Agamben and Kafka: in the biopolitical colony of the body and language

Abstract

In the expropriation of the body and language lies the incapacity of our political inhabit. In order to open up a threshold to the possibility of such an inhabitation, this paper proposes to analyze the paradigmatic figures of Western biopolitics proposed by Giorgio Agamben, such as the nuda vida, the exception, sovereignty, and the Field, as constituents of the production of a biopolitical body. By reviewing these figures, we will be able to conjure the expropriation that gags our language and our body. Franz Kafka, through his story In the Penitentiary Colony, exposes in his narrative images the deserted labyrinth of contemporary nihilism. Nevertheless, Kafka does not abdicate, and from the tinkling of his solitary writing he leaves us an immemorial echo, enabling a politics to come capable of recovering the experience of inhabiting a more vital word. Only in this way will we be able to think the open potency of a form-of-life.