Perhaps this development should not be so surprising.120As early asChartismdand thus be-fore his visits to IrelanddCarlyle had written: ‘A people [the Irish] that knows not to speak thetruth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from even the possibility of well-being. Suchpeople works no longer on Nature and Reality; works now on Phantasm, Simulation, Nonentity;the result it arrives at is naturally not a thing but no-thing,ddefect even of potatoes.’121Carlyle’swords are arresting. Here the famished Irish bodyda ‘nonentity’, ‘not a thing but no-thing’disdiscursively stripped bare to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘naked life’. According to Agamben’sdefinition, ‘naked life’ marks the site of an ‘incessant decision on value and non-value’dexactlythe task Carlyle assigned himself as ‘Eternity’scommissioner’ in Ireland.122This debate onhuman value and non-valuedwhich for Carlyle is inseparable from environmental and racialfactorsdmarks his passage into the domain of biopower and capitalist political eco