Milton and Agamben

Over the last few months I've been reading Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, and found it increasingly hard to study Agamben's ideas without seriously considering their relation to Milton.


I've found it harder still to think of England's interregnum period (with the iconic figures of Cromwell, Charles, Hobbes looming in the backdrop) without seeing a strong correlation between what Agamben—drawing on Schmitt—terms the state of exception and the events of the civil war period, even down to appropriations of Republican ideology by Cromwellians.


Now this is not to be construed as a proposal to look at everything through Agamben-colored glasses, but I would argue that the philosophical and theoretical issues saturating Milton's poetry and, in turn, the historical context of the early modern period are indelibly linked to the paradigms of sovereign power that Agamben brings to the surface in Homo Sacer. To say the least, Agamben's work at its finest and most provocative troubles notions of a reductive and traditional reading of anti-sovereign motifs in Milton's poetry, if only by complicating any simplistic conception of sovereign power or sovereignty.


I would go so far as to say that the philosophy of sovereignty, with all its political and religious ramifications, is a central tension throughout Milton's poetry. For example, Victoria Kahn has argued that Samson Agonsites stems from Milton's struggle to understand the state of exception as the inaugurating moment of political theology.[1] Without slipping into too much of a deconstructive type of reading, the crowning tension of Milton's three major poetic achievements is indeed his attempt to think the limit point of sovereignty.


But by sovereignty, I mean sovereignty as an idea that ties life to law in a fundamental way. In a way that is more extensive than conceptions of sovereignty that stop short at the relation of politics and ontology ( a relation Agamben finds always already at work in a Hobbesian account of the state of nature ).


Moreover, it is important not to ignore the fact that Milton chooses to think the limit point of politics and religion through poetry, for there is a link between Milton's aesthetics (poetry) and Milton's theoretical and philosophical concerns.


Anyway, as these rather general ideas suggest, I do think there is a great deal of work to be done concerning Milton and sovereignty, work which pushes beyond previous studies on the issue. Fortunately, Agamben has opened up many fascinating and incisive avenues for doing so.


[1]Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Reason of State in Samson Agonistes,”South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (fall 1996): 1066.