Panaiga - Homo Sacer Review

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3:1 | © 1999 Davide Panagia

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen

trans., (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1998)

1.

The debate over abortion rights, the status of the right of entry

for refugees, the debate over health care in the United States, theright of individuals to bear arms in order to protect themselves -all these questions constituting much political debate incontemporary America and elsewhere would, according to theItalian political theorist Giorgio Agamben's latest politico-

philosophical pursuit, fall under the category of homo sacer. 2.

To most Anglo-American readers, the term homo sacer is probably unfamiliar as it refers to a juridical category of ancientRoman law where an individual accused of a crime cannot besacrificed for having committed said crime. However, from theRoman writer Pompeius Festus, we learn that what is crucialabout homo sacer is that although "it is not permitted to sacrificethis man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide." (quoted in Agamben, p. 71) Homo sacer thus

presents a limit-concept that Agamben traces throughout thehistory of Western political thought and situates as thefundamental element of sovereign power. The paradox of sovereignty for Agamben - and the political dilemma par excellence - is that the sovereign sphere is structured by the

logic of homo sacer such that "the life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred - that is, that may bekilled but not sacrificed - and in this sense, the production of

bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty." (Agamben, p.83)

3.

A conceptual link is thus established between sacredness-sovereignty-life where the function of sovereignty is to delimit azone of indistinction that constitutes life as sacred. What is

de Panagia | The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's... http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v003/3.1r_pana

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crucial for Agamben is that the sacredness of life does notnecessarily need to refer to a sense of the sacred linked to anoriginary divine status (i.e., because we are all made in god'simage). Rather, the sacredness of homo sacer refers specificallyto the characteristic feature of sovereignty that allows for the

possibility of killing without requiring the divine overtonesusually associated with sacrifice. In this regard, sovereign power

and bare life are linked precisely because it is sovereignty thatconstitutes a life as bare through the foundation of a zone of indistinction. 4.

In his discussion of the paradox of sovereignty, Agamben borrows from Jean-Luc Nancy's account of the logic of thesovereign ban. The structure of sovereignty, he explains, isexemplified by the Schmittian notion of exception whereby thesovereign structure of law has its force in the possibility of thesuspension of the rule such that a state of exception emerges.That which is outside of the sphere of influence of sovereigntythus does not comprise the constitutive outside of sovereignty

but rather, the outside is already included in the domain of thesovereign by means of the suspension of the juridical order'svalidity. In this respect, "the rule applies to the exception in nolonger applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exceptionis thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situationthat results from its suspension." (Agamben, p. 18) 5.

What emerges through the logic of the paradox of sovereignty isan event Agamben calls the zone of indistinction. In thesuspension of the rule through the state of exception, what weare presented with is a complex plateau where such

philosophically distinct categories as state of nature and law,outside and inside, exception and rule flow through one another to the point of literal indistinction. On Agamben's account, theoperation of sovereignty abandons individuals whenever theyare placed outside the law and in so doing, exposes and threatensthem to a sphere where there is no possibility of appeal.(Agamben, p. 29) What is crucial for Agamben's entire project,then, is to point out how the zone of indistinction collapses the

possibility of making distinctions - which is to say further, to point out how political philosophy finds the limit of thinking inthe paradox of sovereignty. In the sphere of indistinction, wecannot think as if distinctions operated as they might ineveryday life. 6.

The political point here is, I think, insightful and worth pursuing. What makes this insight problematic, however, is


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Agamben's treatment of history and the status of homo sacer therein. Part of the task of this book is to ascertain how thecategory of homo sacer is a specifically historical category. Thisis evident in Agamben's constant referral to ancient Roman legaldocuments as well as his exploration of the reappearance of homo sacer throughout history. But it is precisely the possibilitythat homo sacer is something that occurs 'throughout history'

that makes Agamben's analysis at times difficult to swallow. Atthe purely conceptual level, one might be willing to accept themeta claim that Agamben seems to be making. But Agambendoes not want to limit himself to the conceptual level. He wantsto insist on the material dimension of homo sacer and theactuality of this category in contemporary life. There is thus asubstantial tension between the particularity of homo sacer as amaterial instance of modern politics and the trans-historicalcategory of homo sacer as a category constituted by the paradoxof sovereignty and the state of indistinction.

7.

It is with this tension in mind that one begins to get a purchaseon what Agamben means by the term "bare life." As he assertsin a key passage of the book, "the life caught in the sovereign

ban is the life that is originally sacred - that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed - and in this sense , the production of bare lifeis the originary activity of sovereignty." (p. 83) Importantly, theterm bare life is a translation of the Italian 'nuda vita' and, asHeller-Roazen's admirable translation goes at lengths to pointout, the nuda vita is not merely a life left bare of any semantic

content. On the contrary, the term refers to life in its purenakedness where what we are asked to imagine is the materialityof a naked body left standing, but in a state of extremedesperation. In this respect, sovereign power not only constitutes

bare life as a real political phenomenon but further, allocates bare life (exemplified in the figure of homo sacer) to the zone of indistinction where no appeal can be made. Agamben thusattempts to 'correct' or 'complete,' as he puts it, the Foucauldianthesis on biopolitics. The task of political thinking requires us tothink how bare life is both made manifest and persists in

contemporary life. It is precisely for this reason that, in the finalsection of the book, Agamben reveals to us what the figure of homo sacer looks like today: 'the concentration camp as

biopolitical paradigm of the modern' points to thematerialization of the state of exception in the space of the campand the actualization of homo sacer as the figure of the one whoexists therein. 8.

Here it is important to point out that Agamben is not speaking


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exclusively of the Jewish Holocaust when referring to the imageof the camp. Although he discusses the Final Solutionextensively, he is quick to argue that we should not treat the

Nazi concentration camp as a unique historical instance. Thecamp as a paradigm of the modern political condition does notrefer merely to a place that is preserved as a memory or archive,

but rather, it is an event that repeats itself on a daily basis. Thus,

whenever we see boats filled with refugees, when we seeimmigrants being contained in soccer stadiums, we have aninstance of the camp materializing a state of exception where theindividual is constituted as bare life and the logic of a juridical

proceduralism reaches its limits. "In this light," Agambenexplains, "the birth of the camp in our time appears as an eventthat decisively signals the political space of modernity itself"(Agamben, p. 174) and the task for political thinking is toexamine precisely how such an event is permitted to persist. 9.

It is perhaps one of Agamben's great achievements in HomoSacer to pose to his readers the question of the task of politicalthinking in the manner in which he does. The structure of the

book itself (it is divided into three separate and distinct sections) parallels this call to thinking. The first section entitled "TheLogic of Sovereignty" is heavily theoretical and presents thequestions with which Agamben will be dealing throughout incomplex albeit lucid articulations of what he understands the

paradox of sovereignty to be. The second section ("HomoSacer") is not only an explication of the term but further,

presents a discussion of the figure of homo sacer as an event thatemerges from the logic of sovereignty previously articulated.The final section on the political status of the camp in modernlife presents us with an actualization of the instance of bare life. 10.

In this regard, both in its form and content, Homo Sacer is a callto thinking the political realities of our day as they appear at

both the conceptual and material level. What this involves is aturn towards an understanding of thinking that coincides withthe material register of the body as the bearer of life and death.If, according to Agamben, there is the very real possibility thatwe may all be homo sacers, then thinking cannot take placewithout a consideration of the very real experience of life, deathand the zone of indistinction wherein this experience lies. 11.

In light of this, Agamben stands in contrast to manycontemporary Anglo-American political thinkers who presentthe task of political thinking in purely operational terms as aninstance of a procedural rationality that (ought to) take place


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