Agamben, Homo Sacer
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
October 23, 2012
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Homo Sacer comprises three Parts: “The Logic of Sovereignty;” “Homo Sacer;” and “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern.” While he references a litany of Western philosophers and theorists, think about Agamben’s foundations in, and applications of, Foucault and Arendt (and Lefebvre) throughout the reading. Pay special attention to Part Three, “The Camp,” where Agamben uses “bare life” and “the camp” to link Foucault’s theory of biopolitics with Arendt’s historiography of totalitarianism. Also, note the ‘Thresholds,’ as they are both concepts (e.g. “the state of exception,” 19) and literary devices that provide summaries as well as bridges between Parts in the text.
Reading Questions
1. Agamben presents sovereignty as a paradox and states “the law is outside of itself,” (15). Why can the sovereign, who is outside the law, at the same time declare “there is nothing outside the law,” (15)?
2. Despite absolute power asymmetry, how is the “bare life” of homo sacer a mirror reflection of the sovereign’s position?
3. What is a “relation of exception,” (16)? How is something included only because it is excluded?
4. Constituted power and constituting power are presented on two different levels, in the State and outside the State, respectively (39). Thinking in terms of Foucauldian dispositifs, how do these relate to centripetal discipline and centrifugal security?
5. Do we really live in a Kafkian world of paradox, if, as Benjamin said, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that ‘the state of exception’ in which we live is the rule,” (54)?
6. According to the Romans, “homo sacer” is an accursed man outside of the law whose killing goes unpunished (71-73). He is “sacred” and yet he cannot be sacrificed because he is impure. How does this meaning of sacred inform Emile Durkheim’s “ambiguity of the nature of the sacred,” (77)? How do these notions of the sacred relate to conceptions of taboo and profane?
7. How does Agamben’s theory of the “ambivalence of the sacred” and the relationship between the sovereign and “homo sacer” compare to Foucault’s paradigm of the panopticon and government power over docile bodies?
8. According to Arendt’s genealogy of racism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, at what point does the “End of the Rights of Man” culminate in the massification of “bare life?”
9. To reiterate Agamben’s inquiry, why did Foucault never address the concentration camp in terms of biopolitics? And, conversely, why did Arendt never get to the theory of biopolitics herself? Is Agamben’s “camp” the unification and culmination of these concepts?
10. Agamben states: “In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term “sacred” continues in the semantic history of homo sacer and not that of sacrifice,” (114). He then goes on to say: “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West,” (181). Do you agree with these statements? Is Halit Hagma’s Homo Soccer Mom a sound refutation to this claim?
Key terms
· zoe and bios
· sovereignty
· state of exception
· threshold
· inclusive exclusion/exclusive exclusion
· Ortung (localization) and Ordnung (order)
· nomos
· bare life
· biopolitics
· sovereign ban
· the camp
· the refugee
· the werewolf
· Versuchspersonen
· der Muselmann
galenbmurton
Eric Reiff
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 Social Theory, Discussion Paper 7
Giorgio Agamben – Homo Sacer
29 October 2012
Agamben picks up with the question I was asking last week concerning where Arendt left off: What is the nature of the (natural) rights of man if they are not divine, natural, or arising from a state of nature? What in other words is the logic of sovereignty upon which rights appear to hang? He works through these questions first by establishing a rhetorical space for the state of exception. He then argues that the sovereign is a constituting power that is never completely subsumed into the constituted juridical power. This space that the constituting power of the sovereign occupies, that is not occupied by constituted power, is the space of the ban or exception. In this space the sovereign has direct rule over the zoë of the subject, while the subject’s bios or civil life is suspended.
Then he uses a “long” genealogy that takes us back to the paradoxical Roman figure of homo sacer as the subject that fills the space of the exception. Homo sacer is the one who can be killed without recourse but can’t be sacrificed. He resolves the paradox by thinking through the sacred with both divine and human law at the same time. Homo sacer then becomes a transitional figure between how religious and human law understands what it means to be sacred. In explaining this paradox Agamben claims to show us that the real relationship of the sovereign to the individual is through zoë or the bare life in the state of exception. The potentiality of the sovereign to express its relation to zoë is present even when it is withdrawn to allow space for civil law—constituted power.
Finally, he argues that the politicization of zoë (Rights of Man, Habeas Corpus, Bill of Rights) or biopolitics as the foundation of modern states allows the sovereign to relate easily and directly to subjects through the ban or state of exception. The constituting power of the sovereign slipped over the curbs of constituted powers after WWI and the state of exception has become increasingly normalized. That is, the space of the juridical system that lays out expectations and rules for society is reduced as the sovereign increasingly relates directly to subjects through the state of exception in which the sovereign becomes the embodiment of the law which acts directly on subjects’ politicized zoë. Thus Agamben argues that the paradigm of the concentration camp has come to dominate modernity—i.e. that we are all bare life being governed by the sovereign in suspension of the law.
In true Heideggerian fashion, the way forward is ontological and dependent on our changing our comportment toward sovereign power or be doomed to live a bare life in the state of exception in absence of what Aristotle refers to as the ‘good life’—i.e. without our bios. Agamben warns that the way forward is not to return to some past (pre-WWI?) relationship of sovereign-state-subject, but to embrace the current thrown togetherness and to work out an historical fulfillment of the state and sovereign in order to close off the state of exception. In the last paragraph of the book Agamben wants us to imagine a world “beyond the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological science and jurisprudence . . . but first we have to understand how bare life became to be conceived in these disciplines.” To not, reevaluate the ontological underpinings of sovereign power and the ban leaves us open to slipping back into the totalitarian states in which civil law is suspended and the state of exception defines the political space completely.
There are several parts of Agamben’s argument that leave me feeling unsatisfied. He doesn’t leave room for the micropower of the individual (but I know that also not his point). All individuals are bare life and prostrate in front of the sovereign, but aren’t given the ability to resist or influence the sovereign. This lack of a place for micropower leaves a lacuna in his argument. If we were to allow for micropower, could it exist in the state of exception and muddy the perfect power of the ban that Agamben calculates? I also would like to have had the idea of sovereignty explained more clearly. The sovereign is assumed to exist a priori any of Agamben’s arguments. I want to see a detailed genealogy of this sovereign and to know where this power comes from. (Maybe I just need to read Schmitt?) Where is sovereignty in a state of anarchy? His take on sovereignty seems narrow in the world and I would like to know how he moves this past Nazi Germany and the Bush II administration.
I also think when we try to move the paradigm of the camp out to every nook and cranny of the world we will be dissatisfied with what we find. The camp as paradigm doesn’t exist everywhere, BUT perhaps the paradigm of the camp is better understood as a comportment of humanity to the world. If we talk about changing our comportment to states, sovereigns, and individual rights; then we can discuss a new ontology, a new way of being in the world that overcomes the biopolitical tyranny of the sovereign power that constitutes the state. The thought of what epoch is next is the edge of knowledge that Agamben traces and encourages us to think beyond. It’s very amusing to me that I started my Master’s degree with the short lived intent of studying what type of governance comes after the state, and here I sit again almost 10 years later again wondering what comes after the history of the state is fulfilled.
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:31:01 PM UTC-6, galenbmurton wrote:
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
In Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Giorgio Agamben considers the origins of the modern Western political system as it relates to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during WWII and specifically the ways in which “human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171). Agamben traces these origins to the sovereign’s original power over life and death, and, in doing so, identifies the space in which the power of the sovereign articulates between two forms of life— zoē and bios. For Agamben the distinction between zoē—the apolitical, animal nature of life—and bios—the way of living in relation to a group—is critical to his argument, and indeed, he sees navigating between these as the primary role of the sovereign. Yet, ultimately, it is the distinction between these two forms of life that allows for sanctioned and unpunishable violence against human beings.
Agamben begins his argument by focusing on the paradox of sovereign authority and the state of exception made possible through that paradox. The paradox of the sovereign is that the sovereign can at once act within the law by suspending it, and in so doing be outside of the law. It is to the sovereign to decide the state of exception, and in so doing to act within and outside of the law. While the state of exception is an exclusion, it is not without relation to the law. The exception is still tied to the law by virtue of it being defined as an exception to the law. Agamben uses the state of exception to illuminate his understanding of the state of nature by arguing that they are one and the same. The state of nature is not outside of the law; rather, the state of nature is the state of exception. From this understanding, the state of nature is presupposed as being outside the law, but by understanding it as the state of expectation is in actually tied to the political. Agamben materializes this argument in the notion of bare life. That is to say that bare life (zoē) as a state of exception is tied to political life (bios) by virtue of its exception.
To illustrate his discussion on bare life, Agamben calls upon the figure of homo sacer—sacred man, ‘who can be killed but not sacrificed’. For Agamben, homo sacer embodies the sovereign exception. Homo sacer is tied to the law because he is cast from it; he can be killed and it is not considered murder because he is outside of the law. Yet, homo sacer does not merely reside in an ambiguous space between the sacred and profane as others have argued; rather, homo sacer is excluded from both the sacred and law, and as a result is subject to the violence of both. In this way, Agamben argues that homo sacer and the sovereign are at once symmetrical and correlative: “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 homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84). Ultimately, Agamben attributes the production of bare life—through the production of homo sacer—to the sovereign, as the sovereign’s original activity.
With the state of exception and homo sacer as foundational ideas, Agamben moves into modern Western politics through a discussion of the camp. For Agamben the camp territorializes the state of exception, while those who are confined to the camp embody homo sacer. Through this framework, the camp and its residents may be understood as outside the law, not because they exist outside of the law, but because they have been placed outside of it. For this reason and returning to Agamben’s ultimate questions, crimes against those banished to the camp and committed in the space of the camp are not criminal.
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
October 28, 2012
Commentary on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Agamben takes it upon himself to reveal what is, for him, the hidden mystery that underlies modern political power. He does this by first embarking on a series of conceptual distinctions, drawn entirely from the Western philosophical tradition, and then by claiming that these distinctions have been obliterated in a “zone of indistinction” that means ultimately that we have all become qualitatively equivalent to refugees, and that the concentration camp exemplifies the modern political condition. Yes, this a dramatic conclusion based on sweeping abstractions, so allow me to back up a bit and briefly trace the contours of his argument.
Agamben begins by recapitulating Aristotle’s distinction of zoe, bare, biological life, and bios, the broader “good life” of a political subject. For Agamben, the entry of zoe into the polis is the “decisive event of modernity” (10). Agamben vividly illustrates his argument by dusting off and extending the obscure Roman legal figure of the homo sacer, “sacred man”, one who is outside both human and divine law such that he may be killed by any man but not able to be sacrificed. Homo sacer exists in a structural symmetry to the sovereign—who, as Carl Schmitt argues—is sovereign by virtue of the ability to decide when to suspend the law—and is “permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice” (53). To the sovereign, everyone is homo sacer. To homo sacer, everyone is the sovereign, and herein lies the symmetry.
Agamben extends homo sacer to all modern citizen-subjects—in his formulation, we “appear virtually as homines sacri” (66). This institution is exemplified by the camp, a permanent space of exception that exists inside the territorial confines of the nation-state, and yet by virtue of the sovereign exception is not bound by its laws. In this space, the sovereign right to kill can be exercised by petty bureaucrats or camp guards, who are (paradoxically) realizing the living law of the Fuhrer even in a “zone of indistinction” between life and politics, fact and law.
Even if only a few days have passed after reading this text for the first time, I have noticed a few problems. One is that despite Agamben’s dense, detailed excursus of obscure Roman legal forms, and his attention to the policy precedents for the camps, Agamben’s argument is curiously ahistorical . He claims to have demystified the inner workings of modern political power, but he does not provide an account of the emergence of this modern order. Foucault gave a much more through historical account of the transformations of sovereign and disciplinary power, even if his analysis was also limited to Europe and ignored the vital role of the colonial encounter in formulating such modes of power (something Tagma also accuses Agamben of overlooking). Agamben would rather lean on a philosophical argument about the nature of sovereign power—one that explicitly de-subordinates disciplinary power to sovereign power. This would be fine as an argument of political theory, yet given that he claims that his formulation illuminates some secret of modern sovereign power, he should be expected to explain the historical conditions that led to this rupture in the nature and deployment of power. That a historical account of the transition from pre-modern to modern is apparently beyond the scope of a book that discusses, in detail, everything from the biopolitics of the comatose to the experimental design of Nazi biological research, seems somewhat perverse. Even if the “entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis” is tantamount to a “radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (10), an argument would still need to be made as to how this “political-philosophical” shift was actually articulated in time and space.
Another odd shortcoming is Agamben’s insistence on the absoluteness of the camp as the exemplar of biopolitical space, “a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation” (97). Yes, the camp may be the starkest available metaphor for institutionalized violence (whether or not it constitutes a state of exception or the rule), and as Arendt had reminded us, it may not be aberrant but rather a limit case of the atomization and alienation immanent to political modernity. But there were likely other modes of power—including disciplinary power—operating in the camp. The very identification of a muselman in the camp implies the existence of a class of more ‘ordinary’ members whose lives have not been absolutely reduced to bare life, who, however constrained and abused, formed some kind of community. If, even in the camps—supposedly the “fundamental paradigm of the West” (102)—there was still space for bios, then there may be hope yet for homines sacri.
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reflection Paper
10/29/12
Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Georgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life details the aporetic nature of sovereignty and the ambiguity of modern biopolitics. By positing the production of a biopolitical body as the “original act of sovereign power,” Agamben fuses together and furthers the work of scholars such as Aristotle, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Through a seemingly endless barrage of dichotomies and paradigms, Agamben outlines a genealogy of biopolitical sovereignty that he claims will advance to the point where all people are, or are on the verge, of bare life.
Homo sacer, as the personification of bare life, is a person that can be killed but not sacrificed. Furthermore, homo sacer is a person whose death at the hands of another is not considered murder. After discussing the inherent ambiguity between the root of words such as sacrifice, sacrilege, and sacred, Agamben maintains that a “sacred life” is that which has been expelled from humanity and yet has no value in the divine. He points to vitae necisque potestas, a Roman father’s sovereignty over the life of his children, as both a root of bare life and an example in which the sovereign is both inside and outside the juridical order. I find this example particularly remarkable because of the paternal character of the humanitarian interventions that Agamben discusses later in the book.
After a thorough discussion of euthanasia and genocide under Adolf Hitler, Agamben focuses specifically on refugees because they break the continuity between “man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.” The refugee camp, as an extraterritorial state of exception, challenges the trinity of “the state, the nation (birth), and land.” For Agamben, camps are spaces in which “whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police that temporarily act as sovereign.” Thus, it is the potentiality of these atrocities, more so then their inevitability, which makes life in the camps sacred. These temporary sovereigns, with virtually unchallenged power over the sacred lives of the homines sacri under their control, waver between biopolitics and thanatapolitics. Though he does not say it, it appears that Agamben is flirting with an extension of his definition of the “right to kill” that would include the allowance for death. This inclusion would, in my opinion, be more appropriate for humanitarian spaces in which power over life has more to do with diseconomies of the means for life than overt physical violence.
Agamben maintains “the separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of citizen.” While it is not clear why Agamben views humanitarianism as becoming less political, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, his poignant distinction between the rights of men and citizens obviously leaves him heavily indebted to Hanna Arendt. The fact that Agamben illustrates a contemporary modern world in which virtually all lives are sacred, or on the verge, weakens his exclusionary premise. For, if we follow his logic, it would seem that modern “states of exception” would involve spaces in which bios triumph over zoe.
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Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life (Georgio Agamben)
28 October 2012
GEOG 5100
In Homo Sacer, Agamben uses the example of the werewolf—half man, half animal—whose life is divided between the forest and the city (in this case, representations of society and outside society). The werewolf, he writes, is “in its origin the figure of a man who has been banned from the city” (105) yet then “dwells permanently in the city” (107). This man “set-apart” is the homo sacer, a person who can be killed by anyone, but not sacrificed; his body is recognized only as a body and not as a human with value. The moment of transformation from man to werewolf, according to Agamben, is the state of exception. While odd, this example is helpful to understand some of the key concepts in the book: bare life, zoe and bios, the city, and the state of exception.
Zoe, or bare life, exists in relation to bios, or “the way of living proper to an individual or group” (1). The role of the sovereign is to operate in the space between the two. It is the absence of bios that renders a being homo sacer. The city is a reference to society, as determined by the sovereign, with the converse being a state of exception, the primary example in this book being the camp. Existing outside the city is to live beyond the law, though it is unclear whether that means outside the law or excluded by it.
Aside from the werewolf, Agamben offers an example of homo sacer as the person dying in a concentration camp. He references Nazi-authorized killings of “…life unworthy of being lived” as well as “mercy killing” and “death by grace” (140). In these instances, Agamben is exploring the difference between a physical body and one experiencing bios. Of course, the perception of bios is relative, and determined by the sovereign as a display of power.
The book also grapples with the structure of sovereignty and how power constitutes itself under, or in conjunction with, the sovereign. Agamben questions whether sovereignty is exclusively a political concept and, if not, how it is structured (28). This begs a question inspired by Arendt: Is the person who is banned set outside the law, or abandoned by it? Considering the werewolf, is he interacting with society when he transforms, or is he excluded from it? The state of exception can only exist as a space in relation, or as a response to, the sovereign. When determining a person is without bios, is the sovereign then creating a state of exception? Or can it exist without explicit designation from the sovereign? After reading the descriptions of Nazi experiments on Jews, it is clear that the sovereign holds power in determining bios, which leads me to wonder if bios may be the most political concept in exploring the homo sacer.
The example of the werewolf raises questions about Agamben’s thoughts on the role of animals. Do animals exist only as zoe? Or as subjects of the sovereign? Or do they maintain or command a greater value that includes bios? I’m inclined to think this differs among species, as certain animals are valued above others, and that valuation varies between communities and cultures. This example is an interesting space in which to explore the varying epistemologies of states of exception.
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Deconstructing the Camp as Nomos in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer is in many ways a project in synthesizing the key thinkers that influenced this book – Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. From Foucault, Agamben formulates his own notion of sovereign power, and Arendt lays most of the groundwork for what he calls the “state of exception”. In doing so, Agamben claims that the camp, not the city, is the zone of indistinction which gives modern society its signature – camp as nomos. In this paper, I will briefly interrogate the notion of camp as nomos of society to provide a critique of what I see as a shortcoming in the literature on humanitarianism and the current tendency to see Agamben everywhere. How do the notions of “bare life” and the state of exception illustrate certain realities in the context of the humanitarian camp and yet obfuscate others?
The Sovereign Paradox, State of Exception, and Production of “Bare Life”
Agamben’s homo sacer, retrieved from the annals of Roman law, is the figure who can be killed but not sacrificed. What primarily interests the author is how that figure comes to be excluded to a point where he can be killed without being murdered. This exception originally arises out of the paradox of sovereignty: “the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law (15).” The logic of sovereignty thus distinguishes two kinds of life, zoē and bios. Here zoē can be taken as mere biological existence whereas bios refers to life imbued with some sort of political value. Through creating the sovereign ban which deems a life worth killing but not sacrificing, homo sacer is reduced to a base form of existence, what Agamben calls “bare life”. Thus, the production of the modern, sovereign subject is an animal whose “politics calls his existence as a living being into question (119).” Agamben extends the argument beyond the camp as simply the zone of exception, stating the camp to be the nomos or signature of modern society, the production of bare life surfacing at every instance.
Camp as Nomos
Through the ban, sovereign power produces “bare life”, a convergence of zoē and bios. Likewise, Agamben argues that biopolitical power and sovereign power are inextricable – that the production of bare life is the original nucleus of sovereign power. In doing so, he asks if the concept of sovereign power is to be abandoned, then “where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge?” (6). Here, the author returns to Arendt’s discussion of human rights. What are granted as inalienable rights, then, turn out to be a misnomer when they are systematically stripped from the individual. The convergence of these forces takes absolute form in the concentration camp, yet Agamben maintains that this transformation fully subsumes our interaction with the world and nexuses of power: “we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created (174).”
The Humanitarian Camp
Agamben’s work has undoubtedly been fruitful for an entire body of work in humanitarianism that sees a growing biopolitical ordering to life in places like refugee camps. These arguments, however, generally rely on a superficial reading of Homo Sacer, producing a glazed reality of camp life and usually finding only dead ends out of intellectual pursuits. The most common pitfall is in the incessant labeling of “bare life” in the camp, the result being a mere process of indexing. Secondly, it assumes that the biopolitical ordering of life through humanitarianism is a totalizing feature of life, a view which ignores the social (if not political) value of life in these places. Refugees and IDPs are certainly placed in a context where their biological survival is highly structured and managed, but this does not imply they have been stripped of their will to carry out lives outside, through, or alongside that framework. Displaced people living in camps still maintain certain social ties that existed before exile while developing new ones, a process where bios reemerges from the rupture of violence. Ultimately, seeing bare life and bare life only in the camp obscures the dynamic social fabric tenuously stitched together by the residents of these places, most of whom would reject the notion they are the modern homo sacer if not in words, then certainly in practice.
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:31:01 PM UTC-6, galenbmurton wrote:
Joel
Joel Correia
GEOG 5100
28 October 2012
Reading Response
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Giorgio Agamben’s principal project in Homo Sacer is to interrogate the relationship between human life and sovereign political power. For Agamben biopolitical power and the sovereign are so closely related, “it can be said that the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (p. 6). His elaboration exposes the aporia of sovereign power and interrogates the socially accepted value of human life by illustrating how states of exception have become normalized. Agamben is fundamentally concerned with “the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical modes of power” (p. 6) and builds from both Arendt and Foucault to illustrate the intersection of the two via homo sacer; however, he draws from manifold historical events and philosophers that contribute to the theoretical richness of this work. Of particular interest is Agamben’s engagement and conversation with Aristotle, Schmitt, Benjamin, Arendt, and Foucault. However, due to the scope of this response I focus on his use of Aristotle, Foucault, and Arendt. Agamben’s develops his argument through an archeological genealogy of sovereignty and its relation to human life through the body of the banned. His argumentation is both an archeology and genealogy because on the one hand he follows a fairly linear historio-geneological path to construct his argument. Yet on the other hand Homo Sacer reads as though Agamben unearths specific historical events and pieces them together in a manner reminiscent of Foucault’s archeology. Agamben begins this text with three critical concepts from Aristotle.
He is particularly interested in the metamorphosis of human life (both bios and zoe) to a singular bare life embodied by homo sacer and moreover by the process through which exceptional states of being have become normalized. Agamben begins by explicating and employing the notions of bios and zoe. The former term signifies the political existence of an individual and the former the animal nature of life, or rather its bare life. For Agamben, a “the decisive event of modernity” was the moment when bare life is politicized by its inclusion in the realm of the polis (p. 4). The significance of this transformation and the genealogy of its occurrence is one of the primary foci of the book. In modern politics zoe, bare life, is transformed into both the subject and object of political order, conflict, and coincides with the political realm. The coincidence of bare life with the political realm (or the state or exception with the norm, p. 39) occurs through a series of changes in political order and role of juridical power. This normalization is only achieved through the union of violence and justice (i.e. the nomos) by the rule of the sovereign (pp. 31-37). As such, not only does the exception become the rule, but also every individual citizen’s body becomes homo sacer (able to be killed though not scarified nor murdered) through the tools of modern democracy (p. 125, 140). “When life and politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception” (p. 148).
In the third and final section of Homo Sacer, Agamben focuses on the camp as the exemplary site of the normalization of homo sacer and states of exception. In doing so he engages more critically with Foucault and Arendt. Agamben maintains that the scale of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics is lacking. The focus of biopolitics should not be the hospital or the prison, but rather the camp and totalitarian regimes. For Agamben, this is a critical scalar distinction because through the camp as an analytic it is possible to understand that the biopolitical realm of control has become normalized and spread everywhere. Speaking to Arendt, Agamben argues that her analysis of totalitarianism lacks biopolitical considerations. Hence, through bare life, homo sacer, and the camp Agamben brings together lessons from Foucault and Arendt. He ultimately illustrates that through changes in the juridical constitution of life, human rights, and legal definitions of death the zoe (bare life) is drawn further into the realm of the political (polis) until eventually surpassing any threshold separating the two and eventually constituting nomos. For Agamben, it is clear that the changes that facilitated the unification of bare life, the state of exception, and politics occurred in the institution of the camp and through the gradual exchange of power between the sovereign and the physician through the law and the juridical realm. He demonstrates this by drawing from examples of Nazi and U.S. experimentation on homines sacri in concentration camps and prisons, respectively. In the camp, the bare life and body of homines sacri are subject to the direct punishment and whim (i.e. extermination) of the sovereign, not the rule of law. Agamben ultimately argues that the state of exception has become the rule through the biopolitical inclusion of all human life.
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben engages in a "historico-philosophical" analysis of the ways in which Western tradition has taken sovereignty as power over life: "it can even be said that the production of a biopolitical power is the original activity of sovereign power" (p. 6). However, Agamben's argument rests on the distinction between two different forms of life: zoē, or bare life, and bios, politically or morally qualified life. This distinction is traced back to Aristotle in which zoē is taken as mere biological existence, however, as Agamben develops the idea of bare life, it can only be understood in its relation to bios and that which remains after bios is destroyed. Agamben's zoē "is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (p. 109). It is the life represented by homo sacer.
Homo sacer, sacred man, is "an obscure figure of archaic Roman law" whose life can be taken by anyone without impunity, but who cannot be sacrificed. This logic – that homo sacer may be killed and it will not be considered murder – represents the paradox of sovereignty for Agamben: "the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order" (p. 15). The sovereign is able to create a "zone of indistinction" that can constitute a life as bare; however, when the sovereign instituted juridical order, bare life was outside of it. Yet, because sovereign power has absolute authority, it can suspend the juridical order it instituted. Agamben analyses both they way in which sovereignty operates by a suspension of the law, or states of exception, as well as sovereignty's relationship with bare life as "the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty" (p. 67).
Agamben goes on to argue that sovereign exception is no longer exceptional but has become the norm. As he expands upon the ideas of states of exception and bare life, he argues that all subjects are possible homo sacers who could be abandoned by the law and exposed to violence as a condition of political existence. He uses the phenomenon of camps as evidence for this claim. Camps are the ultimate paradigm for modern the state of exception (p. 171). Camps give a spatial expression to the sate of exception, and those who are confined to the camps are homo sacers. It is important to note that Agamben is not only thinking of Nazi Germany when he speaks of camps, although he discusses the Final Solution at length. Rather, he maintains that camps continue to be a modern phenomenon and that "the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself" (p. 174). Our task, then, is to understand why camps continue to be permitted to exist and to "investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (p. 171).
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Response: Homo Sacer
Agamben’s Homo Sacer examines the foundation of modern politics in the originary activity of sovereignty, the state of exception it cannot help but create, and the birth of the camp as the nomos of our current age. Building off the works of Arendt and Foucault, Agamben thus applies the notion of biopolitics to the history of Western political thought and follows it all the way through its concrete manifestation in totalitarian states. In doing so, he is careful to point out that (and indeed this is his warning), although the state of exception, the politicization of bare life, can be identified most glaringly in the horrors associated with the Holocaust, it is in fact an insidious characteristic of the modern political structure more generally.
Agamben begins with The Logic of Sovereignty, in which he posits that “the exception is the originary form of law” (26). In other words, he observes, the law must first establish the realm to which it applies. The sovereign decision, or the discerning of the ever-moving threshold between that which is included in the juridical realm and that which is excluded, represents this initial juridical establishment. That which is excluded, or banned, remains wholly outside the law and is only included in it through its very exclusion. Homo sacer is the victim of this ban, who can be killed but not sacrificed, and thus represents the originary moment of sovereign political power.
Immediately and obviously complex, the notion of the sacred was, Agamben argues, rendered almost unintelligible by the scientific mythologeme of early 20th century anthropological thought (80). To elucidate the actual experience of the sacred body, and its relation to the sovereign body, Agamben thus offers the analogy of the ancient devotee and his colossus. In this instance, his consecration unfulfilled, the surviving devotee exists in a state of exception. He is, in essence, a living dead mean, unable to reenter the realm of the truly living. The consecration of his colossus thus serves as a performative substitute and restores the devotee to the world of the living. Homo sacer can be understood as the devotee for whom there is no substitute; he is “the double or the colossus of himself” (99). Perhaps even more instructive is the likening of the sacred man to man as werewolf, or he who has been banned from the city (105). Here man exists at the threshold between the city and forest, inclusion and exclusion, neither man nor wolf, but simply bare life. Again, here we see that this ban represents the original political relation—not, as Agamben argues we tend to believe, the contract (109).
These analogies are significant, because they open up the conceptual space within which we can imagine the extreme subjection of bare life to sovereign rule, which of course manifested in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Here, Agamben’s work directly corresponds to that of both Foucault and Arendt. Again, we see the inherent paradox presented by the French Revolution and the assertion of human rights: “citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty and, therefore, literally identifies… the members of the sovereign” (129). This is at once the explicit politicization of the zoe (simply, life, in contrast to bio, social life) and the establishment of the modern “living dead man” or homo sacer. With the decline of the nation-state, and the concurrent fall to inefficacy of the “birth-nation link” in legitimating the realm of sovereignty, the distinction between man and citizen first comes to light. However, in stating that, “When life and politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception”, Agamben sees homines sacri not only in the physical camps of totalitarian states, but in the camp that is, in essence, the nomos of the modern world.
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
Agamben’s Homo Sacer
In the course of the twentieth century, Agamben argues, the nature of the modern Western political system, constituted through exclusion (7), achieved its ultimate manifestation – heralded in by the mass refugee phenomenon post-World War I and reaching its fullest articulation in Nazi Germany “the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized” (171). The arch of his argument comprises three main components. First, he presents sovereignty and exception as mutually constituted via the zone of indistinction. The “paradox of sovereignty” addressed in the opening chapter resides in the fact that sovereignty comes into being precisely through what it excludes, first through the originary “banishment of sacred life” and, in modernity where “the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power” (111). Second, he developes the concept of bare life as the singular product of this sovereignty/the exception. Bare life originated in the Roman figure of homo sacer, denied “the sanctioned forms of both human and divine law,” (82), but is finds its modern form in the biopolitical reality described by Foucault. Third, he argues that the camp (internment, concentration, etc) is the “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181).
Agamben explicitly frames his project as aimed at addressing the gap between Arendt and Foucault. The latter, he says “never brought his insights to bear on…the exemplary place of modern biopolitics: the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century” (119); Arendt, on the other hand, evinced “the absence of any biopolitical perspective” in her examination of totalitarian structures. For Agamben, it is only through the transformation of modern politics into biopolitics that totalitarianism emerges (120). In making this case, Agamben asserts a continuum of “mass democracy” or “bourgeois democracy” with totalitarianism. This intuitively makes sense, in that the characteristics of biopolitics – the politicization of zoe – seems evident in all manifestations of the modern state. But this seems to call for further analytical work. Does the commonality of characteristics of the modern state necessarily mean a seamless continuum from democracy to totalitarianism? He states, “It is almost as if from a certain point every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces of liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order” (121). Was there a point before, or is there a possible point in the future, when such double sidedness did/can be realistically imagined to not exist?
I am left uncertain about how to conceptually integrate the entirety of Agamben’s analysis. His insights regarding the causal links between biopolitics and totalitarianism add both to our understanding of the latter and expands our ability to see more clearly the nature of the dark side of non-totalitarian states. And his metaphor of the camp as the condition of all modern existence, while arguably an overextension of the concept, nonetheless has helped us to look anew at what “humanitarianism” has wrought. Yet in his repeated calls for something else to replace “all this”, for “thinking the end of the State” (60), Agamben leaves us with little in the way of openings towards what that would be or how we might begin to think our way there. The closest he gets is in discussing the biopolitics of the camp, when he argues that, “The concept of the refugee…must be resolutely separated from the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt’s claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound together” (134). However, he is not arguing, as Arendt does, for a new focus on a “right to rights”, but rather on a need to undo the system in which these are bound up. But is he in fact producing the same occlusion as Arendt that Ranciere criticized? That is, insisting on such a co-composition of rights and citizenship that, outside of dismantling the nation-state system, there is no room for the productive claiming of rights by those that have been denied them?
(More) questions:
· I found myself never quite clear on what sovereignty or the sovereign means in Agamben’s analytic. While it most often seems to be about the sovereignty of the modern state, it is clearly more or different than this as well.
· Agamben delineates the distinction between the classical and modern era as a shift from the clear zoe/bios distinction into the modern state of indistinction in which bare life – the “the simple fact of living common to all living beings” (1) has become inextricably politicized. However, in his introduction, he notes that even in Aristotle the zoe/bios separation contained an implied politicization of zoe (7). So is Agamben arguing that bare life as the focus of politics was seeded in classical political ideas?
· While I understand how habeus corpus fits into his historical argument, I wonder what could have possibly been the alternative? Where do we end up if we aim to unravel the conceptual link between the body and the ideal of equality bestowed by inalienable rights? What would it mean to leave the body out of this? (123-125)
· Just as he puts democracy and totalitarianism on a continuum, Agamben also puts all forms of “the camp” on the same continuum. In doing so, does he also obliterate important distinctions? Is it really fair – or coherent – to place the Italian treatment of Albanian refugees in 1991 and the Vichey treatment of France’s Jewish population during WWII in the same category? There are, as he demonstrates, important parallels; but don’t the differences require examination as well? (174-175)
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:31:01 PM UTC-6, galenbmurton wrote:
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
October 28, 2012
GEOG 5100: Agamben
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Through an abstruse application of classical political theory upon systems of modern sovereignty, Agamben’s Homo Sacer is in many ways a discussion that Foucault and Arendt never had. Agamben extends Foucault’s biopolitics thesis beyond the state and the prison and confronts Arendt at the concentration camp of totalitarianism. In so doing, Agamben articulates an original, and recently influential, theory on the politicization of bare life and argues that “the camp,” as the ubiquitous materialization and normalization of the “state of exception,” is a modern paradigm that makes all of us into virtual homo sacers.
Agamben’s analysis yields three key theses: “the original political relation is the ban;” the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life;” and “the camp…is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181). Agamben devotes one Part of the book to each of these critical concepts. His historicization of sovereign rule in Part One presents the distinction between zoe (pure, animal or bare life) and bios (collective or political life). Power is the sovereign’s because he alone can make such distinction. Existing at once both within and outwith the law, the sovereign is paradoxical as the arbiter of both justice and violence, yet he is outside of juridical order. This state of exception is the original sovereign ban. Part Two discusses the nature of homo sacer, a man who can be killed, with no punishment, and yet not sacrificed. Sacred in the classical sense – that is, also taboo – homo sacer is, like the werewolf, a paradox, outside both human and divine law, not man but also no sacrificial beast. An inverse reflection exists between the sovereign and homo sacer according to their common states of exception and the polar oppositional asymmetry of their power – homo sacer is to the sovereign as the sovereign is to homo sacer. In Part Three, Agamben engages and synthesizes Foucault and Arendt in his genealogy of the camp. As the localization of biopolitical power where the Rights of Man are suspended (if not abolished), the camp is the ultimate threshold and state of exception. In the camp, the prisoner/refugee/victim loses not only nationality and nativity but also humanity as rights and privileges to land, order, and birth are ruptured (175).
In positing the camp as nomos and the “paradigm of the modern,” Agamben argues that upon the ironic common ground of democratic ideal and totalitarian policy, existence in the modern world is now akin to life in the camp. The exception has become the norm, as “the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical order itself” (168). Agamben shows that this politicization of the body as “bare life” defines life in democratic states (just as it did under totalitarian rule) as zones d’attentes. He cites government polices and actions on suicide, euthanasia, experimentation, techno-medical assistance, airports, and, most importantly, the life of the refugee, in support of this claim.
Despite the erudition of his arguments and the relevance of the camp paradigm, I am not convinced that “the camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (176). Problematically, Agamben’s “camp” appears as a monolithic structure unchanged from Dachau to Yugoslavia to Rwanda to Pakistan, and that it should not be. Refugee camps are not concentration camps, and though rights there may be suspended, they are still protected. Neither refugees nor IDPs are absolute home sacers, and international bodies (UNHCR, NGOs, etc.) exist in loco statis to ensure that their killing will not go unpunished (of course, not always effectively). Indeed, all camps of ethnic cleansing are abhorrent states of exception, but they are not the rule; rather, they are the exception. Pol Pot’s Killing Fields are not the same as Jalozai is for Afghans (at least, they were strikingly different when I was there). In spite of his tremendous theory, I cannot help but wonder how much time Agamben has actually spent in a “camp.”
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:31:01 PM UTC-6, galenbmurton wrote:
Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan
Agamben response paper
While Agamben’s Homo Sacer was the shortest book of social theory that we’ve read so far, it is also by far the least clear to me, and in fact I am suspicious of the conclusions that Agamben draws. Since I had a very difficult time following Agamben’s line of argument, I want to use this response as an attempt to trace the general progression of Agamben’s points.
Agamben begins by explaining the paradox of sovereignty: the sovereign has the legal power to suspend the law, and in so doing places himself outside of the law (p. 15). The sovereign has a monopoly on the right to make a decision (p. 16), and through this power to decide, the sovereign demonstrates that he does not even need the law the create law. Out of this paradox arises the state of exception, which Agamben also refers to as a “zone of indistinction (p. 21).” In this zone, fact and law are indistinguishable (p. 27) and the state of exception is in fact the norm, the usual state of affairs in a modern democracy. Agamben calls sovereignty the “originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it (28).” (Later, this relationship of sovereignty to life is put in terms of Foucault’s biopower.) From here, Agamban ends the first chapter with a short discussion of a key, recurring concept of the ban. The relation of exception is a relation of a ban. The person who is banned is not placed outside the law, but rather abandoned by it. This means that it’s impossible to say whether a person who is banned is inside or outside of juridical order.
Next (chapter 2), Agamben uses a discussion of Hobbes’ Leviathan to show that the state of nature and the state of law are in fact one and the same, that “the state of exception has transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, overflowing outside them, is starting to coincide with the normal order (28).” In other words, the state of exception is becoming the norm, a permanent feature of democratic government. The state of exception is exemplified by the concentration camp, although Agamben also draws on highly unethical examples of 1960s-70s American medical experimentation to show that the concentration camp is not that far from other forms of modern democracy. Essentially, this is what Agambe calls a, “zone of indistinguishability between law and life (59).” Presumably, he is anticipating the argument that such cases in American history are rare, and should not be compared with the Nazi scheme to exterminate the Jewish race, when he argues that the state of exception is increasingly becoming the norm. In a way, Agamben is saying, “just wait, these unusual situations are going to become regular occurrences.”
Homo sacer, is introduced in the second part of the book. He is a character of Roman law who, having committed a crime, may be killed without the killer being accused of homicide, but whose death may not be considered a sacrifice. Homo sacer is in a state of a double exclusion: excluded from possibility of sacrifice, and excluded from the zone of protection and exposed to violence. In this way, Agamben shows that the idea of “sacred” (sacre) has a double and contradictory or ambivalent meaning—meaning both sacred and impure. Moreover, the sovereign depends on homo sacer as much as homo sacer depends for his existence on the sovereign, because the sovereign is the figure for whom all men could potentially become homo sacer, and all men act as sovereign with regard to homo sacer (p. 84). This fact that homo sacer is exposed to death is the same thing as bare life or sacred life, which Agamben also calls zoe.
Ultimately, Agamben says that we are all “hominus sacri” (p. 115). This statement is the “threshold” between the second and third parts of the book, and I think this is also the point where Agamben starts to make leaps that he does not sufficiently demonstrate. The third section begins with an interesting pair or critiques of Arendt’s chapter on the Rights of Man, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality and notion of biopolitics. The latter, “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (119), is problematic because Foucault never applies the concept to its clearest application (in Agamben’s eyes)—that of the Nazi concentration camp. Arendt, on the other hand, is guilty of exactly the opposite—she fails to include any perspective of the biopolitical in her account of Holocaust. Agamben’s goal, then, is to bring these two together through the concept of bare life.
I think that Agamben’s main point actually comes on page 127 in the most important chapter of the book, Biopolitics and the Rights of Man. Here, he says that we must start seeing the Rights of Man “according to their real historical function in the modern nation-state.” (Here, I am finally 95 percent confident that Agamben is on to something important!) The Rights of Man are the “originary” point at which natural life was consumed by the juridico-political order of the nation state. That is, The Rights of Man were the birth of biopolitics. Bare life “now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty.”