Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm by Giorgio Agamben (review)

Civil war is the dark shadow, the evil twin, the disturbing doppelgänger of ancient and modern politics. It reveals the unity of a community at the point of its breakdown and shows the limits to managing conflict before its descent into collective violence. Despite this proximity to politics, civil war has proved oddly resistant to theorization, as Agamben notes at the beginning of Stasis. His brief work comprises lightly revised versions of two seminar papers given at Princeton shortly after 9/11: they thus preceded what Agamben calls "the passage into the dimension of global civil war" since then. The first essay, drawing on the work of classicist Nicole Loraux, examines the Greek conception of internal conflict, (stasis) as it reveals "the threshold of politicisation and depoliticisation" between the household (oikos) and the city (polis). Unlike Loraux, who rightly distinguishes stasis from later Roman conceptions of civil war, Agamben conflates the two and obscures what may be truly revealing about stasis: that it is not civil (it does not take place among fellow citizens, or cives), nor is it war (polemos), as the Romans themselves were aware. The longer second essay, in dialogue with Carl Schmitt, works outward from the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan to reconstruct his political theory of the people, his idea of the state, and the relation of each to Christian eschatology, to propose that the Leviathan is to its people as Christ is to his ekklēsia. Agamben's wide learning and artful exegesis cannot conceal that for Hobbes the contention of all against all—in the pre-civil state of nature, as also after any collapse of the civitas—may approximate to war but is still not civil. Citizens do not exist before the institution of the commonwealth, and they disappear with its dissolution; their struggle is, we might say, an "omnial war" (bellum omnia contra omnes). Suggestive though these two pieces are, they rest on a historical category error. Taken together, Agamben's two blurred snapshots of the long, tortuous genealogy of civil war are necessarily inconclusive. As such, they achieve one of his goals for the book—precisely not to provide a theory of civil war.