Amazon.com: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics): Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen: Books

Review

“Agamben’s intuition, chronicle and meditation are fascinating.”—The Review of Politics

“The story of homo sacer is certainly worth reading because of its suggestiveness and provocations.”—Modernism/Modernity

Product Description

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.

The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Hardcover: 228 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (April 1, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0804732175
ISBN-13: 978-0804732178
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,364,039 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Inside This Book (learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.

First Sentence:
1.1. The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
force without significance, eum immolari, violence that preserves, surviving devotee, sovereign ban, sovereign nomos, biopolitical body, modern biopolitics, sovereign exception, great totalitarian states, homo sacer, necisque potestas, constituting power, bare life, inclusive exclusion, nomos basileus, sovereign violence, sacer esto, originary structure, posits law, juridical rule, juridical order, ius divinum, divine violence, constituted power

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
National Socialist, National Socialism, Final Solution, French Revolution, United States, Hannah Arendt, Karen Quinlan, Third Reich, First World War, Politicizing Death, Roman People of the Quirites, Book Theta of the Metaphysics, Das Nomos, Die Freigabe, Flamen Diale, Zur Kritik

New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 48 books:

On Revolution (Penguin Classics) by Hannah Arendt on page 41, page 177, and Back Matter
Phenomenology of Spirit (Galaxy Books) by G. W. F. Hegel on page 21, and Back Matter
Madness and Civilization (Routledge Classics) by Michel Foucault on page 18, and page 20
The Birth to Presence (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) by Jean-Luc Nancy in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (Great Minds Series) by Sigmund Freud on page 75, and page 78

See all 48 books this book cites

100 books cite this book:

Rethinking Refugees Beyond States of Emergency (Global Horizons) by Peter Nyers on 5 pages
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems by Aihwa Ong on 5 pages
Trauma and the Memory of Politics by Jenny Edkins on 4 pages
Society under Siege by Zygmunt Bauman in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, And Activism by Victoria Sanford in Front Matter, page 38, and page 129

See all 100 books citing this book

Books on Related Topics (learn more)

Sovereign Bodies by Thomas Blom Hansen

Discusses:

n+1, Number 2 by n+1

Discusses:

Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy

Discusses:

Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice by D. Cornell

Discusses:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	88% buy the item featured on this page: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) 3.8 out of 5 stars (15) $60.00
	4% buy State of Exception 3.9 out of 5 stars (10) $13.00
	3% buy "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) $12.44
	3% buy Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977--1978 4.6 out of 5 stars (5) $12.24

Explore similar items

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

(What's this?)

Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).

giorgio agamben(10)

sovereignty(4)

philosophy(4)

carl schmitt(3)

emergency powers(3)

emergency(2)

salus populi(2)

states of emergency(2)

pwn(2)

literary theory(2)

versoradicalthi nkers(2)

Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search

No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Customer Reviews

15 Reviews

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In the midst of life, we are in death..., August 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Paperback)

When all politics is about life, the shadow of death disappears. At this point life itself, despite its glory, is in terrible danger of burning up in this high-noon of the political world. Putting this point less obliquely one might say, with Giorgio Agamben in his Homo Sacer, that a world which is increasingly concerned with ridding itself of any political value except that of serving the exigencies which are thrown up by the brute fact of maintaining biological human life is a world which is dangerously unstable. The danger may lie in either of two directions. The first is that the emergence of a strong political value which co-opts a vision of the importance of biological human life but redefines the borders of 'human' gains an immediate political legitimacy in 'cleansing' the political populace of what become cast as simply vermin. The second danger is that the lack of political value apart from life itself leaves a space wherin 'life itself' increasingly begs definition, and with this definition arrive categories of life regarded as less valuable and, ultimately, as 'life not worth living'. Both of these features can be recognised as elements of the political program of National Socialist Germany. Agamben, untypically, sees Nazi Germany not as a historical abberation, but rather as an extreme case of what characterises all Western political systems and which springs from 'politics' itself, rather than any particular playing out of a political scheme. This is the condition of 'biopolitics', the condition of life as valuable or not within an overall scheme of governance. This condition reaches its paradigm expression in 'the camp', where life is usable or expendable outside the restraints of any legal structure. The argumentation in this book is very complex and opaque. The reader is not helped by the fact that such central concepts as 'sacred' and 'biopolitics' are extensively reworked from the way in which they are generally used in social science literature at this time, without this fact being signposted or even acknowledged. Furthermore, the overall argument relies on a heady admixture of classical philosophy, politics, linguistics and ethology. The ground which is covered is galloped over, rather than taken at walking pace, and the whole trip is not for the faint-hearted. The novelty of the argument, however, which links liberal democracy to totalitarian government merits detailed examination in that it reanimates basic political theoretical discussion in a field which is in danger of stagnation around the notion of the victory of liberal democracy. The only other writer who is engaged in a similar task from a similar perspective of what might be termed 'Grand Political Theory', and with comparable intellectual resources, is Antonio Negri - another Italian left-wing scholar. These two writers mark an attempt to re-invent theoretical politics, and for anyone with a serious interest in this field Homo Sacer is necessary, if not easy, reading.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shorter articles by Agamben, December 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Paperback)

I'm responding to the reader from Korea below who requested a more concise explanation of why the homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. I haven't read this book, but I have read two articles ("Form-of-Life" and "Beyond Human Rights") by Agamben in the collection edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt called Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). These are excellent, concise articles which I recommend without reservation, and may be a good introduction to the "homo sacer."

Agamben writes: "Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of State-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history. We should not forget that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps - concentration camps - extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation. One of the few rules the Nazis constantly obeyed throughout the course of the 'final solution' was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg laws). When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when humans are tuly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in ancient Roman law: doomed to death."

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On the consequence of the split between Bios and Zoe, May 2, 2004

By	Sagan Lazar "Sagan Lazar" (Mango Island) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Paperback)

The obscurity embedded in the Roman Law that declared one who was condemned to death "sacred" is never really clarified here. It is better and more succinctly described in _Means Without Ends_.
In this is book, Agamben soberly traces the origin of the single most deracinating event in human history: the Holocaust. Soberly, because Agamben sees the Holocaust not as an anomaly, but as an unavoidable consequence given the political origin of the West. But this book is not so much about the Holocaust per se, but about the various historical interventions concerning the notion of the Sovereign that wove the matrix of Western politics into what it became capable of in the 20th century.
The locus of Agamben's view of modernity is the (concentration) camp. Agamben stresses the fact that the camp is not only a place where the unspeakable takes place but more importantly and fundamentally where a human being is stripped "Naked", stripped of 'bios' and exposed as mere 'zoe', such that anything--including the unspeakable--CAN be done to him since nothing could be considered a criminal act. The camp, according to Agamben, is "the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule."
Agamben argues that the camp is the new biopolitical NOMOS of the planet by connecting the dots that Carl Schmitt first drew but left unconnected. Closer to the homefront, Agamben's meditation ultimately takes us to see the totalitarian implications behind those "gated communities" in the US today, and the impossibility of dying without the State's approval. If a good life is hinged on the hope of a good death, should the State define and decide who shall get "good death" (euthanasia)?

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 15 customer reviews...

Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Agamben on the Politics of "Life"
This is a must read for any serious student of philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence and international studies. Read more

Published 19 days ago by Tony See

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing Interesting
I don't understand why this book was even created. The author spends a lot of time mentioning other works and ideas that are key to this book, so why mention them. Read more

Published 4 months ago by Joseph J. Sabet

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting thesis, but...
Agaben has had quite some impact in the English speaking world, since publication of this book (along with Remnants of Auschwitz and the collection of essays Potentialities). Read more

Published 9 months ago by A Philosophy and Ethics Reader

3.0 out of 5 stars "Homo Sacer" and the Problem with the Ancient Model
"Homo Sacer" proposes a succinct thesis: contemporary political regimes, including both liberal democracies and totalitarian governments, have increasingly relied on a juridical... Read more

Published 11 months ago by Martin M. Rayburn

4.0 out of 5 stars The Body = The Nation
I was first introduced to this text in one of my college courses. I'm not quite familiar with all of Agamben's theory on power, but I have read portions of, "The Camp as... Read more

Published on December 12, 2006 by crazycleveland

5.0 out of 5 stars Homo Sacer is a must read.
Agamben's best known work lives up to the hype. One of the most powerful aspects of this book is its shocking predictions about the world to come. Read more

Published on June 5, 2006 by Scott Odekirk

4.0 out of 5 stars Political Ontology and Bio-Politics
Agamben begins his inquiry into sovereignty in the light of the problematic left to contemporary political ontology via Hobbes, Schmitt, and up to Heidegger (Dasein being... Read more

Published on November 28, 2005 by Steve Nail

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but Problematic
Agamben's sets up his work in the left-open space of Foucault's work, the void in which "subjectivization" (the internalization of the order into the individual psyche)and... Read more

Published on May 23, 2005 by Without Wit

4.0 out of 5 stars Murder and sovereignty
In this book, Giorgio Agamben traces how the concept of "sacredness" changes throughout Western intellectual history. Read more

Published on April 30, 2005 by Neckar

2.0 out of 5 stars Go read LaCapra for a sound critique of Agamben/the "sacred"
This book is a key text in the work of Giorgio Agamben and holds a special place in the growing cult surrounding him today, but like Remnants of Auschwitz that follows it, is... Read more

Published on March 5, 2004

› See all 15 customer reviews...

Customer Discussions

Beta (What's this?)

New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.

This product's forum (0 discussions)

	Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
	No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight

Start a new discussion

Topic:

First post:

Receive e-mail when new posts are made

Prompts for sign-in

[Cancel]

Guidelines

Active discussions in related forums

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
politics The first 100 days of your Clown.	1231	2 minutes ago
politics "take it back," china says	7	20 minutes ago
politics General and Lt Col join lawsuit re: Obama's Birth Status...	10	34 minutes ago
politics With "Free" ObamaCare (Socialized Medicine), why should anyone work?	140	1 hour ago
politics Liberal Sotomayor Hates America too!	62	1 hour ago
current events Rights and Freedoms vs, Security	12	7 days ago
current events Get Rich Cheating	0	17 days ago