In previous chapters, there has arisen a series of questions concerning Agamben's notion of politics and what sort of alternatives might be conceivable in his rather stark analysis of the seemingly inexorable trajectory of modern biopolitics and sovereign exceptionalism. Even though the tone is more optimistic regarding the human and the political in the latter part of The Kingdom and the Glory, Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz, by contrast, give the impression that the entire destiny of Western politics lies in the concentration camp and in the reduction of everyone to ‘bare life’ or, worse, to homines sacri. Much of what Agamben says in these key texts would seem to support this bleak outlook. Moreover, many commentators are critical of what they regard as the metaphysical and ahistorical nature of Agamben's thinking, as if the ‘biopolitical catastrophe’ (1998: 188) that awaits humanity is forged in earliest antiquity, in the initial separation of zoē and bios in Greek thought, and simply unfolds throughout the course of Western history, entrapping us within the infernal logic of power. Indeed, there is something that seems rigidly deterministic about Agamben's analysis of biopolitics and its intertwining with the sovereign exception. This is not helped by the vagueness and opacity of Agamben's alternative figures of life and community.