Agamben and Spirit

A passage from Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer:

Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body--a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body--in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoē and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē. . . . Yet how can a bios be only its own zoē, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplōs that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence (p. 188).

As Agamben writes earlier, "[t]here is no return from the camps to classical politics." In other words, there is no easy way out of the bind that we are in, i.e., the pernicious form of nihilism rendered by modern metaphysics and technologism. If moderns like Habermas are calling for the reinstitution of respect for the Aristotelian distinction between the grown and the made in order to prevent the domination and mastery of the latter over the former, such Romantic defenses of the victimization of pure nature or bare life are hopeless. There is no return to that Garden in which there might be a harmonious oikos. Nor is there hope for some new body devised by biotechnology which might resolve the relation between zoē and bios without recapitulating one form of nihilism or another; that is, once life inevitably becomes the "bare" life of the other in the inexorable economics of biopolitics.

If the bios could be its own zoē, i.e., if the political being could be its own animal life rather than always becoming other than its animality, then we might name this being a "form-of-life." In this form-of-life, "we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence." In other words, we will witness what never seems to get mentioned explicitly in Agamben's book: spirit. It seems that the geistig and the geistlich are everywhere hovering about this account, but also nowhere to be found. Does Agamben mean to link his discussion of the Muselmann to this emergence? If so, this is theology of the cross with no possibility for a theology of glory.

At some point, I would like to comment on Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion in this context. It seems that the possibility of emergence need not be circumscribed within the horizon of this passivity and openness.