The chasm between the heft of a critique and the insubstantiality of the solutions proposed for the problems it discerns tends to be particularly imposing with post-deconstructive philosophical work. That's one of the reasons why I keep returning to the unsexy and frequently tedious work of Jürgen Habermas as a counterweight to people like Agamben: his solutions are less thrilling and more easily achieved as a consequence. Perhaps the attempt to think the unfinished project of Englightenment simultaneously with a critique founded on the notion that it must, indeed, has already been abandoned is doomed to failure. Nevertheless, I still hold out hope for the exercise, which can only be described as dialectical, unfashionable as that term has become.

Since you mention Wendy Brown's book and I adore her work — and her — I thought I'd chime in with a selection from the interview I conducted with her for The Anti-Capitalism Reader, in which she considers the options for proposing solutions. I should also add that I'm endorsing your decision to start including interviews on Printculture by demonstrating how useful they can be in discussions like this. Here's the selection:

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Charlie Bertsch: In making the broad arguments you’re talking about, it is very difficult to avoid giving directives, such as “People should do x or y.” It almost seems that there is a “should” built into the structure of political argument. My question is whether we should worry about the basis of that “should.” Or do we just take it as a given that there’s going to be an implicit “should” in any argument and move one. The mere fact that I can’t manage to ask my questions without recourse to a “should” of my own indicates what’s at stake here.

Wendy Brown: I actually think there is a way to avoid that “should,” and I don’t think it’s just an academic trick. In my book States of Injury, I made an argument that one way to get away from certain kinds of conservative identity claims without rejecting everything about the importance of what we call “subject position” these days was to shift our language of political demands from “I am” to “I want this for us.” That is, to replace, “I am a (fill in the identity position), therefore I demand. . .” to “I want this for all of us. This is how I think things should go in the world from the place in which I stand.” Now, what if we used that same kind of linguistic shift to think about how we might get away from that “should” you were talking about? We can move from, “Freedom should be freedom with one another in which there is collective ownership and control and in which all human beings participate,” to, “The vision of human freedom that I am arguing for is one in which these things are featured and here’s why.”

I don’t think that difference is slight, because the first one does have a moral and therefore implicitly foundational claim. When I say, for example, “We must value basic human needs and care for the earth over corporat profits,” I could do it in a way that makes this claim a moral truth, but I think it will actually be more compelling as a political claim. I think leftists today will be more compelling and also more honest if we accept that what we’ve engaged in is a rhetorical battle for a vision of human life and a vision of how it can best be organized. By “rhetorical,” I don’t mean something slight or cheap. I mean that what we need to be producing as a left is a vision that compels people, a vision of a world in which they actually want to live. And that’s not a “should”! It’s not saying, “You should live this way,” but “Don’t you want to? Doesn’t this capture you? Incite you? Isn’t it better that what we’ve got? Doesn’t it make what we’ve got appear absurd, ridiculous, misbegotten?”

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Brown's answer falls squarely within the realm of the “Left Nietzschean” tradition, but works for me in a way that more highblown arguments do not.

If I have time, I'll try to write something more about Agamben's proposed solutions, as well as his relation to Schmitt. I will say that the passage you cite from Homo Sacer, Eric, is a great example of how the authoritarian undercarriage I was talking about yesterday manifests itself in his work. In my book, to propose solutions that would only be possible by doing away with all of the institutions that presently structure our relationships is a profoundly authoritarian gesture, even if the act is carried out with the best of intentions. I agree, though, that the Agamben of State of Exception does a much better job of evading the authoritarianism of his philosophical father figure.