Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo sacer: soverign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

This is an incredibly dense text, and I hesitate to even attempt to create an abstract for it. I continue only through the faith that it will help me return to the text in the future to further my understanding.

The book begins, as many do, on the cover. There is a picture of the architectural plans for the Auschwitz camp made so famous for brutally killing so many. This is what Agamben refers to as the camp. For him, the camp has replaced the city as the totalizing, “fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181).

Agamben’s text is delineated into three sections, each of which is separated by a movement that he calls “Threshold”. The first is an examination of Sovereignty, relying, at least in part on Schmitt’s definition of Sovereignty as being the one who decides on the exception. The second section is an exploration of the idea of Homo Sacer, the person who can not be sacrificed, but who can be killed. The third section highlights the role of the camp in the biopolitical matrix of the West.

He begins his first section by examining the difference between the two Greek meanings of the word “life”. The first is zoe, or life that is common to all living beings. The second is bios, which is a way of living, life tinted with custom. Our zoe has been replaced by a bios; it has been subsumed through the process of biopolitics.

“In particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the “docile bodies” that it needed” (3).

He goes on to say that the, “fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (8). This is clearly a response to the Schmittian notion of politics written in The Concept of the Political. This “categorical pair” can be seen in many places, which will be explored later in the book.

The “Paradox of Sovereignty” is then explored. This inconsistency takes place in the nature of sovereignty to be both inside and outside of the juridical order. Agamben then returns to a Schmitt concept and discusses the sovereign’s ability to decide upon the exception. The exception is discussed as being the ban that the sovereign can inflict upon subjects. This ban is, in Agamben’s analysis, evident in a relational form and it highlights the paradox of sovereignty: it can be stated that there is nothing outside of the law, while at the same time the sovereign can place things outside of that law.

This brings us to Home Sacer. This is the person who is the living dead of Agamben’s philosophy. These people have been relegated by the sovereign to be outside of the law, they are people who can not be sacrificed (i.e., they can’t have the privilege of being sacrificed to something greater), but who can be killed. These are the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. These are the undocumented workers who have no legal standing in a society.

Agamben also examines the idea of constituting power and constituted power and eventually relates them to the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves law. Constituted power is power that exists in a structure, i.e., the three branches of government. Constituting power is the potentiality, the power “of the people”. Constituted power is in the state, constituting power is outside of the state.

Homo Sacer and the Sovereign are juxtaposed as representing two sides of the same object: “At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84).

The ban is examined in relation to the wolf (lupus, wargus). The ban is broken down etymologically to mean both “at the mercy of” and additionally “out of free will” (110). This duality is also juxtaposed with the idea of bare life, bare existence and how that is compared with ideas of human nature. This is where the grey area between being human and being animal appears.

Life is where the political takes place. This is the elevating of the Foucadian concept of biopolitics to its logical conclusion. The body becomes the template for the acting out of discipline by the sovereign. See: habeas corpus. The entire concept of life has been called into question. Agamben highlights suicide, euthanasia and issues of the beginning and ending of life. The idea of “neomorts” is touched on: those people who have, “the legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of future transplants” (164). Eventually, we move into a discussion of eugenics and advances in genetic studies.

“If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually hominess sacri” (115).

There is much to this book that I was not able to cover here. It is excellent and deserves another reading.