The best way to resolve bare life is with a political-ontological approach

In a critique of Agamben that would be devastating if it didn’t make the category mistake I am trying to identify, Andrew Norris writes the following: If the Bush-Cheney administration is simply providing the sovereign decisions that are metaphysically necessary to maintain public order in the United States, one cannot fault it for acting tyrannically. Conversely, if it is indeed acting tyrannically, this is something that requires not metaphysical analysis and political theology, but practical, political resistance and institutional change.60 A political ontological approach, which undermines the very idea of ‘metaphysical necessity,’ will dissolve the terms of this dilemma. For if bare life and the exception are not metaphysically necessary, then we should respond to it with a both/and rather than an either/or. In other words: Guantanamo Bay is metaphysically contingent, and that is part of why it is tyrannical (it is not only a political, juridical, and ethical monstrosity; it is also based on a violent metaphysical logic). As such we can agree with Schmitt when he writes that “metaphysics is the most intensive and clearest expression of an epoch”; that monarchy was “self-evident” as a form of political organisation in the 17th Century because it was “in accord with the structure of metaphysical concepts” in play at the time.61 The mistake, however, would lie in underestimating the complexity of the relationship at work here, refusing to recognise the real intertwining of politics and ontology that it represents. Political ontology does not mistake theory for practice, falling into a kind of magical thinking where the former is somehow taken to have the capacity to change the world; rather it insists on the mutually determining relation between ontology and politics, on the claim that truly radical change in one area means change in the other (there is no vulgar claim of one-way causality at work here). The practise of thought and the critique of metaphysics have political stakes, just as properly revolutionary political action is not only concerned with ontic political change, but also with challenging the very figure of the world as we know it. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”62 Political ontology does not hold up another world as an ideal to which the present one should be made to conform; instead it demands the abolition of the present metaphysical scheme of things, in which the natural sweetness of life, the sharing of the gratuity of the world, are voided. A political movement cognisant of this would be on that insists on—indeed one that demonstrates in practise—the truth of the claims that no life is bare and the ordinary is exceptional. These are ontological laws, but they are also ethical laws; they are real ontological claims, but they also make a normative demand on us. Gershom Scholem writes that “[m]etaphysics is a legitimate theory in the subjunctive form. This is the best definition I have found so far; it says everything.”63 Though Scholem uses the term ‘metaphysics’ here, exchanging it for ‘political ontology’ will see his point sit perfectly with this project. Political ontology is a mode of thought in which the distinction between fact and value collapses, such that what is shown to be valuable is the fact of existence itself. As such, a politics in-keeping with political ontology would be a subjunctive politics,64 a politics informed by an exigency.