The result of two seminars in October 2001, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm offers insights into the thought development of Giorgio Agamben in the immediate wake of 9/11. This project seeks to fill an acknowledged lacuna in political theory, “while the very possibility of distinguishing a war between states and an internecine war appears today to have disappeared, specialists continue to carefully avoid any hint at a theory of civil war” (1). Agamben begins his exploration of this topic with an analysis ranging from the stasis of ancient Athens to the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt's commentary on him.

To understand the insight of Stasis, it must first be situated in the chronology of Agamben's Homo Sacer project. Agamben locates the origins of civil war in ancient Athens, between the oikos and the polis and their corresponding relations of zoē and bios. Referring explicitly to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben sketches how the state of exception and the bare life of citizens relate to civil war; however, such a brief monograph does not developed this line of thought in great detail. Those engaging with Agamben's work on bare life and biopolitics can find here a first step into the relationship between war and biopolitics, especially civil war and “irregular” conflicts.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Stasis is the gloss at the end of the first chapter, on the biopolitical significance of terrorism for civil war theory. Crossing from ancient Athens to the contemporary, Agamben declares that “if the Foucauldian diagnosis of modern politics as biopolitics is correct, and if the genealogy that traces it back to an oikonomical-theological paradigm is equally correct, then global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires when life as such becomes the stakes of politics” (24). In the decade-and-a-half that has followed this seminar, the changing practices of terrorism and its global networks cannot but corroborate Agamben's diagnoses. Further in the same gloss, Agamben notes the danger of stasis creeping forth “precisely when the polis appears in the reassuring figure of the oikos—the ‘Common European Home,’ or the world as absolute space of global economic management” (24), years before the global financial crisis, or more recently Brexit and the European refugee crisis. This relationship between oikos and polis sketched out by Agamben in the first half of Stasis offers insight into the relationship between contemporary issues of terrorism, economy and globalization with the sovereign power critiqued throughout the Homo Sacer series.

In the second chapter of Stasis, Agamben turns to a series of investigations into Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Remaining within sight of the analysis of civil war, Agamben analyzes the frontispiece, the conflict between the biblical figures of the Leviathan and the Behemoth, and Carl Schmitt's critique of Hobbes. Agamben follows his aesthetic investigations of the frontispiece and preliminary philology of Hobbes’ diction in discussing people, multitudes, and populations to renew his commentary on the nature of people under a sovereign begun in Homo Sacer and Means without Ends. This culminates in the theory of an ademia, or absence of people, where “the people, that is to say, is the absolutely present which, as such, can never be present and thus can only be represented” (51). This location—and dislocation—of the people within sovereignty and the sovereign order thus, for Agamben, means that “the Hobbesian State—like every state—lives in a condition of perennial ademia” (51). Agamben alleges that this ademia and the people/population distinction arise consciously in Hobbes, and, further, that these conditions are precisely that “which Foucault will place at the origin of modern biopolitics” (52). Stasis thus informs, clarifies, and ultimately completes the reflections on “people” that began earlier in the Homo Sacer project.

Agamben—perhaps foreshadowing the next phase of his Homo Sacer project which will, following the 2001 seminar, include such distinctly theological meditations as The Kingdom and the Glory, Opus Dei, The Highest Poverty, and The Church and the Kingdom—concludes that “the political philosophy of modernity will not be able to emerge out of its contradictions except by becoming aware of its theological roots” (69). The reflections on the Leviathan in the Old and New Testaments, as well as later religious scholars, inform Agamben's treatment of the tensions of civil war, and further bridge the gap from the earlier discussions of sovereign power and biopolitics to his later writings on political theology, beyond Schmitt alone.

Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm represents an important volume both for readers of Agamben and political theorists in general, as it gives insight to the threshold between biopolitics and war, politics and theology, aesthetics and philology in the work of Agamben. As a brief volume, Stasis leaves much room for its arguments to be followed, connected, and applied; however, sharp as ever, Agamben's insights into the genealogy and nature of modernity are unparalleled.