselmann of the Nazi death camps: the camp inmate who was no longer considered human he was so close to death, "the drowned" as Primo Levi called him, an "anonymous mass of non-men" who marched and laboured in silence, "the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer."32 These men, who marked the limits between the living and dead, described as neither one nor the other, also marked the threshold between the human and the inhuman, the ethical and the unethical. They were beyond dignity and self-respect -- unbearable to look at -- rendering these moral concepts useless.
· Agamben claims that this fact of the Muselmann's limit status therefore leads to the loss of the very idea of an ethical limit. For if an ethical concept such as dignity makes no sense for the Muselmann, neither alive nor dead, neither human nor inhuman, then it is not a genuine ethical concept, "for no ethics can claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see."33 Indeed, Auschwitz -- a space in which the state of exception became the norm, where law was completely suspended --
marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And 'the ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species' cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity.34
The Muselmann, Agamben concludes, the most extreme expression of this new knowledge, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics that begins where dignity ends.
· The bare life of this homo sacer, in whom the divine spark is dead, is therefore paradoxically, anything but sacred. As the facticity of birth, of suffering, and of human life that is judged unworthy of being lived, it is a reference to extreme and absolute human fragility, a vulnerability that is no longer excluded from political life, yet one that exhibits its own strange power. While once it was relegated to the margins, now it has entered politics to an unprecedented degree. With our political order turning into a state of emergency, or state of exception, Agamben argues, this bare life, trembling on the threshold between the human and the inhuman, "becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it."35 Corpus is a two-faced being.
· If we bracket for a moment Agamben's most extreme case of the Muselmann, the concept of bare life becomes useful for thinking about the state-occupied body, the inhabitant of nowhere, stripped of political identity, nationhood, and basic human rights, by virtue of the fact of birth, a body whose very biological rhythms are regulated and controlled by a sovereign power. We could explore a number of examples here: the Iraqi's body, ravaged by hunger and disease, occupied by a sinister program of economic sanctions that Joy Gordon calls "a weapon of mass destruction" that has caused "a legitimized act of mass slaughter"36; the Tamil, the Chechen, the Tibetan, the indigenous Zapatista -- a discouragingly long list of peoples who are victimized to one extent or another by an occupying or colonizing power. It is the Palestinian occupation however, that comes most to my mind in this evocation of bare life.
· Tanya Reinhardt demonstrates in her detailed documentation of life in the occupied territories, how the Palestinian body is regulated, rendered vulnerable by the state power that penetrates all aspects of daily life from controlling where one can and cannot travel, where and how one can work, whether one can import or export produce, medical supplies and cooking fuel, to whether one is safe in one's home.37 This is a systematic destruction of all semblance of normal life through a complicated and extensive web of enforcements from passes, identity numbers, permits, routine interrogations, road blocks that require leaving home in the night to get to work, to surveillance and political assassinations.
· Out of this emerges the figure of the "suicide bomber,"38 a figure of bare life, in this sense of abject vulnerability, reduction to a life devoid of any political meaning except that by which he is excluded, and by the fact that his or her life would be extinguished with impunity if the act did not already accomplish death. Intriguing contradictions arise however, when we consider the fact that these human bombs become martyrs to their own people through the sacrifice of their lives -- a sacrifice that defies their own Islamic faith, as well as the figure of homo sacer, whose life is not able to be sacrificed because it is meaningless already.39 In this case, the element of sacrifice appears to be the only meaning available, a final recourse to a limited resistance. This is an argument made repeatedly in the struggle to bring the plight of the Palestinians to the world's attention.40
· In an oft-quoted interview, Eyad El Sarraj, a psychiatrist from the Gaza strip and recipient of several human rights awards, describes the association of sacrifice with power when asked to what he attributes the escalation of violence in the second Intifada:
It's despair. The hopelessness that comes from a situation that keeps getting worse, a despair where living becomes no different from dying. Desperation is a very powerful force -- it's not only negative. It propels people to actions or solutions that previously would have been unthinkable. . . .
Today, the symbol of power is the martyr. . . . Today the martyr is glorified. The martyr for them [the children] is the power of the people, the power to take revenge on behalf of the victims. They have all these romantic notions. They see the martyr as courageously sacrificing himself or herself for the sake of everyone, as a symbol of the struggle for freedom, because this is what these people are fighting for.41

Despair as the condition of life on the threshold of living and dying. Desperation as the force that drives resistance. Here is the homo sacer whose life is democracy's strength yet inner contradiction. Here one finds power and victimization -- strange bedfellows -- in the fight for dignity and self-respect. Here we are presented with an exemplary figure: the biopolitical body created by sovereign power. Sarraj speaks with anguish about the hopelessness that has caused the escalation of violence in the second Intifada. The perpetrators of suicide bomb attacks are the children of the first Intifada, he states, during which over half of them witnessed the killing or humiliation of their fathers at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The psychological impact is stunning. Usually an authority figure, the father is witnessed as helpless, unable to protect himself or his children. Sarraj concludes: "Children who have seen so much inhumanity -- basically the Israeli occupation policies -- inevitably come out with inhuman responses. That's really how to understand the suicide bombings."42 The violence instigated by the occupied body is the symptom; as Sarraj puts it, "the reaction to this chronic and systematic process of humiliating people in effort to destroy their hope and dignity." That is the illness, "and unless it is resolved and treated, there will be more and more symptoms of the pathology."43
· Violation, humiliation, the extreme frustration of powerlessness -- these terms abound in Palestinian accounts of daily life under Israeli rule. Ghassan Hage calls it "colonial humiliation": the experience of being psychologically demeaned without the capacity to redress the situation. Not only on a national level but on a personal level: "being shouted at, abused, searched, stopped, ordered around, checked, asked to wait, 'allowed to pass,' and so forth."44 In these descriptions, dignity and an end to harassment are desired above all else. As Faisal Darraj writes,
What makes a Palestinian youth no more than 17, rush eagerly to his death? The more religious might answer it is the promise of paradise. But what turns a 27-year-old professional woman, who has no connection to any religious discourse, into a suicide bomber? The answer, like so much in this catastrophe, has nothing to do with a 'terrorist essence,' and has everything to do with dignity, or in this case the need to avenge the abuse of dignity, degraded each and every day for half a century.45
· Desperation is a powerful force, and not only negative. There is life in the power that propels one to resist. "It is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination," Agamben states, thinking of the Muselmann; "there is still life in the most extreme degradation."46 Any discussion of power in these troubled times has to take into account this life-force. Lest we romanticize such a power, however -- the enigmatic soul of the revolt -- we must acknowledge not only its emancipatory potential, but its roots in the very sovereign power that seeks to quell it. The body of the human explosive is both the site of its subjection to control and its resistance; it is both the weapon of retaliation and the sacrificial lamb. As a weapon it kills and incites violent response, but as a sacrifice, it ignites the passion of an occupied people for freedom. Agamben's question then is critical here: what "technological" process of subjectivization is required to bind one to the identity of a suicide bomber? A process which binds one at the same time to an external power -- indeed plays immediately into the hands of the forces against which the bomber struggles. The human bomber, as the representative of bare life reduced to a minimum existence and excluded from the political arena, is the link between Foucault's two models of power: becoming both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, "the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it."47
· Yet we might well ask, where is the resistance here? How have acts of self-immolation and murder contributed to the emancipation of the Palestinian people? When each new attack on Israeli citizens -- acts of revenge themselves -- legitimates in the watchful eyes of the world the retaliation of the Israeli military and provides fodder for a media-engorged public fascinated by body bits and bloody corpses in the street, how can we speak of resistance?
Preventing disorder and catastrophe

· I have argued that Agamben's provocative use of the notion of bare life for understanding the two-faced nature of the political subject is useful for discussing the case of the individual who makes his or her body into a weapon. That the occupied Palestinian lives the life of homo sacer is a function of the imposition of regulations on the rhythms of ordinary life. Yet we are brought up against the incommensurable difference between the Muselmann as the terminal point of no return for homo sacer, the last stop before absolute inhumanity, whom no one cared to save, not even his fellow camp inmates, and the human weapon whose murder and sacrifice turns him or her into a hero of the resistance. The former has given up all hope. As one Muselmann survivor put it: "You became so indifferent to your fate that you no longer wanted anything from anyone. . . . Today was enough; you were content with what you could find in the trash . . ." and another, who spoke of drifting through the camp "like a stray dog, dreaming of coming across at least a single potato skin," no longer hoping to survive.48 The human bomber however, is arguably the epitomy of hope, hardly indifferent to the outcome of his or her fate. For while killing oneself along with one's enemy might be an act of refusal, of desperation, of indifference to one's own life in the desire for retribution, it is carried out in the hope of transforming daily life for a community, and in the hope of claiming political freedoms, dignity, and self-determination for a people; carried out with pride, I would suggest. The act therefore, bears deep cultural, religious and political significance, despite the fact that in the public imagination of the West, the perpetrator is a fanatic terrorist, who like the ancient homo sacer, could be eliminated with impunity.
· Furthermore, we must note the disjuncture between Agamben's call for an ethics beyond dignity, for the Muselmann has lost all capacity to feel or care -- dignity can mean nothing to him -- and the demand of the human bomber for that very dignity and the right to feel or care. It seems odd, disturbing even, that Agamben would choose such an abject figure, devoid of anything we might call political agency, as an exemplary figure. There appears to be no recourse to a politics of resistance here; no power in these "skinny, dirty figures, their skin and faces blackened, their gaze gone, their eyes hollowed out, their clothes threadbare, filthy and stinking."49 What's more, there is no desire, no longing for liberation, for a dignified, self-determined existence; a desire that saturates every revolutionary or insurrectionary narrative familiar to us.
· Agamben's purpose in exploring the Muselmann as the most extreme case of homo sacer, however, is not to provide a theory of resistance, but to re-think ethics. At the heart of the testimony from Auschwitz is "an essential lacuna" he tells us: the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. Interrogating this lacuna, listening to it, is a way to create some signposts for "cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves."50 In the process, he throws open the doors to new questions concerning power, despair, hope, domination and the vulnerable naked life under its heels. I would venture that we can "read" the occupied body similarly: suspended in a state of exception, the "suicide bomber" is produced as a limit figure, his or her blown-up body also beyond dignity and despair -- unbearable to look at -- by which we are forced to encounter the limits of political norms. What can this tell us about the inadequacy of our political paradigms and our lack of political imagination or vision? We need to think a politics that will account for this body.
· The limit figure of the occupied body and the human explosive exhibit a similar lacuna, one that neither Foucault nor Agamben have adequately accounted for. The twentieth century has provided us with countless witnesses to the force of resistance, offering us a rich literature testifying to the power of collective revolt -- the "moral force" Foucault found both grave and beautiful, ever-ambivalent towards its enigmatic potential. It is here that we need to begin anew an analysis of power and resistance: in the accounts of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, among many others who write eloquently, if desperately, of the native's desire for liberation from the settler, of the necessity of claiming a human status, a political identity scavenged from the bare life to which the colonizer has reduced the colonized, and, critically, of the necessity of dignity. Fanon's words disturb us with their gritty, unapologetic violence: "the native life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler."51 As do the words of Hanadi Taysser Darajat, who turned her body into a weapon on October 4, 2003, killing nineteen people, both Jews and Arabs, in a crowded Haifa restaurant: "By the will of God I decided to be the sixth [female] martyr who makes her body full with splinters in order to enter every Zionist heart who occupied our country."52
· Yet we must proceed with extreme caution in this analysis. There is little hope for resistance if it is instantly recuperated into the sovereign power it contests. We need to be critical of claims that making one's body into a bomb is a strategy of resistance, while at the same time strive to understand the conditions responsible for producing this figure. It may be a question of ethical judgment; however, not only a condemnation is needed here, but a recognition of the fact that some powers are more repressive than others. We must acknowledge, as Mohammed Bamyeh does, that
the violence of the Intifada, indiscriminate and unapologetic as it may seem, still pales in comparison to the violence of the occupation, which had been indiscriminate and unapologetic for decades already. From the perspective of many Palestinians today, history shows that the world pays attention only to outbursts that shock it, and not to ongoing and accumulating injustice. After each setback, the Palestinians disappeared again from the diplomatic language, until the following round of noisy mobilization, activism, and violence.53
· If the production of the biopolitical body is the very function of the state, we cannot think of the self-sacrifice of this body as a strategy of resistance. The act of sacrifice is itself recuperable. Killing oneself in the process of killing others is not then a strategy of resistance, so much as a desperate refusal of bare life to the condition of being occupied, as well as one of the most horrific, and counter-productive examples of violent retribution.54 Accusations made against those who wish to understand it -- for failing to condemn a heinous act -- are therefore misplaced. We have to negotiate the terrain between arguments concerning the moral justification of such an act of violence, citing this despair as reason enough to justify revenge in the name of self-defense, and the foreclosure of any discussion by demanding unconditional condemnation for what is judged to be an act of terrorism.55 The urgent question then, has to do with understanding the occupied body who sacrifices his life, and accounting for the political conditions that breed eager new volunteers.
· In such a negotiation, we must ask why "suicide bombing"? Why now? Why this method of resistance and not another? Why is this phenomenon particular to certain struggles for self-determination and not to others?56 Why is it often assumed as an inevitable response to despair and repression? It is all too easy to dehistoricize diverse methods of political resistance as well as the State powers they contest. We must, as Bamyeh argues, "maintain the sobriety of the concrete at all costs" for it is "material existence and material grievances that create suffering and struggle": the lack of access to land and water, denial of human rights, demolition of homes, relegation to refugee-status, restriction of movement, among other abuses. Attention to the particularities of the struggle will demonstrate, Bamyeh continues, "that even the most seemingly irrational acts, like suicide bombings, have their basis in concrete but ignored grievances."57
· While we need to guard against assimilating the Palestinian struggle to the reactionary terrorism of Al-Qaeda, or for that matter to any other mode of violent resistance or act of anti-imperialism, I am suggesting that what the twenty-first century knows as "terrorism" alters the focus of Foucault's discussion of power and resistance, and highlights the necessity of formulating an analysis that acknowledges the root causes of the act of self-sacrifice and murder. For all the horror, grief and violent vengeance caused by this act, the important question is precisely that which Foucault wished to deflect: who wields the power? The transition from theorizing disciplinary power to dominating power, individual subjectivization to collective subordination, necessitates posing this question.
· Foucault appeared unwilling to do this, persisting in arguing for the reversible dynamic of power struggles. When he devotes his later energies to understanding technologies of the self as counterstrategies of individual resistance, his analysis of power disappointingly evokes the terms of antagonism that appear in his rhetorical activism. As Beatrice Hanssen explains, while his appeal to strategy was prefaced with an appeal to analyze social networks and concrete institutions, "when it came to specifying the material fiber of these relations" Foucault turned back to familiar ground: the definition of power as forceful imposition and antagonistic confrontation.58 He writes in 1982:
At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships.59
· Foucault persists in being optimistic. The claim that "at the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom" leads him to an agonistic politics. Agonism is preferable to antagonism, he argues, to describe "a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation."60 This claim, and Foucault's ambivalent relationship to it as he moves between theoretical investigations and political action, is the concern we need to address in order to understand the current deadlock between the forces of security and terror, between global capitalism and Islam. An attitude of permanent provocation can lead to an acceptance of the very "worldwide civil war" Agamben alludes to, and the destruction of civil coexistence that the paradigm of security and terror appears to be heading towards.
· Agamben argues that nothing is more important today than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics and a consideration of the catastrophic consequences of the use of this paradigm. He urges us to consider that
Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, and not merely towards their control. Today, there are plans for all kinds of emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. . . . It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- and not to reduce itself to attempts to control them once they occur.61
To this end, we need to listen to those who bear witness to the conditions of life under an occupying force, and to those whose sacrifice, in the end, may not count for anything except momentary empowerment for a people. A resistance that cannot be appropriated or recuperated, one that remains outside of the mutually reinforcing paradigms of power and counter-power, violence and counter-violence, is clearly evident in the resilience of the Palestinian people to their occupation. This force should be our point of departure in an analysis that requires courage as well as rigor in order to refuse the pernicious invitation to participate in a Manichean politics that polarizes the arguments: either one defends the victimized or defends the war on terror. Above all, we must guard against any ideology that promotes a "clandestine complicity of opponents" that will lead to the destruction of civil coexistence. This includes an unexamined defense of despair and the necessity of dignity as reason enough to resort to extreme acts of violence against civilians. Anger at injustice and an understandable desire for revenge have historically been channeled in diverse ways. While we cannot assume that "suicide bombing" is truly unnecessary, it is worse to say that it is the only option.

Diane Enns is working on a project concerning violence, totality and self-determination in the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto where she holds a postdoctoral fellowship. She has previously published on subjectivity, identity and emancipatory discourses and is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics and the Struggle for Liberation. She can be reached at d.enns@utoronto.ca.