Postcolonial redemption: Agamben’s thought as ... Asia Agambens Work... · Postcolonial Redemption: Agamben’s Thought as Transformative Chrēsis* ... the relevance of Agamben’s

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40.2 September 2014: 29-54 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2014.40.2.03

Postcolonial Redemption: Agamben’s Thought as Transformative Chrēsis*

Simone Bignall

School of Humanities and Languages

University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract Contemporary Continental Philosophers frequently take the Holocaust as a

point of departure. While their concern to investigate the conceptual operations

underwriting the attempted annihilation of Europe’s internal Others is

undeniably important, it is troubling how far less attention has been given to the

colonial violence waged upon Europe’s external Others, and to the role played

by philosophy in its justification and process. This general neglect on the part

of Continental Philosophy to address reflexively its own past uses and imperial

inclinations is all the more troubling because European colonization has a

continuing legacy. Australia, for example, comprises an imposed settler society

that remains unreconciled with the Indigenous peoples it displaced. Is this

problematic colonial history of European thought redeemable, and if so, then

what might constitute a postcolonial redemption of Continental Philosophy?

Giorgio Agamben is one Continental thinker who has devoted significant

attention to a notion of “redemption,” which is realized in an ethos of practice

that he theorizes in terms of Pauline chrēsis, or “transformative use.” However,

the relevance of Agamben’s concepts in non-Western situations is unclear,

since he insists that his most influential paradigms apply only to Western

political contexts and to the internal operation of European forms of political

exception. I engage with the apparent insularity of Agamben’s Eurocentric

Philosophy by testing whether his concepts and paradigms are “useful” for

thinking about postcolonial justice in Australia.

Keywords

colonialism, decolonization, “the West,” redemption, dispossession, chrēsis (use)

I am grateful to Daniel McLoughlin, Miguel Vatter and two anonymous reviewers for their

thoughtful engagement with the ideas presented in this paper, and for their perceptive suggestions towards its improvement. Very sincere thanks also to Chun-yen Chen, Jon Solomon and the organisers and participants of the conference “Except Asia: Agamben in Transcultural Perspective,” which was held in Taipei, June 25-27, 2013.

30 Concentric 40.2 September 2014

A significant strain of contemporary Continental Political Philosophy takes as

its point of departure the horrific fact of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews,

Roma and homosexuals. Aiming to counter the potential for such events to occur

again at a future time, thinkers including Agamben have investigated European

traditions to discover the conceptual origins of such political cruelty, for example in

the structuring exclusions that characterize the operation of sovereign power. Other

Continental thinkers, such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, take the

Holocaust as an implicit horizon informing their efforts to understand how docile

bodies become compliant with the powers that repress them, or to theorize creative

desire as the condition of a “non-fascist” life. Investigation and repudiation of the

ideas and frameworks underscoring the exclusion and attempted annihilation of

Europe’s internal others is undeniably important and prescient, especially when an

ascendant neo-fascism is palpable in many European centers. However, it is

troubling how far less attention has been given by Continental Philosophers to the

long, dark history of European colonialism, and to the role played by philosophy in

its justification and process. Although Hannah Arendt points to the conceptual

framework of imperialism as a source of the totalitarianism that underscored the

events of the Holocaust and made them possible, on the whole Continental

philosophers have been far less inclined to think about the horrors Europe inflicted

upon its external others as a result of colonization, or about the imperial character

of the operations undergirding Western power in its paradoxical internalization and

expulsion of difference. Indeed, this neglect on the part of Continental Philosophy

to address reflexively its own past uses and imperial inclinations is all the more

troubling because European colonization is far from being a thing of the past. In

Australia, for example, the polity is sullied daily by the hostilities that result when

an imposed settler society remains unreconciled with the Indigenous peoples it

displaced. In the absence of responsible reflection about the continuing effects of

the imperial legacy upon its own character and operation, it is uncertain whether

Continental Philosophy can be considered now delivered from its past imperialism.

What might constitute a postcolonial redemption of Continental Philosophy?

While scholars can learn much from Indigenous critical theory, which has made

significant inroads to theorizing the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and the

necessary conditions for its transformation in Australia and elsewhere,1 it is not

1 Exemplary theorizations of Indigenous governance, sovereignty and political ontology

conceived in an Australian context can be found in work by Indigenous scholars including Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Larissa Behrendt, Jon Altman, Irene Watson, Mark McMillan and Daryle Rigney. Further afield, Indigenous scholars have developed theorisations of decolonization based on Indigenous epistemologies grown in diverse settler-colonial states such as New Zealand-

Simone Bignall 31

enough for Western philosophy to “accommodate” Indigenous perspectives or to

“appropriate” such perspectives as a more adequate ground for the progress of

Western knowledge formations. Such gestures can merely replicate imperial modes

of operation. Indeed, just as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd suggests that “Indigenous

critical theory could be said to exist in its best form when it centers itself within

indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures

from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical,

legal, and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available”

(xxix-xxx). I believe European thought should first seek postcolonial redemption in

a reflexive moment; not only by identifying and critiquing its ongoing complicity

with imperial agencies in light of widespread postcolonial and Indigenous critiques

of imperialism and colonialism, but also by examining its considerable internal

diversity to identify and revalue potential strains of nonimperial engagement. It

should then look outward to engage Indigenous philosophical, legal and cultural

traditions in order to test its concepts for their actual utility in connecting

sympathetically and respectfully with other knowledges and worldly practices.

One Continental philosopher who has devoted significant attention to the

notion of “redemption” is Agamben. For Agamben, redemption or deliverance from

a problematic tradition calls for a process of release and exit, which is realized in an

ethos of practice that he theorizes in terms of Pauline chrēsis, or “transformative

use.” However, it remains unclear how Agamben’s concepts might enjoy a

productive relationship with non-Western phenomena of postcolonial importance,

such as native modes of governance: colonialism is at best a peripheral concern in

his work, and indeed he insists that his most influential paradigms—including homo

sacer—apply only to Western political contexts and to the operation of Western

forms of sovereign power, in which Europe’s internal Others are at once contained

and excluded by formally sanctioned states of exception. This paper engages with

the apparent insularity of Agamben’s Eurocentric philosophy by evaluating the

wider relevance of his concepts, measured here by their “usefulness” in thinking

about postcolonial justice in Australia.

Aotearoa, the United States, Canada and Palestine-Israel. See, for example, work by Amal Jamal, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Taiaiake Alfred, Sandy Grande, Dale Turner, Robert Warrior, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Jodi Byrd and Joanne Barker.


Relation of Ban

I’d like to begin this task by telling a personal story that illustrates a particular

form of political exception and abandonment characterizing contemporary

Australian settler-colonization.2 During 2007, I lived in South Australia in a big

white house on land dotted with ancient trees and bordered by a creek. Reading

local history, I became aware that the house was built on a traditional burial site of

the Indigenous Kaurna people. An early colonist, Edward Stephens, reminisces that

one of the last funerals to take place here was that of a Kaurna “Queen,” whose

final resting place lies near the creek, under the trees. For historians Elisabeth and

Jim Warburton, whose research uncovers the account of the burial as remembered

by the settler-colonist Edward Stephens, evidence of funereal land use in this area

of Adelaide is strengthened by anecdotal evidence told to them in 1977 by the man

then living within this space. He said: “workmen digging a few yards inside his

hedge exposed a skeleton. ‘What will we do with that?’ one wondered. ‘Throw it

away,’ said the other. ‘No,’ said the first, ‘I am a Lutheran. Let’s bury it again and I

will say a prayer over it’” (Warburton 2).

The burial ceremony Mr. Stephens observed taking place around 1840

represents a distinct world of traditions, of law and sacred knowledge, which

became practically forbidden on this site when the land was seized from the

traditional owners by the colonizing authority, divided up and fenced as private

property. And yet this world persists today—not simply as past “heritage,” but as a

present and living connection with culture through Country—and its protection is

the objective of Australian Indigenous peoples’ ongoing efforts of resistance to the

elimination and assimilation of their societies (Altman and Kerins).3 Viewed from

2 Australia was forged as a nation through a violent process of British colonisation, which

established penal settlements and expanded a colonial presence across vast tracts of territory already occupied by Indigenous peoples. No Treaty has been negotiated between the colonising powers and Indigenous nations, and the Australian community remains internally conflicted by the resulting feelings of resentment, suspicion and hostility that continue to sully intercultural relations. See Wolfe and Veracini for defining discussions of Settler Colonialism. While his analysis has limited application to settler colonial contexts beyond the United States where his investigation is focussed, see Morgensen for an explanation of the biopolitical operation of settler colonial formations in locations founded on a complex mix of Indigenous dispossession and slave labour. Morgensen’s article discusses gendered aspects of settler colonialism’s relation to the patriarchal state, and is particularly instructive for our purposes in how it makes use of Foucaultian and Agambenian perspectives to critique settler colonialism in the United States.

3 I emphasize that my reference to this Ancestral Kaurna figure here (and in the wider project on Excolonialism to which this article contributes) is made as a personal entry point for my own thinking about the experience of settler colonialism, and is part of my responsive action to her

Simone Bignall 33

the perspective of postcolonial “reconciliation,” the presence of the Aboriginal

Ancestor within the fenced territory of an individually held land title, which bars

common access to the land, evidences the prickly situation still characterizing

community relations between Aborigines and settlers in Australia. On the one hand,

settler landowners feel they have every reason to enjoy their property in private. On

the other hand, this land was appropriated by theft from the Indigenous traditional

owners; it remains a significant communal site for the Kaurna people, but their

interests are in no way recognized and their capacity to enjoy their Country and

fulfill their custodial responsibilities—for example, by protecting their Ancestors

from desecration or destruction—is denied.

While the Ancestor buried in this ground is not (or is no longer) a living body,

from the perspective of Indigenous Australian ontology and epistemology the

permanent presence of the Old People as a guiding force in the contemporary

community is a vital element in their living cultures and their consubstantial

understandings of sovereignty (see, for example, Moreton-Robinson, ed.): the

Ancestral remains therefore represent a form of life—the social life of an

Indigenous collective—now placed in a troubled relationship with a colonial

sovereign power. In his series of major works on sovereignty, Agamben provides a

conceptual framework for thinking about such “troubled relationships” obtaining

between the forces of life and of power. He locates the source of the trouble in the

“relation of ban” or abandonment, which he believes constitute an originary

Western political structure of “exception in which what is captured is at the same

time excluded, and in which human life is politicized only through an abandonment

to an unconditional power of death” or destruction (Agamben, Homo Sacer 90).

Largely in agreement with the discussions of Agamben taking place within

Indigenous studies and in the context of postcolonial theorizing more generally,4 I

think it is quite possible to identify the Indigenous Ancestor, who figures in Edward

Stephens’s account, as a figure of abandonment. Contained within a settler

enduring call for recognition and respect; however in no way should this be taken to suggest that this is a strategy which renders Kaurna people as “past tense presences” devoid of agency in contemporary society (Byrd xx). In fact, such an interpretation would rely upon colonialist assumptions that Ancestral beings have no place in real world ontology; my work here records my attempt to acknowledge and to take seriously, from my own “settler” perspective, the present salience and ongoing affective force of Indigenous conceptualisations of an enduring sovereign existence, which relies upon consubstantial relationships with nonhuman agents such as Country, animals, and Ancestors.

4 See, for example, influential work by Byrd, Rifkin, Morgensen, Muldoon, and Motha, as well as the collection on Agamben and Colonialism recently edited by Marcelo Svirsky and myself.


landholding, she is separated from her Kaurna community (who cannot currently

access their Country in this fenced site, and can no longer observe the Laws,

customs and spiritual affairs they once practiced here). She is “included” within the

land title, but not formally acknowledged as a part of it; her existence there is thus

“excluded” from formal recognition, since this existence is “presupposed” to have

no significance in relation to the settler law of property acquisition, which was

indeed founded on the basis of non-relation or of her irrelevance in political terms;

perhaps even on the basis of her non-existence as such. She is “removed and at the

same time captured,” “delivered over to [her] own separateness” without the lawful

protection of her people, and “consigned to the mercy” of the settler community

that was the agent of her separation (Homo Sacer 110). Thus she may be “thrown

away,” or reburied in accordance with an alien religion and a foreign set of rites, or

perhaps treated with an appropriate cultural sensitivity; but in any case her survival

is always dependent on the whim of those individual powers—the landowners,

gardeners, or tenants—she now encounters. This is not to deny the affective force

she has exerted historically upon these various agents of settler colonialism; neither

does it ignore the power she continues to exert upon settlers—including myself—in

her insistent call for postcolonial justice; and nor does it devalue the agency

presently exercised by the Kaurna community in its current activism for

decolonization. Rather, this perspective acknowledges that agency, like all

experiences of power and freedom, is relational; acts of resistance and of

responsiveness take their actual shape and exercise their particular efficacy in

concrete practical contexts of domination. In settler-colonial states, Indigenous

agency confronts Western property law, which is itself a powerful agent of

domination and abandonment that discourages settler awareness of the need for

postcolonial responsiveness to Indigenous concerns.

As he endeavors to explain the structuring operation of sovereign power in

terms of abandonment, Agamben interrogates the constitutive link between the

concepts of life and power, evident in modern Western texts on sovereign right.

Accordingly, he describes the Schmittian tradition of political exceptionalism,

which defines as sovereign he who stands outside the law (while simultaneously

embodying the law), in order to decide its application to life. Carl Schmitt argues

that “all law is situational law” (13), in the sense that it creates the normative

situation for which its rule can be considered valid. In this way, the sovereign

decision applies primarily in defining the normative situation that gives the law as a

whole the force it requires in order to regulate life in its jurisdiction. As Steven

DeCaroli has pointed out, sovereign authority relies upon the a priori

Simone Bignall 35

circumscription of a “field of sovereignty,” which “creates the ground upon which

both the rule of law and those subject to the law are found to be entirely compatible”

(50). The sovereign decision thus primarily refers to the setting of the territorial

boundaries within which sovereign authority operates and takes effect. Importantly,

however, this reach of sovereign power not only includes life that is protected by

law because it is contained within the fold of sovereign jurisdiction; it also extends

to those lives or forms of life that are somehow beyond the survey of the law

because they fail to abide within the normative “frame of life” defined by the

sovereign situation of legality. For these forms of life, the law applies to them as

inapplicable. These forms of life are therefore ambiguously included as subjects of

sovereign power in the very act of their exclusion from its consideration. In this

way, the “life” that sovereign power bears upon is not simply a primal, natural and

free state (zōe) that is presumed to exist “before” social power or in permanent

opposition to it; nor is this “life” simply contained or internalized by power when it

becomes a qualified form of existence or a particular “way of life” (bios) defining a

political community. In fact, the life that is the object of the sovereign decision, and

which originally constitutes sovereignty’s reason for being, always exists in a

“threshold” space of exception, between natural life (zōe) and social life (bios).

Another way of understanding this point is to see that, for Agamben, life and

power—potentiality and law—are always-already co-implicated, that being is

always-already political, and that sovereignty takes form and operates in the

indistinct zone where life and power intersect. According to Agamben, this life that

is the object of the sovereign operation is best thought of as “bare” life, in the sense

that it is an always-already politicized life that has been isolated from normative

frames of communal belonging and stripped bare, bereft of the protective cloak of

positive law. Thus, the “bare life” residing at the heart of sovereign operations of

abandonment is not the “natural” or “essential” human life that is the universal

object of sovereign protection; nor is it a particular social way of life associated

with the territorial customs that are protected by (national) sovereign law. Rather, it

is a kind of life that suffers a “double exclusion” from these spheres, while at the

same time remaining fully exposed to the violent effects of the sovereign power of

abandonment. Like the Indigenous Ancestor, this is “bare life, which dwells in the

no-man’s-land between the home and the city” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 90). This is

abandoned being: bare life placed in a state of exception where it constitutes the


referent of the sovereign decision regarding the limit application of the law, thus

making it “the originary political element” (Homo Sacer 90).5

For Agamben, the archaic juridical figure of the outcast “sacred man”

exemplifies this kind of life that is abandoned by a sovereign power and bereft of its

legal protections; a life for whom the law applies only in the consequences suffered

as a result of the formal withdrawal of legal privileges and recognition.

. . . homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the

sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion

through which the political dimension was first constituted. The

political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double

exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the

religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction

between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in

which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without

celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed

but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere.

(Homo Sacer 83; emphasis in original)

If we interpret this passage through the lens of the situation that concerns us, where

Indigenous Australian life is “taken into the sovereign ban” via private property

entitlements to land that was seized from the traditional custodians at the time of the

British invasion, how should we understand the implications of this claim that it is

possible to eliminate with impunity this life captured in the sovereign ban, though it

is not permissible to sacrifice it? Firstly, the assertion that Indigenous life may not

be sacrificed takes on a sovereign significance once we observe that this is a claim

that Indigenous life, like all (human) life in the nation, belongs to sovereign law and

is therefore included in its protective scope. That is, to claim the non-sacrificability

of the Indigenous “sacred man” is also to insist that British sovereignty extended

over all within the colony upon its establishment; this sovereign rule is thus asserted

as unitary and undivided, encompassing all human life that dwells upon its territory.

Indigenous life that cannot be sacrificed is affirmed as secular, belonging to the

colonial sovereign state, and (despite what Australian Indigenous peoples assert) it

therefore does not belong to the “Dreamtime” laws of Ancestral Creation that are

5 For an alternative vision of “naked life,” see the conceptualization of Aboriginal sovereignty

articulated by Australian Aboriginal legal philosopher Irene Watson in “Naked Peoples: Rules and Regulations.”

Simone Bignall 37

the source of Indigenous legal traditions and principles of governance (see

Moreton-Robinson). Indigenous life is thereby considered subject to sovereign state

powers alone: it cannot be judged or sacrificed in accordance with other Laws for,

according to the sovereign perspective, there are no other Laws of significance. In

this way, the assertion that Indigenous life cannot be sacrificed “preserves the

memory of the originary exclusion” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 83) of the contesting

sovereignties or conceptions of political life and governance that stem from

Indigenous legal customs related to Country and Creation (Muldoon). Of course,

this is an exclusion “through which the political dimension [of colonial rule] was

first constituted” as legitimate in Australia, according to the extended principle of

terra nullius.

However, as Australians well know, Indigenous life understood socially as a

“form of life” may indeed be “killed with impunity” in colonial and postcolonial

Australia. A traditional Indigenous way of life is communal and takes its character

from its autochthonous relation to the Country that is also its source of Law and

custom. According to the liberal individualist property statutes of Australian

sovereign law, this Indigenous relation to Country (and the “native title” that

translates this relation into Western terms of law), if it is recognized at all, may be

extinguished in the interests of settlers. Secondly, then, the claim that Indigenous

life is sacred because it belongs to the sovereign nation state is also a claim about

territorial boundaries and the rightful ownership (by the British Crown) of the land

subtending the reach of sovereign jurisdiction. Unitary settler sovereignty in

Australia is thus predicated upon the geopolitical project of empire, defining the

territoriality of the colonial nation-state by displacing and refuting competing

claims by older Indigenous political formations (Rifkin 94). As such, when it

threatens to undermine sovereign authority by transgressing territorial boundaries

(for example, when it surfaces in the private garden of a settler land holding),

Indigenous cultural life connected to Country is presented as “‘life devoid of value’”

or “life that does not deserve to live,” and so may simply be “thrown away”

(Agamben, Homo Sacer 136-43). As life that can be extinguished with impunity,

yet not sacrificed, Indigenous being is the homo sacer of the Australian nation-state.

With his emphasis on the “originary” exclusion that constitutes Western

sovereignty, and in light of his references to archaic historical sources, one might

wonder what Agamben offers for the analysis of sovereignty today. In fact,

however, he insists that the structure of the ban is not simply an original operation

of a sovereign power exercised at the time of its establishment, for example at the

time of the British invasion of Australia. Rather, it constitutes the permanent


structure of sovereign operations, which through the constant reiteration of

“relations of ban” defines its character not only in the past, but also in the present

(Agamben, State). Therefore, Agamben insists:

We must learn to recognise this structure of the ban in the political

relations and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the

banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and

more external than every extraneousness. The banishment of sacred

life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the ongoing

spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and

every territorialization. (Homo Sacer 111; emphasis in original)

On this view, the dispossession of Indigenous Country must be seen “not as a

historical fact and an anomaly belonging in the past (even if still verifiable) but in

some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are

still living” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 166; see Motha). This point is, I suggest,

illustrated starkly by the situation we have been considering: where the Country that

sustains Indigenous life is routinely internalized within the fenced spatializations

that describe the settler property regime. This view also implies that the “state of

exception” that characterizes daily life in Western settler-colonial polities is not

“exceptional”—not the kind of operation we find only in Nazi Germany or in the

original violence of genocidal colonization—but rather is mundane, banal and so

pervasive it has become virtually imperceptible and certainly unremarkable. The

very spaces in which we live, our gardens and our houses, are sites of exception;

living in them as tenants or proprietors under exclusive titles, most Australians daily

render Indigenous life as homo sacer, blithely acting out the violence that

constitutes the secret heart of the colonial sovereign state. As Agamben points out,

“what confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without

precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways” (Homo Sacer 114).

Applied to postcolonial analysis, Agamben’s critique of the sovereign

exception and its illumination of the pervasive violence routinely employed today in

the most regular and unremarkable entitlements are certainly “unsettling” for the

conscionable Australian. And yet, the very banality of the situation he describes

might be cause for worry that Agamben’s critical work lacks redemptive force. His

analysis certainly appears of vital importance, but it is difficult to see its practical

significance or to know with any immediacy or clarity what we may do with this

new understanding Agamben’s conceptual framework furnishes. Consequently,

Simone Bignall 39

Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary situation often appears as a criticality “in

force without significance”; or perhaps it is one that is significant, but without force.

Of course, on one level it is obvious that everyone should care that Western

political societies rely upon the creation of homines sacri. And it is apparent that

those of us living in such polities should worry for our own safety, because the

sovereign decision is structured by a state of exception in which anyone may serve

as the requisite abandoned subject, and any day might see “a new decision

concerning the threshold beyond which [one’s own] life ceases to be politically

relevant, becomes only ‘sacred life,’ and can as such be eliminated without

punishment” (Homo Sacer 139).6 Each and every individual living in Western

political society may at some time become sacer, since “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” (Homo Sacer 84). And yet, on

another level, when political violence is pervasive and unremarkable, the challenge

of its transformation becomes immense and seems impossible to put in motion. For

Agamben, “only a reflection that, . . . thematically interrogates the link between life

and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the

same time, return thought to its practical calling” (Homo Sacer 5). Accordingly, the

transformative capacity of Agamben’s thought lies in the way this link between life

and power is reconceived, differently from the form it takes in the sovereign bond.

The following section elaborates this possibility in relation to Agamben’s

secularization of Saint Paul’s texts on messianic redemption.

Redemption

If we can understand Indigenous cultural existence as life necessarily

abandoned by the sovereign law of the colonial state, then what do postcolonial

Australians stand to gain by doing so? Agamben’s intention in his work on

abandonment is to observe the complex way in which Western sovereignty is

founded upon a state of exception that may, he hopes, eventually also be the source

of its ruination. His aim is to prepare the conceptual conditions for its dissolution.

In this respect, his work could be helpful for thinkers who are attempting to theorize

new forms of “shared sovereignty” as the negotiated coexistence of diverse political

6 While the fact of homo sacer in sovereign society is immutable, the threshold of exclusion is

subject to change according to political conventions and popular attitudes: “Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern—decides who its ‘sacred men’ will be” (Homo Sacer 139).


entities in postcolonial nations (see Pitty and Smith; Bacik; Krasner). In other words,

it may be a fruitful source of postcolonial redemption. Here, I acknowledge that I

am granting pre-emptively that settlers may eventually find a rightful place

accommodated on Indigenous lands, and also that Indigenous peoples will be

willing to “share sovereignty” over their unceded territories. Of course, this political

negotiation is yet to take place in Australia or elsewhere in the postcolonial world

and the outcome is here provisionally begged in light of the need to find a solution

to the actual existing condition of postcolonial life: diverse peoples cohabit in fact,

but unitary political forms imposed with colonial rule do not recognize the diversity

of the lives they purport to represent. Further questions of agency arise at this point:

if responsibility for finding happier forms of postcolonial coexistence in locations

marked by original and continuing dispossession is necessarily shared today by

Indigenous peoples and by the settlers who have made their homes on Indigenous

lands, then what might motivate settlers responsibly to seek postcolonial

redemption? After all, settler interests are vested in the protection of their privileges

secured by the unitary power of settler institutions, and therefore are best served by

the continuing sovereign abandonment of Indigenous forms of life. In my view,

despite the intransigent thrust of policy towards the assimilation of Indigenous

political cultures within the imposed Western state-form, the postcolonial burden of

mutual “accommodation” cannot fairly (or logically) be carried by Indigenous

agents alone—particularly in light of the immense losses and compromises

Indigenous peoples have already been required to endure. However, the public

conversation in Australia about “postcolonial reconciliation” has an unfortunate

tendency to misrepresent settlers as being in possession of a privileged freedom of

choice to become involved, or not, in decolonization. This stance ignores the

problematic legal status of settler property acquired by the original theft of

Indigenous lands. As Shaun Berg, lawyer for the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority,

points out with respect to the British Crown’s original acknowledgement of

Indigenous rights to land in South Australia: “If rights to those lands were already

held by native inhabitants, then the first land grants were not validly granted. . . . the

first title would not be a valid title, and this would result in subsequent titles being,

as a consequence, invalid” (22).7 In short, while decolonization has been driven

7 South Australia was settled with authority given by Royal Letters Patent, signed by King

William IV in 1838. While the Letters Patent provided for the sovereign recognition of Aboriginal rights to land and culture, and included a clause safeguarding their continuing and undisturbed enjoyment of these rights, this proviso was subsequently ignored as the land was seized for private holdings. See the edited collection by Berg; and related scholarship by Rigney, Hemming, and Berg.

Simone Bignall 41

efficiently by the agency of Indigenous peoples, the postcolonial reconstruction of

just forms of social relationship requires settlers must become equal agents in

transformation, not only from a moral compulsion to do the right thing in the face

of the historical injustices suffered by the Indigenous peoples they have

dispossessed and supplanted, but also because there is a legal issue that must

rightfully be resolved. And beyond these moral and legal compulsions for settlers to

take action in the service of postimperial transformation, there also exists a positive

promise of benefit: the potential for political pluralism introduces new freedoms for

Indigenous peoples and settlers alike, in the broadening of current horizons that

comes with the expansion of currently dominant forms of “the political” to embrace

diverse expressions of existence.

In thinking about post-colonial property and the sovereign abandonment of

Indigenous cultural life, my interest therefore lies in the possibility of characterizing

a redemption that is at once philosophical and practical. Indeed, for post-imperial

European philosophy, its scope for redemption rests precisely in its capacity to bear

upon contemporary postcolonial practices of political exclusion in a transformative

fashion. Especially in Christian theology, redemption is thought of as a process of

salvation or deliverance, involving a movement of release or exit from a troubled

situation, also often accompanied by responsive actions of atonement for past

wrongs. Continental Philosophy (with its imperial past) is potentially redeemed

when it delivers a genuinely “excolonial” imaginary, and in collaboration with

Indigenous thinkers, thereby helps to create new forms of social practice “released”

from their present connection with the kinds of relations and institutions inherited

as legacy of European colonization. I have coined the term “excolonial” (“exit-

from-colonialism”) to designate an ideally decolonized form of future community

that is “yet to come” in the postcolony.8 “Excolonialism” is conceptually distinct

from “postcolonialism,” which I consider best signifies the actually lived time of a

(neo)colonial present following a colonial past. Thus, for example, post-colonial

Australia exists as a nation that has been colonized by settlers, which remains

invested predominantly by settler interests and retains institutionalized

characteristics of settler colonization; excolonialism is mindful of the history

associated with the event of settler colonization and affirms the continuing co-

8 This is the subject of the wider project titled Excolonialism: Ethics after Enjoyment, to which

this article contributes. A related account is published in Settler Colonial Studies as “The Collaborative Struggle for Excolonialism.” For commentary on historical discontinuity in the context of post-colonial transformations, see my Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism, especially Chapter 6.


existence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples following this event, but refers

to a future-form of decolonized sociability that has conscientiously “exited” the

settler-interested modes of social production predicated upon the Indigenous

dispossession characterizing Australian colonialism, and which currently exists

virtually or potentially as a minor form of Australian sociability yet to be widely

actualized in the present. Redemption is usually associated with salvation and

deliverance; but according to a more secular interpretation, to redeem something

(say, a voucher) is also to exchange it or to use it. This is the significant

interpretation Agamben draws from Paul’s references to the term “chrēsis” in

Corinthians. “Chrēsai” is a verb meaning “to make use of,” and Agamben places

chrēsis at the heart of Paul’s message about the messianic vocation and the

salvation it brings to the faithful.

To understand the redemptive significance of chrēsis, it is first necessary to

appreciate the internal ambiguity present in the notion of (messianic) vocation. On

the one hand, a vocation is a calling; to have a vocation is to be identified with a set

of characteristics or properties that signify one’s worldly situation. By contrast, the

messianic calling (or vocation) is more like a “revocation” of a worldly situation: it

is “a calling of the calling” in which one’s material determination is “made as

nothing” when one is swept away by the radically universalizing experience of

“being in the Messiah.” In this way, the messianic calling prompts a change in

things, an “internal shifting of each and every single worldly condition by virtue of

being ‘called’” (Agamben, Time 22). According to Agamben, this “internal shifting”

is best understood as a form of nullification or negation, in which worldly things

and situations are considered “as not.” This does not mean that they cease to be or

are materially transformed in any way, but rather that their “impotentiality” is made

apparent. Paraphrasing Paul’s words in Corinthians: in coming to be in their present

determinations, the things of the world “used the world” but did not “use it up”;

those paths they did not take, those unchosen potentialities they did not make use of,

remain immanent within every factical thing, as a kind of permanent negating force

that Agamben suggests “revokes a condition and radically puts it into question in

the very act of adhering to it” (Time 23). In this way, by revealing the impotentiality

that resides within all things as their potential to “not be” such as they are, the

messianic “vocation calls the vocation itself, as though it were an urgency that

works it from within and hollows it out, nullifying it in the very gesture of

maintaining and dwelling in it” (Time 24). The negative condition of impotentiality,

of being lived “as not,” “indicates the particular transformation that every juridical

status and worldly condition undergoes because of, and only because of, its relation

Simone Bignall 43

to the messianic event” (Time 22). Accordingly, “[t]o be messianic, to live in the

Messiah, [to be redeemed] signifies the expropriation of every juridical-factical

property under the form of the as not” (Time 26; emphasis in original).

However, this release from the powerful hold of the illusory givenness of

things and present states of affairs does not found a new identity or a new situation;

it merely revokes the existing one to make way for the “passing of the figure of this

world.” (Time 25). Considering the things of the world being as not, opens up a

potentiality that can be used for the creation of a new world; however, in itself, the

redemptive movement of revocation simply deactivates the old powers defining a

present set of entrenched traditions and conventions, without pinning down the

coordinates of the new future that will follow. In this way, Agamben notes: “For

Paul, the redemption of what has been is the place of an exigency for the messianic.

This place does not involve a point of view from which we could see a world in

which redemption had taken place. . . . The messianic vocation dislocates and,

above all, nullifies the entire subject” (Time 41). In other words, salvation is not a

promised possibility we may hopefully encounter in the future; rather it is

something that abides with us here and now, in the potentiality that remains to be

used of present things in the time of the now. But while the moment of deliverance

is always-already upon us in the negative potentiality that permanently destabilizes

the real, the “messianic subject . . . contemplates salvation only to the extent that he

loses himself in what cannot be saved” (Time 42). That is, the messianic subject

becomes open to salvation when he understands the exigency of his identity as such:

when his self-certainty is lost in the unrealized history of those uncertain moments

of impotentiality where alternative worlds and forms of life never came to pass; and

when he loses his composure as he feels the destabilizing force of this alternative

world that “cannot be saved” because it has never existed as such, though it remains

permanently potential in the redemptive form of the as not. This is the sense in

which the messianic event is the “revocation of every worldly condition, released

from itself to allow for its use” (Time 42-43).

According to Agamben, then, the critical impotentiality of existence has a

special relationship to use or practice, and in fact for Paul, living “as not” appears in

the time of the messiah as “the only possible use of worldly situations” (Time 26;

emphasis in original). Agamben writes, “Use: this is the definition Paul gives to the

messianic life in the form of the as not. To live messianically means “to use” klēsis

[the calling]; conversely, messianic klēsis [calling] is something to use, not to

possess” (Time 26; emphasis in original). This contrast between the use of things

and the possession of them is, I suggest, a distinction that can be helpful as we think


about postcolonial co-belonging and the capitalist-colonial property regime of land

ownership. Agamben explains that “the messianic vocation is not a right, nor does it

furnish an identity; rather it is a generic potentiality [potenza] that can be used

without ever being owned” (Time 26). Indeed, this is because it works by the

deactivation of identity and its properties, returning it to a free condition of

potentiality and indeterminacy, to its “natural” life outside of a given “form of life.”

Whereas right is vested in property or in the rights-bearing properties of the

individual, the use of messianic impotentiality involves expropriation; accordingly,

“to remain in the calling in the form of the as not means to not ever make the

calling an object of ownership, only of use” (Time 26; emphasis in original). But,

although the messianic vocation cannot be owned and cannot define the property of

an identity, this does not mean that things themselves cannot be objects of right or

possession, for the ownership of a thing is always a possible use of it. However, by

the same logic, possession is just one “use” of things, and use is not exhausted by a

“right of usage” or usufruct. This, then, is what the messianic condition reveals: not

the impossibility of lawful property relations in the redeemed world to come, but

the primacy of use over possession, and the understanding that a worldly existence

or state of affairs is certainly in the last instance defined by its properties and its

property relations, but in the first instance it is produced by the social practice, or

ethos, that delimits and gives meaning to the way things may be used (and owned)

in any given society (Agamben, Highest Poverty). Because praxis and ethos are

always mutable, the object properties and significations they produce are similarly

open to alteration when they are taken up in a new use, or a new performance of the

real. Thus, “[i]n the as not, the juridical-factical condition is taken up again and is

transposed, while remaining juridically unchanged, to a zone that is neither factual

nor juridical, but is subtracted from the law and remains as a place of pure praxis, of

simple ‘use’” (Time 28; emphasis in original). Agamben illustrates this by pointing

out that for the apostles, “the acts of selling and buying and other types of contracts

existed only in name and as external ritual, but not in the reality (truth) of the thing”

(Time 27).

In The Time That Remains and in his work on monastic life titled the Highest

Poverty, Agamben’s emphasis on the redemptive priority of “use” over property or

right in the reconstruction of social meaning and worldly situations is, I think,

relevant with respect to the problematic situation that concerns us: where

Indigenous use of Country is forbidden in favor of exclusive ownership of a land

parcel. If the colonial imaginary describes ways in which land can be separated

from common use, made exclusive and reduced to ownership, then Agamben’s

Simone Bignall 45

interpretation of Pauline chrēsis suggests new possibilities for an “excolonial”

imaginary. For Agamben, the redeemed world to come will be a “profane” world, in

which the things that have been “separated” from the community for the use of a

privileged few, will be returned to a common (or multiple) use. In this case, we

might envisage the possibility that a territory may be released from its containment

in an exclusive property holding and restored to its multiple uses. One use is as

property (and so the redeemed excolonial world to come will not necessarily bring a

world without proprietorship); but other uses and relations to land also exist—for

example in the non-economic use of Country as source of Law and custom.

Acknowledging the multiple use-value of things permits us to “stretch and pluralize

the paradigmatic practices of capitalist property, ownership, territory and

sovereignty” (Connolly 41), potentially also making room for relations of

production and modes of social belonging beyond capitalism.

An excolonial imaginary will create concepts (such as “shared sovereignty” or

“co-belonging”) that describe how these various possible uses of land—for example

as individual property and as Indigenous Country—may be understood to coexist

and can be fairly negotiated. This possibility is, I suggest, not entirely unrealistic or

utopian—it is quite possible for settlers to acknowledge the existence of nation-

wide native title in Australia today, while Indigenous owners might allow that

individual interests and rights in property will continue to exist, though they will

need to be balanced more carefully against those interests and rights that are

currently unrecognized at law. For example, under an alternative urban property

regime, a person who owns land might still be considered free to dispose of it and

build upon it and use it how she will; however it becomes reasonable to expect that

any building work she proposes will not only be approved by the local Council but

also by the Indigenous custodians who have an enduring title and interest in that

land. Similarly, the construction and excavation work might no longer be monitored

only by a community representative elected to Council, but arguably should also be

overseen by an Indigenous caretaker of Country. If privately owned land lies on a

site of special cultural significance, it is possible to imagine that necessary access

may be shared, negotiated and regulated by formal or informal agreement, as

happens even now in many instances.9 The actual mechanisms of “excolonial”

cultural coexistence and co-management of “shared land” are largely yet to be

invented (especially in urban environments); and here I am perhaps problematically

9 Indeed, such arrangements were the subject of the Wik decision, which was reached in the

Australian Federal Court in 1996, but subsequently abandoned.


presuming that Indigenous peoples would consent to the notion that their unceded

lands can be justly shared today with the descendents of their colonizers. Granted,

however, Agamben’s interpretation of the messianic “time of the now” allows us to

understand how the potential existence of such mechanisms may be discerned today

as a consequence of the permanent impotentiality of current forms of life.

Excolonialism exists even now, though in a “weak” and virtual state, resident in the

redemptive possibility that our present social life may yet be lived “as not,” and

then reinvented for a new use consistent with an excolonial ethos of coexistence.

We are now in a position to observe that the term “chrēsis” designates a “use”

of the messianic calling, to bring about a series of “exchanges.”10 Firstly, in the time

of redemption, the facticity of situations as they are presently lived is exchanged for

their impotentiality and the critical awareness all things are present only because

they enjoy the exigency of an existence; but in this very exigency they experience a

potentiality that means they may always become otherwise. Secondly, vocation or

propriety is exchanged for revocation and impropriety or expropriation. And third,

the powerful things of the actual world are exchanged for the weak things that are

merely potential, those “meek,” “remnant” and barely discernible, virtual forms of

life that will inherit the earth in the time of the messiah.

I have suggested that Agamben’s Continental Philosophy shows a redemptive

capacity that may release (aspects of) European thought from its long complicity

with imperialism. This is evident in the way his concepts may be used for the

critical analysis of colonial sovereignty, and for the creative imagining of an

“excolonialism” to come. However, it remains unclear whether Agamben betrays

the redemptive potential of his philosophy when his own conceptual language

remains contained by an insular Westernity. Does Agamben’s lack of significant

engagement with alternative traditions of thought limit the transformative potential

his resolutely Western philosophy might realize by deactivating its enduringly

powerful relationship to its Others?

10 Examination of the Marxist subtext pertaining to the concepts of “exchange-value” and “use-

value” regrettably extends beyond the scope of my discussion here. However, readers may wish to note that in The Time That Remains and elsewhere in his opus (for example, in “The Work of Man” and “In Praise of Profanation”), Agamben devotes considerable excursionary attention to Marxist analyses of commodity fetishism and of “use.” For a discussion of Agamben’s views on such matters and his reworking of them, especially as these are illuminated in his work on “profanation” and in his commentary on the correspondence between Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, see work by Vatter and Whyte.

Simone Bignall 47

Conclusion: Language, Power and Potentiality

Post-war Continental Philosophy has taken a reflexive turn, frequently

seeking to provide itself with a critical image of its own epistemological

presumptions and ontological operations. I have suggested that this tendency

towards critical self-reflexion in Continental Philosophy should justly be extended

to the rigorous critical analysis, by Continental Philosophers, of Europe’s imperial

activities; and thus to the reformation of European frameworks for thinking about

its relationship with the rest of the world’s peoples. However, the mode of its

criticality in this task also poses a question for concern, since there is always a

danger that Western thought may mine non-Western traditions for the exotic

resources that might enable its own development. This is, of course, an operation

that mimics the appropriative nature of imperialism itself, and thus should be noted

as something to be avoided in a Philosophy that seeks to reform the conceptual

frameworks underpinning imperial operations. How, then, should Continental

Philosophy best engage in self-critique and renovation? Is it fitting that it seek to

destabilize itself from within, by seeking out those minor strains of thought internal

to its own historical development and often suppressed within the dominant forms

that Western Philosophy has taken, and which have been a significant organizing

feature of European colonization? If so, then how might this insular praxis be able

to redefine Continental Thought’s relationships with non-Western Philosophies? Or

should it instead try to reach outside itself, to engage more fully and openly with

those non-Western traditions it has tended willfully to ignore or to devalue in the

past? If so, how might it avoid appropriating and claiming the conceptual tools of

non-Western traditions for its own use?

In an interview conducted in 2010, Agamben’s compatriot, Roberto Esposito,

says the following:

I believe that a critical and self-critical image of the West can come to

us only from outside the West, from a conceptual language that does

not coincide with the West’s own and whose specificity lies precisely

in its difference from the West. Chinese as well as Japanese semantics

(though in different ways) seem to be decisive in this regard.

Postcolonial literature [. . .] can teach us much, but especially how to

understand that it is only from the outside that we can grasp the

meaning of the inside. Not vice-versa. (117)


And yet, surely there is something dubious about the solipsistic motivation

expressed obliquely here: that, for Europeans, the point of engaging with traditions

“outside the West” is to “understand the meaning of the inside,” rather than to

appreciate such traditions for their own intrinsic worth. The “outside” with its

inscrutable semantics appears here as something of value (only) if it “can teach us

much” about “the meaning of the inside”; that is, about “our” (Western) selves. This,

then, is an “outside” always-already circumscribed by the requirements of the

“inside.”

Agamben, too, meditates on the concept of the “outside” in a chapter of his

work on The Coming Community. Here, the “outside” is defined as “an external

space that must remain empty” because it is the indetermination that touches being

“at its threshold” and renders it potential. Readers attuned to Indigenous critical

theory might hear in this formulation alarming echoes of the colonial fantasy of

terra nullius as an empty space available for the self-development of Western forms.

Indeed, it is significant that, immediately following this account of the “outside” as

the domain of a potentiality that borders experience, Agamben reductively captures

the meaning of “the outside” as a “threshold” by pinning it firmly to a Western

linguistic framework and an associated geopolitical position of enunciation in the

following claim: “the notion of the ‘outside’ is expressed in many European

languages by a word that means ‘at the door’” (Agamben, Coming Community 68;

emphasis added). In this way, “the outside” appears as an exteriority and a passage

to potentiality, but one that is always-already thought as such from within the

conceptual and linguistic scaffolding and the positionality of Western thought. It

thus signifies a potentiality for thought, but one that is already contained by the

familiar structures of European languages. In a few other places in Agamben’s work,

the “outside” appears more specifically located in the non-Western traditions that

Europe considers to represent its external others. Thus, in The Time That Remains,

Agamben refers to the Indigenous Hopi language studied by the linguist Benjamin

Whorf as an “outside” of “Standard European Language,” one able to provide

concepts of modality such as “impotentiality” that are not conventionally used in

Western languages. And he points to the case of Tiananmen as a non-Western

example of the “potential politics” that might usher in the coming community. And

yet, these examples also translate perhaps too smoothly, or too completely, to the

terms defining political operations of Western linguistic or sovereign dominance:

the Hopi language is here neatly contained in an interpretive text by a Western

scholar; the resistance action performed by the Chinese students at Tiananmen is

Simone Bignall 49

not novel from a Western perspective, but in fact is already disconcertingly familiar,

shaped by the sovereign nature of the power it faces.

Agamben himself is “acutely aware of the way structures of language

determine structures of thought” and action (Time 37). In fact, Agamben’s juridico-

political thought is informed by the critical analysis of language and ontology in his

early works including Infancy and History, Language and Death, and Stanzas. Just

as his political works interrogate bare or sacred life as the constitutive limit and the

product of sovereign law, his work on language and being considers the limit of

language as a constitutive fracture between the actuality of discourse and the

potential for speech that characterizes human being (see McLoughlin; Abbott). In

each instance, at issue is the determining power of language and law in naming

normative forms of life. Like the sovereign decision on the application of law to life,

language “creates the situation” in which events make sense or else are perceived as

insensible and discounted: language delimits the ways in which being may be

expressed, and thus normatively constrains what counts as a valid form of life.11

Agamben is thus concerned with the ontologically constitutive fracture between the

abstract human potential for speech inherent in “the fact itself of speaking,” and the

concrete actuality of discourse: for him, the “outside” of language is not an

ineffable exteriority that operates as its negative presupposition, but rather is the

“unsayable” within established discourse. By retrieving archaic terminology buried

deep within the Western philosophical tradition and renovating current uses of

received meanings, Agamben seeks to make a redemptive praxis of Western

language, which frees it from the constraints of existing forms of speech. However,

his reluctance to engage more rigorously, or more openly, with non-Western ideas

means that his efforts to transform Western thought—by seeking its “outside” only

“inside” its own different uses of language—do little to redeem the problematic

power relation that has long obtained between the Western tradition and its non-

European philosophical others. Agamben does not challenge the presumed

normative hold of Western discourse and epistemology on the globalised world

after empire. He thereby remains beholden to the exclusive forms of belonging

described by Western identities when they are joined in a linguistic community that

attends only to the differences perceived within its own normative form of life. He

pays little heed to non-Western concepts that have been devalued or rendered

insensible according to the normative Western ear attuned to the form of address

11 On Agamben’s views of the relationship between language and the nation-state, see Means

Without End: Notes on Politics, 63-72.


that Naoki Sakai has termed “homolingual.” This is all the more deeply troubling,

because a postcolonial redemption of Continental Philosophy must certainly bear

upon this relationship between European thought and the diverse “frames of life” it

excludes as irrelevant (or else assimilates by reductive translation), and not simply

upon the properties or “vocation” of Western thought itself. Indeed, this is the

warning Gayatri Spivak issued many decades ago: an unequal relation of power

obtains between Western and non-Western epistemologies, and it remains intact and

bolstered by processes of imperialism and globalization which permit and support

the West’s solipsistic presumption of its own normative status. According to the

terms of this relationship, “subaltern speech” that fails to conform to the conceptual

language furnished by Western traditions—however diverse these may be—remains

unheard, and increasingly becomes unspeakable and unthinkable in globalised

societies. In Australia, this has been evidenced by Indigenous actions at law which

have required communities to reveal sacred cultural knowledge, that is then not

credited by Courts because it exceeds the conceptual limits of what counts as

evidence in the Western language of the law imposed with colonial settlement (see

Kartinyeri v Commonwealth). Similarly, Mayfair Yang refers to the ways in which

an increasingly normative Western secularism undermines native Asian religiosities

as a source of political understanding and action. Accordingly, when reduced to a

limited form of articulation in accordance with the Western conceptual frameworks

that do not adequately convey their significance, these distinct and alternative

understandings of political society can be lost or silenced in translation. European

colonialism persists in the operations of linguistic abandonment that allow reductive

translation to happen, and thus it appears irredeemable.

All of this points to the idea that postcolonial redemption calls for transformed

relations, and not simply for the desouvrement (deactivation) and “new use” of the

(Western) self. Indeed, reflecting on the legacy of the European colonization of

Australian territory, I have argued that “excolonial” sociability calls for

communicative intimacy across culturally diverse conceptions of political life and

subjectivity. A rich conceptual engagement of this kind is a prerequisite for

successful negotiations concerning the multiple uses of shared land and the practical

actualization of new modes of co-belonging. Crucially, it requires from settlers, and

from Europeans more generally, an alternative etiquette of “receptivity”—to listen

respectfully to the traditions of others and to the (unfamiliar, inassimilable) content

they produce in the “fact of their speaking” (see Kompridis). It is only by engaging

this second moment of receptive engagement, beyond critical reflexion, that

postcolonial Continental Philosophy may avoid replicating an imperial solipsism of

Simone Bignall 51

the sort criticized by Indigenous theorists, whereby “the use of the ‘native’ is

merely a means to instigate yet another conversation about the colonialists. [In such

cases, the . . .] ‘native’ remains an object, a metaphor through which these

institutions can confront their complicity in colonialist practices, and is never

granted agency or presence beyond its usefulness as sign in the cosmopole of the

global North” (Byrd 51). Beyond a “coming community” of “whatever beings”

united only in their radical singularity and their defining potentiality, a rich ethos of

sympathetic engagement that seeks a potential for common understanding—while

stoutly resisting the political impulse of assimilation—is necessary if the

significance of diverse cultural expressions of being and belonging may be heard,

especially in contexts where some articulations have been silenced or rendered

insensible by the crushing procedures of imperial domination. Excolonization will

make use of a profane, hybrid language that remains to be invented, which

embodies responsiveness to past violence and articulates the present potential for

co-belonging. In the absence of such careful communication, Europe’s colonial

descendants will never even know whether, or how, they can be redeemed from

their imperial past, for this is a judgment that can only be expressed to them in

“non-standard” terms of address, by the Indigenous peoples of the colonized world.

Works Cited Abbott, Matthew. The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political

Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 1993.

—. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Trans. A. Kotsko.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013.

—. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

—. “In Praise of Profanation.” Profanations. Trans. J. Fort. New York: Zone Books,

2007. 73-92.

—. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Trans. L. Heron.

London: Verso, 2007.

—. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. K. Pinkus. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 1991.

—. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. V. Binetti and C. Cesarino.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.


—. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. R. Martinez.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

—. State of Exception. Trans. K. Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

—. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. P.

Dailey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

—. “The Work of Man.” Trans. K. Attell. Calarco and DeCaroli 1-10.

Altman, Jon, and Seán Kerins, eds. People on Country: Vital Landscapes,

Indigenous Futures. Sydney: Federation P, 2012.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Harvest, 1973.

Bacik, Gokhan. Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East. New York: Palgrave

MacMillan, 2008

Berg, Shaun, ed. Coming to Terms: Aboriginal Title in South Australia. Adelaide:

Wakefield P, 2010.

Bignall, Simone. “The Collaborative Struggle for Excolonialism.” Settler Colonial

Studies 4.4 (2014): 1-17.

—. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2010.

Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.

Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2011.

Calarco, Matthew, and Steven DeCaroli, eds. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and

Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

Connolly, William. “The Complexities of Sovereignty.” Calarco and DeCaroli 23-

42.

DeCaroli, Steven. “Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of

Sovereignty.” Calarco and DeCaroli 43-69.

Esposito, Roberto. “On Contemporary French and Italian Political Philosophy: An

Interview with Roberto Esposito.” Interviewers Timothy Campbell and

Federico Luisetti. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minnesota Review 75

(2010): 109-17.

Kartinyeri v The Commonwealth, 195 CLR 337, 1998.

Kompridis, Nikolas. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and

Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006.

Krasner, Stephen. “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing

States.” International Security 29.2 (2004): 85-120.

McLoughlin, Daniel. “The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and

the Law.” Law Critique 20 (2009): 163-76.

Simone Bignall 53

—. “The Sacred and the Unspeakable: Giorgio Agamben’s Ontological Politics.”

Theory and Event 13.1 (2010).

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, ed. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters.

Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2006.

Morgensen, Scott L. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right

Now.” Settler Colonial Studies 1.1 (2011): 52-76.

Motha, Stuart. “The Sovereign Event in a Nation’s Law.” Law and Critique 13.3

(2002): 311-38.

Muldoon, Paul. “The Sovereign Exceptions: Colonization and the Foundations of

Society.” Social and Legal Studies 17.1 (2008): 59-74.

Pitty, Roderic, and Shannara Smith. “The Indigenous Challenge to Westphalian

Sovereignty.” Australian Journal of Political Science 46.1 (2011): 121-39.

Rifkin, Mark. “Indigenising Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the

‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88-124.

Rigney, Daryle, et al. “Letters Patent, Native Title and the Crown in South

Australia.” Indigenous Australians and the Law. Ed. Mark. Hinton et al. New

York: Routledge, 2008.

Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.

Trans. G. Schwab. Cambridge: MIT P, 1985.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of

Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Baskingstoke: Macmillan,

1988: 271-313.

Svirsky, Marcelo, and Simone Bignall, eds. Agamben and Colonialism. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, 2012.

Vatter, Miguel. “In Odradek’s World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in

Agamben and Benjamin.” Diacritics 38.3 (2008): 45-70.

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Warburton, Elizabeth. The Paddocks Beneath: A History of Burnside from the

Beginning. Burnside: Corporation of the City of Burnside, 1981.

Watson, Irene. “Naked Peoples: Rules and Regulations.” Law Text Culture 4.1

(1998): 1-17.

Whyte, Jessica. Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio

Agamben. New York: SUNY P, 2013.


Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of

Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387-409.

Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. “Postcoloniality and Religiosity in Modern China: The

Disenchantments of Sovereignty.” Theory, Culture and Society 28.2 (2011): 3-

45.

About the Author Simone Bignall is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow and Lecturer in philosophy at the

University of New South Wales. She is the author of Postcolonial Agency: Critique and

Constructivism (Edinburgh 2010/2011); and she is co-editor of Deleuze and the Postcolonial

(with Patton; Edinburgh 2010), of Agamben and Colonialism (with Svirsky; Edinburgh

2012), and of Deleuze and Pragmatism (with Bowden and Patton, Routledge 2014). She is

currently working on a project titled Excolonialism: Ethics after Enjoyment.

[Received 31 December 2013; accepted 5 May 2014]

Documents

Postcolonial redemption: Agamben’s thought as ... Asia Agambens Work... · Postcolonial Redemption: Agamben’s Thought as Transformative Chrēsis* ... the relevance of Agamben’s