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

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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.

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."

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)?

"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.

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 police/political strategies might intersect. It is this void that Agamben desires to write, a (non)place in which "life" is incorporated into the political order. Agamben goes about this by beginning with a reading of Greek and Roman philosophical and poetic texts and weaving a continuity from these early works through the works of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and Jacques Derrida. The continuity he describes is that of sovereignty founded upon the "suspension" of "bare life." "Life," here, is "natural life," natural being that element (like the referent in language) that is the always already included absence (or as Agamben calls it the "exclusive inclusion"). This relation of suspension also creates the possibility of the "state of exception," a space in which the force of law is exerted outside of law.

This state in which the law is outside of itself allows for a renewal of the force of law, it transforms the law through its absence. Such a process involves the creation of sacred life, the life that can be killed without sacrifice and without guilt. It is from here that Agamben takes a look at the concentration camp and comes to the conclusion that this exceptional state of political life is in fact the norm of our contemporary reality: the exception has become the rule. "Life" in modern times is the life in the camp, whether it be in a totalitarian regime or one of mass democracy.

The strengths and faults of Agamben's lie in this continuity of sovereingty. On the one hand, it provides a discourse (indeed, a kind of meta-discourse) for placing philosophy and politics in relation to each other. It makes a poignant argument for the politicization of life as not merely a modern affair (as Foucault largely situates it) but, in fact, the founding moment of Western civilization, of the civis and the polis. However, this poignancy is also the achilles heel of Agamben's argument. Agamben's argument accounts for modernity as a "coming into light" of life's incorporation in politics. This subordination of modernity to a realization of what was already there is reductive to the point of excluding some of Foucault's most interesting insights into the diagramming (or beuraucratization) of life. In other words, much of Agamben's argument seems to derive its powers from excluding particularities. (This exclusion of particularities extends to a reductive reading of Derrida's "The Force of Law.")

Don't get me wrong, Agamben's work is important, especially his considerations of Walter Benjamin and Aristotle. Like Benjamin, he raises the stakes. Revolution becomes not merely the transition of one state to another but an eradication of the state that must also involve a revolution of language. Like, Benjamin in his "Critique of Violence," this transformation is ambiguous. Agamben locates it in the sphere of ontology's limits: the revolution will deconstruct the difference of world and person and of pure being and being. It will heal the fissure of life and politics that captures life in politics. Though this is a noble cause, it could certainly use elaboration, an elaboration that may not be possible within the reductive limits of Agamben's historicizing.

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 that being who's very being is always at stake for that being, and ontological difference), post Heideggerian political thought (Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Derrida) and finally Foucault's bio-politics. While Agamben's criticisms of these thinkers is brief (and somewhat reductive) it does serve the importance of situating his own conception of bio-politics, sovereignty and life as a radicalized "state of exception".

The Logic of Sovereignty is not one of a mere inclusion of beings into a political sphere or form of life specific to it (bios) which emerges or is transformed from an originary bare life (zoe). Rather Sovereignty establishes itself as "sacred" or "set apart" from the polis. There is nothing legal about law, in that the very founding moment of political ontology is apolitical and extra-juridical (because there is no normative law that has been set up yet). Benjamin distinguishes between two forms of violence (constituting and constituted). However, while the Sovereign constituting power of law must claim to be wholly outside the law in order to have created it, it must also regulate and constitute its power through law itself, thus including itself within the law. The Paradox of Sovereignty then is that its life is an "inclusion through exclusion". The signifier of law is absent (or non-signifying form) but is signified through this very non-signification of absence.

Homo Sacer then is the non-criminal criminal , the "extra-juridical" exception that is designated by the sovereign. The homo sacer can be legally killed by any person but is not a juridical killing. That is to say, killing the sacred human is not homicide nor is it sacrifice. The norm of political subjects are set against the exception of the homo sacer, but also included in the norm in its very opposition and ability to exile homo sacer. Agamben sees homo sacer and the sovereign to have this very inclusion by exception in common. Both the Sovereign and homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. (It is not a legal issue to kill a King but rather a heretical or anti-juridical one in this account). The Werewolf (half man and wolf inside the city and outside of it, man and animal, political and non-political) and the Sovereign, the inside and outside become an "indistinction" which no longer holds up for modern politics.

The Camp is the modern political space or "coming to light" of this "indistinction" between nature and law in the form of bio-politics. Modern politics as bio-politics takes life as what is at stake for its own life. Bare life as the state of exception, or the sacred, now becomes the rule. As for homo sacer everyone was sovereign, for the sovereign everyone is homo sacer. "The Enemy" as constitutive outside to the norm of civil society now becomes the inside in a society as war carried out by other means (politics). Society as life itself is the `enemy outside which is inside'. In fact, it was the rule from the inception of western politics. The camp then refers to the Nazi bio-political movement where law and fact are indistigusihable. The "suspension of law" and "states of emergency" are not purely juridical, and the holocaust cannot be understood in terms of law alone, but can only be understood as the indefinite suspension necessary for sovereign power to kill without crime, and without sacrifice.

One of the strengths of Homo Sacer is that it is able to weave the problems of political ontology together with the historico-political configurations and aporias of Nazism/mythology/capitalism/ and statism. In a subtle way Agamben is challenging the whole of contemporary political ontology to begin to rethink politics in terms of (actual)potentiality: (Life). Bio-politics as the state of exception (as rule) is no longer oriented toward the impossibility of the law (as form of the law without signification) but is rather concerned with the form-of-life (as indistinction/exception). A political ontology that is not concerned with the impossibility of laying claim to bare life as such, or the fascist mobilization of its totality and implementation, but rather with the practical creation and proliferation of non-statist, non-hierarchical experimentations in political practices that would create new ways of living and maximize the diversity of lives that would decide these ways. Life as potentiality (never reducible to any given definition or determination (totalitarianism) always calls for the emergence of a new politics of the actual, pointing always to the inexustablity/infinity of Life itself.

Critique of Agamben's somewhat reductive (although appropriate) critique of Heidigger, Battaille, Nancy, Derrida etc. aside for a moment, what remains a gapping hole in this work is the complete lack of eco-critical perspective on life. Almost every time Agamben speaks of life it is always in terms of a human life (a human political refugee, a proletariat, the life of a human political body, or a human sovereign king or people). It is his call for the creation of a people (resonances with Deleuze here) that he seems to close up his work on life. His very inquiry into the `open' of Bare Life (potentiality) as always political (indistinction) is closed up through the work in his neglect of animal, plant, and non-organic life, and hierarchical (statist?) (almost humanist) privileging of the bios politicos of the human.

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. Published many years before the initiation of the war on terror, Agamben signals the beginning the of a style of governance built on permanent exception. He insists that the extermination of the Jewx by the Nazis was not simply a horrible enigma that should never return, rather biopolitical atrocities have continued to intensify. This book is a must read for any person interested in understanding how the deep seated structure of sovereignty and its spatio-temporal course through power relations have brought us to the seeming limit poit of exception become rule. A handbook for contemporary politics. This is a great book.

This is a must read for any serious student of philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence and international studies. Agamben here displays his mastery of the Greek, Roman, Judaic and modern traditions through his insight into the very heart of our modern understanding of the term "life."

Using a genealogical method, he traces our understanding of "life" back to a break between "bios" and "zoe" itself, a break that is to lead step-by-step, through a series of historical accidents and judicial decisions, eventually to genocide, concentration camps and the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. Believe it or not the roots of this human tragedy can be traced back to as early as Roman antiquity - a point that would have definitely made Heidegger raise his eyebrows.

This has special significance in relation to the thoughts of Heidegger and Arendt and should provide a shock to those who still, despite our current political and economic crisis, believe that we live in an age of progress and Enlightenment.

Easily described as an extension, or 'elastication', of Foucault's critique of biopower, the life-giving, sustaining power of the contemporary state, and how it has grown up, from its very roots, as the primary term of sovereignty (the power of "auctoritas," to command authority and originate the law) in the West, finally to take on its present project of attempting to stretch itself over all of life and cement the control society. The book stands well alongside comtemporary criticism of global capitalism, including the work of Slavoj Zizek and Negri & Hardt. But on another level, this is much more than a gloss on Foucault's analysis of power. Agamben's perspective is different from Foucault's, he's uninterested in lengthy, sweeping archaeologies, although he does delve into the history of language and the law in some detail. Subsequent parts in the Homo Sacer series and the book "State of Exception" give even more depth to the work, and connect it to the enormous tightening up of government and legal controls since 9/11.

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 deeply flawed and must be read with caution. Certainly worth reading, but not to be approached uncritically (as on display in the review below). D. LaCapra has recently written a cogent critique of Agamben's appropriation of the standpoint of the victims, essentially robbing them of their own voices and conflating their position with that of the perpetrators's in what Primo Levi termed the "grey zone", simply to further his own discourse (albeit an original one) on the Sublime (what LaCapra calls the "Traumatic Sublime"). Look for LaCapra (and a growing number of critics focusing upon Agamben's work, which is one of the latest fads in Academia) to balance this text. By all means read it; but maintain a critical distance (again, unlike the slavish "review" below, which is an attack on William Haver in the guise of an engagement with Agamben).
To the author of that mean-spirited review (obviously a former, disgruntled student of Haver's--and since I have encountered so few in my long acquaintance with him, I have a feeling I know who it is), I simply respond: Haver is anything but a "career academic writing for tenure" (he already has it) and his thinking, teaching and writing are an inspiration. I agree with the earlier review lauding his work and placing him, rightfully, alongside Hardt and Negri, et al. At any rate, beware Agamben's reading of the Muselmann in Remnants in Auschwitz, which is the logical outcome of his original, but flawed, thesis in Homo Sacer.