Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) [Paperback]

Giorgio Agamben (Author), Daniel Heller-Roazen (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998 | Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804732183
• ISBN-13: 978-0804732185
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #33 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties

More About the Author

Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. He is the author of Profanations (2007), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002), both published by Zone Books, and other books.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 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

Format: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.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars "Homo Sacer" and the Problem with the Ancient Model August 15, 2008

By Martin M. Rayburn

Format:Paperback

"Homo Sacer" proposes a succinct thesis: contemporary political regimes, including both liberal democracies and totalitarian governments, have increasingly relied on a juridical space that isolates and rules over the "bare life" (zoe) of their subjects. According to the author, the founding gesture of political sovereignty does not simply grant or restrict the rights of citizens, but wields an absolute power over the life and death of men. As the argument goes, today's biopolitical machinery betrays a hidden complicity with the most detestable forms of domination, exemplified by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Whilst many forms of contemporary sovereignty might seem benign compared to this singularly horrible event, these forms share with Nazism a tendency to expunge mediating political categories such as rights and contracts, and subject biological bodies to the immediate control of a sovereign.

Reviving a forgotten subject of ancient Roman law, Agamben defines the homo sacer (sacred man) as a political unit that can be killed but not sacrificed. Anybody can terminate the life of the sacred man with impunity, and no worth can be conferred upon his being through a ritualistic sacrifice. Although the sacred man is not actually deceased, he inhabits an indeterminate ground between life and death because homicide laws do not apply to him. He lives a virtual death. His "being-toward-death" is not only ontologically implicit but juridically authorized.

The figure that completes this grim picture is the sovereign, who may at any time call for a "state of exception." That is, he may suspend the laws of the land and thus produce a collective of sacred men who occupy a threshold between nature and civilization. Paradoxically, the sacred men are included in a new juridical sphere to the very degree that they are abandoned by the law. With this insight, Agamben subverts the conventional understanding of Hobbes' state of nature. The state of nature does not designate the status of men prior to the advent of political rule. Politics, rather, incorporates the state of nature into its very essence; the setting of Hobbes' "war of all against all" becomes the very terrain on which biopolitical authority is exercised. In Agamben's scheme, there is no chaotic life outside the scope of political sovereignty. On the contrary, sovereignty is sustained by this "zone of indistinction" between law and order on the one hand, and violence and chaos on the other.

Like his intellectual precursors Benjamin, Heidegger and Arendt, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the relevance of seemingly outmoded texts to contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Agamben persuasively illustrates the contemporary manifestation of one attribute of the sovereign/sacred man pair: the sovereign's capacity to kill without being punished and, correlatively, the sacred man's potential exposure to this injustice. I believe Agamben fails, however, to unfold the implications of the other aspect of homo sacer's being, that is, his inability to be sacrificed.

From a contemporary vantage, homo sacer's "unsacrificeable" character seems not simply irrelevant, but downright erroneous. The stringency of Agamben's ancient paradigm precludes an analysis of the insidious logic of sacrifice operative today. Because Agamben detects sacrifice exclusively within the boundaries of religious ceremony, he is unable to discern the manner in which secular political ideology both reinforces the sacrificeablity of the subject and renders him utterly disposable. Agamben tells us "that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, `as lice,' which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics." But this dichotomy--between the event of the collective sacrifice on the one hand and the banalized process of extermination on the other--is less stable than Agamben implies. "Sacrifice" functions as a convenient catchword by which the sovereign may, paradoxically, reduce the subject to bare life while recuperating a sense of purpose and meaning in the midst of mass slaughter. (Thus, Truman was able to write, "I think the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies.") Within the scope of a dubious utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is deemed an investment for a "better future." In this sense, sacrificeability does not mitigate or contradict the sacred man's "capacity to be killed," but makes this capacity seem both palatable and redemptive. While we are beyond an epoch in which religious sacrifice is pervasively practiced, sacrifice is nonetheless transposed into a secular key and thereby used to justify a wide range of biopolitical crimes.

Although this may seem like a minor flaw in this text, it gestures toward Agamben's larger shortcoming, that is, his inability to buttress his most provocative claim: that we, today, collectively embody the ancient figure of homo sacer. His enumeration of contemporary states of exception toward the end of the book does little to remedy this problem. For instance, he squeezes "military interventions on humanitarian grounds" into his conceptual model of the state of exception not by demonstrating a structural coincidence between homo sacer and the subjects involved in contemporary warfare, but by making an unconvincing appeal to "an undecidability between politics and biology." Agamben is at his weakest when adducing such platitudes of deconstruction and passing them off as argument. While the reader cheers for his attempts to graft the structure of ancient Roman law onto the contemporary political landscape, these lines of thought run up against the same impasse, at which Agamben invariably resorts to specious analogical thinking.

Since I haven't read Agamben's entire oeuvre, I'm in no position to comment on the extent to which he has corrected this defect in subsequent publications. But in this book, at least, it is conspicuous. So, while "Homo Sacer" advances a strikingly original thesis, it leaves the reader wishing this critical point had been proven and not merely proclaimed.

42 of 49 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 Saul Boulschett

Format: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)?