The civil war as a political paradigm in Giorgio Agamben’s thought

from the state of excepction to the stasis

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the problematization of civil war as a political paradigm in Giorgio Agamben’s thought, seeking, at first, to approach the paradoxical position of homo sacer’s as an arcaic figure whereby the vulnerability of life rest under the sovereign decision, exposing the proximity between sovereing power and the biopower since ancient times, through the exception relation. Next, we’re going to advance in the problematization of the state of exception, based on two categories interposed by Agamben: on the one hand, the concentration camp paradigm, or the field, which, in addition to determining an exception structure of a historical period, or from a specific context, delimits emergency records emerging from the global horizon, as in refugee and stateless flows, threats of terrorism and economic crises, endless civil wars – whether in Palestinian territories colonized by Israeli forces or in the Brazilian peripheries – a context, finally, plunged into a permanent war plot. On the other hand, we will appeal to the concept of stasis to analyze the civil war in ancient Greece as a political paradigm, through the dissolution between the oikos and the polis, or rather "politicizing" the oikos and "economizing" the polis, making indiscernible the public and private, the internal and external, and finding in the war against terror, in the indiscernibility between police actions and the military actions, it’s contemporary counterpart.

Keywords: Giorgio Agamben. War. State of exception. Biopower. Stasis.