المنبوذ: السلطة السيادية والحياة العارية

Homo Sacer #I

by Giorgio Agamben, جيورجيو أغامبن, عبد العزيز العيادي (ترجمة)

المحرك الأول لهذا الكتاب هو الحياة العارية، أي حياة المنبوذ التي يمكن انتزاعها ولا يمكن التضحية بها، هي التي أردنا بيان وظيفتها الأساسية في السياسة الحديثة. صورة غامضة للقانون الروماني القديم حيث الحياة الإنسانية متضمنة في النظام القضائي في شكل استبعادها وحسب (أي في إمكان انتزاعها دون عقاب)، تعطي على هذا النحو المفتاح الذي يمكن بفضله، ليس للنصوص المقدسة للسيادة وحسب ولكن بشكل أعم للقوانين ذاتها التي للسلطة السياسية، أن تكشف ألغازها.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, History, Anthropology

256 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

When my 5 year-old asks why I don't have to eat all my peas, I'm going to tell her that the sovereign exists outside the juridical order.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the best continental philosophy* books display the best and worst things about continental philosophy: they introduce a profoundly useful concept and make a number of interesting but lesser points about the world in general while they do it. They also needlessly confuse the concept itself, display far too much irrelevant learning (of the "I was reading book x while I was writing book y, therefore book x and y are somehow connected" variety), and make statements that are so over-the-top and ridiculous that any sane reader will only retain her sanity by keeping in mind Adorno's marvelously self-referential claim that all real thought is exaggeration.

According to this implausible statement of mine, Homo Sacer is among the best continental philosophy books. Agamben introduces a very useful and interesting concept by thinking about a)sovereignty, particularly as discussed by Schmitt; b) the figure of homo sacer and the much discussed 'ambiguity of the sacred'; and c) Foucault's concept of biopower. The concept is 'bare life,' which is what the figure of homo sacer is meant to have, what sovereignty rules over, and what Foucault (ait Agamben) was really trying to get at.

This should all be plain sailing, really: the sovereign, Agamben suggests, doesn't so much decide on the exception as decide on the boundaries of legality. The sovereign has the power to turn someone (or some group) into homines sacres, or 'bandits,' or, more making the idea a bit clearer, outlaws. Homo sacer, the outlaw, is both no longer subject to the law- but also no longer protected by it. He can kill you if he wants, but you can kill him without having any legal problem. So the sovereign and the outlaw both stand at the boundaries of human law, civilization etc... When you're in this position, though, you don't really have a full 'life' as such. You aren't a citizen, you aren't a subject- now you're bare life. I doubt it's very nice. This brings with it some interesting points about Heidegger (Dasein as a kind of benign bare life, which is no longer subject to power structures or politics or whatever), anthropological investigations of the sacred and a bunch of other issues in which you might be interested.

Now for the bad stuff:
i) this interesting concept does not allow you to make wildly exaggerated claims like 'economic development turns the entire population of the Third World into bare life,' or 'concentration camps signal the political space of modernity.' Regardless of whether some people are treated as bare life, the vast majority of us remain citizens.

ii) Aristotle's discussion of potentiality in book theta of the Metaphysics has nothing to do with sovereignty, no, nothing at all, and no matter how much fancy footwork you do you will not make them have any relevance to each other. Pindar might have something to do with it, but in a very uninteresting way. Kafka probably has something interesting to say about it, but Agamben doesn't tell us what. Benjamin certainly does, but you could only explain what in a freestanding book length essay on him. All this means that about two thirds of part one of this book are gratuitous and quite irritating. This is a side-effect of the argument-by-outlandish-example method, which also takes up too much space in part three: 'scientists sometimes turn people into lab rats' adds nothing to the concept of bare life.

iii) And finally, I actually have a complaint of substance: despite all the talk of bodies and biopolitics and what-not, Agamben's work is the worst kind of obfuscating idealism. I say this as someone who doesn't mind a little idealism every now and then. But saying 'the Romans conceived of homo sacer in this way... and now we're all homines sacres' leaves out a couple of pretty important *millenia,* through which one probably can't track the figure of homo sacer. What possible effect could this fascinating but arcane legal dispute have today? How is it that such ideas have some immediate impact on people who have never had a politically theoretical idea in their lives?
Agamben could answer, say, 'that's not what I mean; it's not that these ideas have actual worldly effects in the present. It's just a way to think about our world.' That would be okay.
*But*, I'm pretty sure that's not what's going on. He routinely says things like "only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to... put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and cities of the earth," p 180. I suppose we could dedicate the next twenty years to re-thinking the relation between politics and bare life and sovereignty and so on. We could try to get an absolutely true political theory that steps beyond all of western history and metaphysics, since *only* then will injustice cease. But I'd like to think it isn't *only* when you have a perfect political theory that you can take steps to stop the environmental, political, economic, social and cultural havoc that we seem intent on wreaking.


*yes, I am aware that continental/analytic is a silly distinction, but it holds in this case.

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in March it seemed like Agamben had lost his damn mind. Now I have to wonder if he was the only one who was correct. Marx can get you pretty far on certain questions, but I have to admit he falls a bit short on making sense of 2020.

***

What concerns us most of all here, however, is that in the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move in the no-man's-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate.

These words have an eerie quality to them in 2020; and yet it's important to resist the all-too-easy conclusion that covid shutdowns represent the triumph of technocracy. Anders Tegnell is in fact the exemplary technocrat, and by allowing Swedish society to keep functioning he was merely following well-established science. The biopolitics of covid is in no way reducible to the authoritarianism of scientists; political passions have played a determining role.

***
In conclusion, this difficult-yet-playful little book may hold the key to understanding human civilization in the 21st century.

[Mariafrancesca di natura viperesca sta con gli ultimi della terra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mantra viene ammonito, nei contesti più disparati, di vigilare chè il mostro sterminatore di popoli inermi non ricompaia sotto mentite spoglie. Si raccomanda l’assidua frequentazione della memoria vista la propensione mentale umana a procedere per confronti e esempi. Ma se nella fattispecie la coppia bene/male è chiara nel secondo termine riferito a quel particolare passato, è la definizione del primo che fa acqua da tutte le parti.
Se è bastato che il nome campo fosse sostituito dall’anodino c.p.t. (non sono informata dell’ultimo acronimo messo in giro dal nuovo cazzuto ministro, comunista della vecchia guardia, e pertanto non sbranato dalla sinistra come si deve) risulta chiaro che la locuzione ‘mentite’ spoglie lascia ampi margini di indeterminatezza.

Se negli anni trenta il laborioso popolo tedesco smise dall’oggi al domani ‘la vecchia coscienza’ come se si trattasse di cambiare pietanza, o di farsi rigirare dal sarto un cappotto un po’ liso, Agamben ci dimostra che esiste una pulsione più forte a monte della culturalmente fragile morale.
Questa pulsione non è altro che il potere sovrano di vita e di morte del capo (o degli organi più o meno democratici che lo detengono) sulla vita nuda degli uomini che abitano il territorio in cui lo esercita.
Anche nei tempi più bui della storia il potere sovrano ha avuto bisogno di consenso.
E come ottenerlo se non con il creare un nemico che minacci l’integrità di questa amorevole culla e nutrice che è la terra chiamata di volta in volta patria, res-pubblica, stato o nazione?
E come agire per debellare il nemico con ogni mezzo se non con eccezioni alla legge?
Si sa che l’eccezione più che indebolire la legge la conferma. Uno stato di eccezione può essere abrogato qualora il pericolo venga meno. E soprattutto il nemico non è necessariamente esterno. Può, come i sei milioni di ebrei mandati al macero, essere interno ma talmente indegno di essere cittadino da diventare Homo sacer , non sacrificabile ma uccidibile. Cioè indegno a tal punto da non poter essere sottoposto alla legge (anche cruenta come il sacrificio agli dei riservato ai cittadini normali), ma uccidibile senza che questo possa essere imputabile di omicidio.
Nasce nella notte dei tempi la nuda vita, diversissima dalla bios greca. Accettata e introiettata dall’ homo lupus che rimette nelle mani di uno solo il compito che madre natura ha impresso in qualche parte del suo paleoencefalo: quello di essere il lupo del suo simile.

E mentre le nazioni moderne si preoccupano sempre più della salute dei loro cittadini seguendoli dal concepimento alla morte (che non coincide più con l’arresto cardiaco ma con la morte cerebrale che può essere protratta a piacimento) grazie ai progressi tecnologici, allo stesso tempo moltiplicano i nemici da confinare in luoghi dove lo stato di eccezione è la regola. Magari pagando democrazie non compiute perché si faccia carico delle nude vite.

E allora, grazie a questo imprinting ancestrale, ci si può permettere di mettere alla gogna un povero prete perché osa fare immergere in una piscina comunale quattro negri di merda che dovevano invece essere lasciati immersi nel canale di Sicilia.
Si può intimare alle ong, novelli Ulisse visto che i luoghi sono quelli, di non rispondere ai richiami delle sirene dai gommoni che affondano.
O sgomberare fatiscenti edifici occupati da profughi in attesa di giudizio.
O, perla delle perle, pagare bande libiche perché si prendano ‘cura’ di quelle nude vite scampate agli scorpioni del deserto senza, per carità, farci sporcare le mani.
Le nude vite sono i figli di nessuno.

Alle voci nel deserto che si alzano in loro favore il meno che gli può capitare è essere tacciati di buonismo accompagnando l’epiteto con smorfie di disprezzo e compatimento.
Anche perché in aiuto all’immarcescibile homo homini lupus che circola digrignante nel corpo calloso di ciascuno di noi, c’è quel generico ‘ mentite spoglie’ riferito al male assoluto, che blocca il più buono degli uomini ma sincero democratico.
Niente niente dovesse sbagliare e scambiare lucciole per lanterne tacciando per male assoluto la normale amministrazione di uno stato che ha mille gatte da pelare e non ci voleva pure questa invasione.
Mica si tratta di gettarli ai pesci ma solo di definire delle regole civili. E parliamoci chiaro, da quando queste regoline sono state definite sono calati gli sbarchi e soprattutto i morti in mare. I disfattisti parlano di campi di concentramento nel deserto libico. Mica hanno le prove. Ecco cosa pensano e dicono i buoni democratici con le radici cristiane per piedi.

[roz_anthi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ένα απ' τα σημαντικότερα κείμενα για την κατανόηση της σημερινής συνθήκης μέσα στην πανδημία αλλά και γενικότερα, για την κατανόηση της δομής που έχει η νεωτερική κυριαρχία.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part I of author’s Homo Sacer project.

Text opens with the Aristotelian distinction between bios and zoe: life of the polis, a “particular way of life,” as opposed against life of the oikos, “simple natural life” which is “excluded from the polis (9). (By the time we get to Part IX of this series, The Use of Bodies, it is revealed that the particular way of life is really Plotinus’ eidos zoes, the form of life, a bio-ontology (loc. cit at 218).)

Author cites Foucault for the proposition that “at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, and politics turns into biopolitics” (10). Author follows on this by noting that the “entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis - the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (id.).

Agamben likes Foucault because of “its decisive abandonment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of the state), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life [sic]” (id.). Statement of purpose here is accordingly interrogation of “precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” (11). This “inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (id.). Links up with Volume II insofar as “biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (id.). The modern state bonds “modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii” (id.).

Zoe is “an inclusive exclusion (an exceptio)” of the polis--“bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (12)—for “the fundamental categorical pair of western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (id.). However, because “the protagonist of this book is bare life,” i.e., “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (id.), the “the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule” zoe begins to “coincide with the political realm”—exclusion and inclusion “enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction” (id.).

Begins the contemplation of Schmitt’s ideas on the state of exception, which are developed most rigorously in volume II of the series: “For what is at issue in the sovereign exception is, according to Schmitt, the very condition of possibility of juridical rule and, along with it, the very meaning of State authority” (18). However: “the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule” (id). The state of exception is therefore “not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension” (id.). It is peculiar insofar as “it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two” (id.), which is a thread worked consistently in State of Exception.

The notion ‘threshold of indistinction’ is the master figure of thought in the Homo Sacer series, along with related corollaries such as ‘zone of indetermination’ or 'undecidability' and ‘coincides without remainder.' The agambenian method is foucauldian archaeology and heideggerian destruktion, starting with the most ancient antecedents for whichever concept is under his examination, and thence bringing that concept into the present. Along the way, traditional concepts are brought into confrontation with each other and zones of indistinction (&c) are typically revealed. By the time we get to volume VI (Opus Dei), we see that the zone of indistinction/threshold of indifference notions are the ancient plotinian hoion, which is often translated as 'so to speak,' a rhetorical equivalence, almost uttered as a by-the-bye. My suspicion is that the notions of zones of indistinction or threshold of undecidability or indetermination are themselves non-identical concepts, so to speak, metaphorical in slightly different ways, that nevertheless enter themselves into their own zone of indetermination in Agamben. The best expression of this sort of zone/threshold stuff, as it begins to appear in some of the later HS volumes, is the notion of items "coinciding without remainder." Fair to say that the agambenian notions of zones and thresholds and whatnot do not coincide without remainder, even if there something of a zone of indistinction or threshold of indetermination among them.

It’s not a postmodernist’s implosion of binaries (which will either refuse to rank irreducible differences or perhaps abolish the difference without more), and it’s not quite hegelian dialectical negation (where a thing will produce its opposite, and the confrontation thereof results in a new thingy born of the negation of the negation &c.); it is almost as though the agambenian method draws postmodern implosion into a zone of indistinction with hegelian dialectics wherein irreducible difference is brought into confrontation and nevertheless impossibly imploded for the purpose of pushing history forward. It sounds outrageous, but it’s bloody amazing to watch when he’s hitting on all cylinders. (We see this most plainly in volumes V and IX of the series.) We should perhaps stay on the lookout for this stuff in the future volumes, such as how ultimately in volume IX he seeks to undo the fundamental opposition of bios/zoe by means of finding “a bios whose object seems to be solely zoe” (loc. cit. at 225)—can there be such a thing? All’y’all motherfuckers will just have to read all nine books to see.
For example (heh), some work in showing how there’s a ZoI between the ‘exception’ (inclusive exclusion) and the ‘example’ (exclusive inclusion) (20)—so that “in every logical system, just as in every social system, the relation between outside and inside, strangeness [xenos] and intimacy [oikeios], is this complicated” (id.). (What to make of Woolf’s “exquisite intimacy” then? Volume IX's meditation on the relation of intimacy to exile and politics, and, ultimately, defined as a 'void of representation,' is probably my favorite moment in the entire series. Is it possible to overcome xenos to the extent that two persons in their intimacy coincide without remainder?)

We see a similar movement in the analysis of Pindar’s fragment 169:

While in Hesiod the nomos is still the power that divides violence from law and, with it, the world of beasts from the world of men, and while n Solon the ‘connection’ of bia and dike contains neither ambiguity nor irony, in Pindar – and this is the know that he bequeaths to Western political thought and that makes him, in a certain sense, the first great thinker of sovereignty – the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction. (25)

I.e., “the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law” (id.).

The sovereign decision “suspends law in the state of exception and thus implicates bare life within it” (53)—“production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty” (id.).

If our hypothesis is correct, sacredness is instead the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order, and the syntagm homo sacer something like the originary ‘political’ relation, which is to say, bare life insofar as it operates as an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision. Life is sacred only insofar as it taken into the sovereign exception. (53-54)

Early Roman crimes that warranted the culleus, say, “do not, therefore, have the character of a transgression of a rule”; they are rather “the originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed”—i.e., “their cancellation or negation is the constitutive act of the city (and this is what the myth of the foundation of Rome, after all, teaches with perfect clarity” (54).

Plenty of reflection on Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history and critique of violence, Kant’s note regarding the form of law as force sans significance, Kantorowicz on the royal dignitas (monarch as homo sacer, which is why there is no society “in which the killing of the sovereign is classified simply as an act of homicide” (62)—but contrarily there can “never be a legal sentence but only dismissal from office” against the sovereign (id.)), and so on.

The concerns regarding the threshold of humanity/animality developed in other volumes are borne out in the discussion of the Hobbesian (i.e., kenomatic) state of nature: “It is not so much a war of all against all as, more precisely, a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else, and in which everyone is this wargus, gerit caput lupinum. And this lupization of man and humanization of the wolf is at every moment possible in the dissolutio civitatis inaugurated by the state of exception” (64). Upshot is that anomie is inscribed in the heart of the nomos in the dual person of the sovereign—“just as the sovereign power’s first and immediate referent is, in this sense, the life that may be killed but not sacrificed, and that has its paradigm in homo sacer, so in the person of the sovereign, the werewolf, the wolf-man of man, dwells permanently in the city” (64).

These meditations leads to a rereading of the “myth of the foundation of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau” (65), which is rooted in the sovereign decision over the life of citizens; this life is not “simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life [eidos zoes, recall],” but is “rather the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (65). It is “a more complicated zone of indiscernibility between nomos and physis”—which means that “all representations of the originary political act as a contract or convention marking the passage from nature to the State in a discrete and definite way must be left wholly behind” (id.). That is, “the understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to confront a problem of sovereign power” (id.). (These items are intimate to in Volume IX.)

The final section of the argument is an extension of Foucault and Arendt’s analyses with the homo sacer apparatus: “The concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total domination” (71)—“the radical transformation of politics into the realm of bare life (that is, into a camp) legitimated and necessitated total domination” (id.). We see that there is a mobile line whereat biopolitics transforms into thanatopolitics, “such as National Socialist eugenics and its elimination of ‘life unworthy of being lived,’ or in the contemporary debate on the normative determination of death criteria” (72). Ergo, “the camp, as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception) will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity” (72-73).

The writ habeas corpus becomes the foundation of modern democracy not by summoning the citizen or the subject, but rather by demanding very precisely the corpus (73). Modern democracy accordingly “does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body” (id.). Instead of regarding “declarations of rights as proclamations of metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact without much success to respect eternal ethical principles,” we should note their function as “the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state” (75)—i.e., “the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights” (id.).

The ideology of the NSDAP was condensed down to the hendiadys ‘blood and soil’; “this formula is nothing other than the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served to identify citizenship (that is, the primary inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents)” (76), which concepts are still part of the US statute, incidentally. (I note with some horror that Isenberg's White Trash (a text laden with implicit agambenian promise) reveals Thomas Jefferson's politics to be substantially similar to 'blood and soil' ideology.)

Plenty more unearthing of these concepts through fascist doctrine (Erlosing, ‘life unworthy of being lived’), de Sade, &c. One striking fascist concept is “living wealth,” a “budget of the living value of people,” a “logical synthesis of biology and economy” according to fascist ideologues (84). It’s all brought into the present in the politicization of the moment of death (92 ff.): coma, overcoma, brain death, “the wavering of death in a shadowy zone beyond coma,” an “oscillation between medicine and law.” The zone of indistinction is complete in the figure of the ‘neomort’: one who has “the legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of future transplants” (94). Apparently this leads to some declaring that “the body is nationalized”; “in modern democracies it is possible to state in public what the Nazi biopoliticians did not dare to say” (id.).

Overall: “The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (99).

Recommended for persons who define the sovereignty of the nomos by means of a justification of violence, readers worthy of veneration and provoking horror, and those who consecrate their own lives to the gods of the underworld.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agamben je apostol biopolitičke logorologije. Čak i u neprozirnosti i protivrečnosti, njegov teorijski aparat je dragocen za političko opismenjavanje. Jasno je da svaka stranica ječi da predoči nešto važno o svetu i da je takt pogođen. Takođe je jasno da je iskustvo logora, kao užasa koje je došlo do same granice zamislivog, temeljno preobrazilo mišljenje o politici, javnosti i ishodima međunarodnih inicijativa, međutim, tu se Agamben ne zaustavlja, već pokazuje da je logor paradigma društvenog delovanja odvajkada. Drugi svetski rat je samo potvrdio iste one mehanizme tzv. „uključujućeg isključivanja” poznatih još u antici. Ova oksimoronska sintagma predstavlja, zapravo, susret u razlikovanju nivoa života, a par excellence biopolitičko pitanje je kako goli život neke jedinke obitava u zajednici. Ostvarivanje društvenosti predstavlja nužno i preobražaje nivoa života, koji se nalaze u nekoj vrsti nasilne koegzistencije. Bez razumevanja kategorije suverenosti, teško da mogu da se valjano misle zaoštrenosti koje nastaju kada biološko postojanje stupa na domen političkog. Sukob suverenosti i teret borbe dovodi do permanentnog vanrednog stanja, koje je, opet paradoksalno, postojanije od redovnog stanja, premda je jasno da je red uvek omogućitelj nereda. Najvažniji izraz suverenosti je, nadovezuje se Agamben na Hegela, sam jezik – koji u beskrajnom vanrednom stanju izjavljuje da spoljašnjost u odnosu na jezik ne postoji! (40) A jezik može biti ne samo priprema za teren dejstva već i neposredan čin. Zato je krajnje zanimljivo da pravu moć u državi ima onaj ko poseduje kontrolu nad vanrednim stanjem. Kada ukoričeni zakonici padnu, ispliavajaju nepisani, pravi, još snažniji i još više obavezujući. I ne tiče se to nomosa niti anarhije, već toga da je moć života i moć nad životom urođena, a da je priča o izuzecima uvek o odnosu izopštenja. A ko vodi kolo izopštenja, on ima moć. Logor je, tako, moguć samo i isključivo u vanrednim okolnostima i on je redovna i i izmeštena vanrednost, u kojoj je svaki život – goli život. On je i deo teritorije, postavljen izvan pravnog poretka, što ga ipak nije činilo spoljašnjim prostorom (248). Hijerarhija logora je čvrsta, mada nerazlučiva – logori se uvek tiču masa – a najpotentija masa politike je narod. Narod koji je, primećuje Agamben, čisti izvor svakog identiteta, ali istovremeno mora neprestano da biva redefinisan i prečišćivan kroz isključenje, jezik, krv i teritoriju. (260)
Onaj ko bude uspeo da uvidi da je ultimativni zahtev našeg, modernog vremena, premošćavanje krajnosti i krpljenje rascepa, moći će nešto da uradi u dobrom pravcu.

Nisam siguran da li to baš tako ide, ali jesam da Agamben misli opasno, a zaista opasnih misli je danas sve manje. Ubile ih preplavljenosti.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's unsurprising that Homo Sacer is Giorgio Agamben's best known work. As a study into the nature of sovereignty in the modern age - and more! - it's awfully good. Unlike many of Agamben's other works - which are usually essay long reflections on various topics - Homo Sacer is one of his most sustained and penetrating investigations, refusing to let its target out of sight. Agamben's stated thesis is simple, but its ramifications are anything but. The basic idea is that sovereign power, the exercise of which once distinguished between 'natural', biological life on the one hand, and 'qualified', political life on the other, is ever more eroding the distinctions between the two forms of life. Modernity, for Agamben, is defined precisely at the point at which both natural and political life become indistinguishable, such that life as such is directly politicized, without any form of mediation between the two.

Such a blurring of the lines indicates, for Agamben, the inception of a new kind of politics, first isolated by the researches of the late and great Michel Foucault: a biopolitics. Agamben's delicate and probing expositions of this novel political situation takes place by way of an intriguing and twisted journey that starts in ancient Greek thought and ends in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Along the way, Agamben treats the reader with a panoply of illustrative pitstops, with discussions of werewolves, bandits, sacrificial statues, fifteenth-century Haggadoth illustrations and more. Not to mention the discussions of Aristotelian metaphysics, Benjaminian messianism, Schmittian jurisprudence and Arendetian political theory. Typical Agambenian fare - which is to say, ever fascinating stuff.

More than just intellectual athleticism however, at stake for Agamben is nothing less than the political future of modernity itself. For the culminating point of Agamben's argument is that this new form of sovereignty, made explicit in the camps and the mysterious figure of the homo sacer from which the book takes its name, has put into question every political and ethical category by which we have been able to make sense of the world. Just as life and politics become indistinguishable in this new form of sovereignty, so too do fact and law, the divine and the profane, the rule and the exception. And to the extent that this 'zone of indistinction' has cast its net across the earth itself, the camp will show itself to be nothing less than "the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity".

As usual, Agamben's arguments are subtle, his discussions wide ranging, and his boldness incomparable. And what Homo Sacer ultimately offers is not a solution, but problem to think through. Agamben himself, while calling for the necessity of thinking otherwise, effectively only gestures towards the diffusion of the paradoxes he raises (although his later work goes some way to addressing this problem, it does so in the oblique and sideways fashion that only Agamben knows how). Regardless, the provocation to thought that Homo Sacer offers is, when all is said and done, a marvelous achievement in itself. Whatever one thinks of this or that particular argument, or this or that mis/use of examples, - which Agamben is frequently called out for - the stringency of vision put forward here makes Homo Sacer essential reading for anyone interested in the future of sovereignty.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

After having read a chapter from this previously, I read the whole thing this summer. Agamben is not as subtle as Foucault, but I think he takes the question of biopolitics in the direction it needed to go after Foucault's untimely death. "Bare Life" is such a useful concept. I heard Ewa Ziarek give a talk a few months ago on "bare life" as a form of resistance, and my head is still buzzin' with the after-echos.

[Tintarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

هوموساکر: قدرت حاکم و حیات برهنه/ جورجو آگامبن/ سید محمدجواد سیدی/ فرهنگ نشر نو
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آگامبن از نقطه‌ی اتصال فوکو و بنیامین شروع می‌کنه و کارش در ادامه‌ی کارهای کارل اشمیت و به اصطلاح «الهیات سیاسی» هستش. کتاب سه فصل داره:
-منطق حاکمیت
-هوموساکر
-اردوگاه به مثابه الگوی زیست‌سیاسی امر مدرن
کتاب با توضیح تفاوت مفهوم زوئه به معنای حیات زیستی و بیو به معنای حیات سیاسی در یونان باستان آغاز می‌کنه (فصل جذابی در مورد استثنا و قاعده و تفاوتشون وجود داره)، قسمت‌هایی از متون افلاطون و ارسطو رو بررسی می‌کنه و به تفاوت‌های قدرت برساخته و قدرت برسازنده می‌پردازه. بعد مفهوم هوموساکر (انسان مقدس - یا به عربی: انسان حرام) رو معرفی می‌کنه؛ شخصیتی حقوقی در روم باستان که می‌شد کشتش ولی نمی‌شد قربانیش کرد. و بعد مفهوم حیات برهنه رو در نقطه‌ی برخورد بین زوئه و بیوس تعریف می‌کنه: عنصر سیاسی نخستینی نه حیات طبیعی صرف بلکه حیاتی‌ست در معرض مرگ (حیات برهنه یا حیات مقدس)
آگامبن دوگانه‌ی قدرت حاکم/ حیات برهنه رو در برابر تقایل اشمیتی دوست و دشمن مطرح می‌کنه و در فصل سوم تمرکزش رو روی بحث‌های انضمامی‌تر می‌گذاره: اردوگاه رو به عنوان شاخص‌ترین سمبل حیات برهنه مطرح می‌کنه. به وی پی‌ها VP یا همون پیش‌مرگه‌های آزمایش‌های پزشکی نازی‌ها می‌پردازه (آگامبن در فصلی درخشان درباره‌ی ارتباط ریشه‌ای فلسفه‌ی هایدگر با نازیسم می‌پردازه) و حتی موردی از انجام آزمایش‌های خطرناک پزشکی روی زندانیان با محکومیت سنگین توی آمریکا هم مثالی میاره. یا کارهایی مثل کشتار کولی‌ها (که در کنار یهودی‌ها اصلی‌ترین جمعیت اردوگاه‌ها بودند)، (با بهانه‌هایی مثل خالص‌سازی نژادی) دیوانه‌ها و ضعفا، مطرودین و همه‌ی جمعیت‌های بالقوه برای هوموساکرسازی
فصل جالب دیگه‌ای هم اواخر کتاب هست به اسم سیاسی‌سازی مرگ که آگامبن درباره‌ی تغییر مفهوم مرگ به خصوص بعد از پیچیده‌شدن مرگ با پدیده‌هایی مثل کما و مرگ مغزی می‌پردازه و نتیجه این‌که: زیست و سیاست هیچ‌گاه جدا از هم نبودند. حکومت یعنی اعمال قدرت در وضعیت استثنایی و در وضعیت استثنائی همه‌ی ما به طور بالقوه هوموساکر هستیم.
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در سرحدات نهایی درد، هیچ باقی نخواهد ماند مگر زمان و مکان تهی
- هولدرلین

[Miloš · Rating 5 out of 5]

preventivno zatvaranje = željeno vanredno stanje = LOGOR = PROSTOR IZUZETKA = deo teritorije postavljen izvan redovnog pravnog poretka, što ga ipak nije činilo spoljašnjim prostorom = Logor je struktura u kojoj se vanredno stanje odvija redovno

unutrašnja dvosmislenost "naroda" u zapadnoj politici:
Sve funkcioniše kao da ono što zovemo narodom nije jedan jedinstveni subjekat, već dijalektička oscilacija između dva suprotna pola: s jedne strane imamo skup Narod, kao integralno političko telo, a sa druge podskup narod, kao mnogobrojna, fragmentirana tela kojima je potrebna pomoć i koja su isključena. S jedne strane imamo uključenost bez ostatka, a sa druge isključenost bez nade. Na jednom je polu celokupna država integrisanih i suverenih državljana, a na drugom izopštenje ili logor siromašnih, potlačenih i poraženih. Ni u jednom jeziku ne postoji jedan jedinstven i kompaktan referent termina "narod": kao i mnogi drugi važni politički koncepti, i reč narod predstavlja polarizovan koncept, koji označava dvosmerno kretanje i kompleksne odnose između dva ekstrema. To, međutim, takođe znači i da konstituisanje ljudske vrste kao političkog tela prelazi preko suštinskog raskola, kao i da u konceptu "naroda" lako možemo da prepoznamo kategorijske parove koji su definisali izvornu političku strukturu: goli život (narod) i političko postojanje (Narod), isključenje i uključenje, zoe i bio;
"narod" uvek u sebi već sadrži suštinski biopolitički lom. On je ono što ne može biti uključeno u sve ono čega je deo, niti može pripadati skupu u koji je uvek uključen.

[Abdullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

يناقش اغامبين ف جزء الاول من الكتاب "حالة الاستثناء" تلك المساحة الغامضة التي يتم فيها امتزاج المعيار بالفعل والحق بالواقع والقانون بالفعل السياسي منتجة ف النهاية منطقة غامضة تمارس فيها السلطة بدون مسائلتها عن أصلها متجسدة في صاحب السيادة

ثم ينتقل بداهة ف جزئه الثاني"المنبوذ" من الكتاب إلي محاولة تفنيد تلك الذات_المواطن_المدمجة قسريا داخل اطار الحياة "بما هي حياة الكائن الحي" حيث يوضح أنه لم تكن الراهنية على الإنسان في اندماجه وجوديا وفكريا داخل منظومة الدولة وآليات الحياة المدنية بل كانت الراهنية على الجسد فقط وانضباطه والسيطرة عليه ليصبح الهدف الاهم للحياة السياسية بما هي القدرة على تنظيم الاجساد والعمل على انظباطها والاعتناء بها كقوة منتجة داخل اطار الدولة، هنا تصبح الحياة البيولوجية موضوع كل سياسة وراهنيتها، عندها يتحول الفعل السياسي الي فعل بيوسياسي ويتحول الرهان من القدرة على تنظيم حياة البشر بشكل عادل الى استخدام تلك الحياة وتعديل بنيتها التلائم نمط سياسي ما

يمارس اغامبين نهجا استراتيجيا من اول الكتاب الى آخره متمثلا في تحفيره المستمر عن الشكل الأصيل للحياة العاريةمن العصور القديمة متمثلة تارة ف التراث الفلسفي(أفلاطون وأرسطو) وتارة ف التراث القانوني (العهد الروماني القديم) وصولا إلى المعتقل كصورة لناموس الحداثة في العصور المتأخرة متجسدة بشكل فج ف النازية.

حيث لم يكن نص اغامبين غير كشف الستار عن ذلك الكائن الرازح تحت ستار الفكر الفلسفي منذ سقراط وحتى هيجل ومحاولة تحرير ذلك الكائن من ذلك الثقل الملقى عليه وتركه عاريا هكذا محاولا ادراك وجوده المنسي بتعبير هيدغر

مساءلة التراث الفلسفي الغربي بهذا الشكل الذي تشبعت به كل فكرة ف الكتاب لكان لم يكن لولا نيتشه الذي تجرأ لأول مرة ووضع كل التراث الغربي على المحك كل أفكاره من بعده أصبحت في وضعية إعتقاد جديد وقيد التنفيذ هنا تتبدل الصورة ويصبح الفكر مساءلا نفسه ويصبح تاريخ الفلسفة تحت سندان التفكيك والتجريح

كان مايزال سؤال أغامبين "ما الفعل السياسي؟؟"من وجهة نظري هو محور كتاباته ومحاولة للنظر الى الانسان ككائن يعيش داخل تنظيم سياسي" المدينة" محاولا البحث عن بعد جديد غير بعده الأخلاقي أو الإسطوري أو العقلاني وهو بعده السياسي في صورة"المواطن"تلك الذات التي ظهرت وتربعت على سلم الاولويات في عصرنا المتأخر تلك الماهية الجديدة التي التي طبعت بها الذات وأصبحت محرك التاريخ

[Andrew]

I was introduced to Agamben as a starry-eyed 19 year old just learning about critical theory, and this is my first attempt to read anything by him in ages. I found him to be a still impressive thinker and theorist, but one with a few notable flaws...

The central metaphor of the book is, in my mind, a stretch. Are we REALLY all homo sacer? OK, we do live in a surveillance society these days, and I would agree that this surveillance society does indeed reduce humans to "bare life." But at the same time, Agamben stretches his metaphors to near-bursting. And claiming that modern society is modeled on Auschwitz while you hold a prestigious scholarly position in a wealthy, European social democratic state is not only silly, it's offensively bourgeois. For a both more accurate and more entertaining version of the story of biopolitics, please read Mr. Foucault.

[Maxim · Rating 5 out of 5]

In its three chapters Agamben shows the contradictions among law, politics and bare life at the base. You can easily get a rough picture about why Western democratic trends still fail up to this date. Lots of nazist biopolitic activities and different documental facts from Antiquity help to strengthen book's core ideas. The propasals how to overcome this global regime are blurred like in today's other philosophers' works. But let's confess that generally, it is not about a result, but a process...

[Rowena]

Read a few recommended chapters for my directed studies course. It was a tough read! I will rate the book once I finish reading the rest of it.

[Nicholas Nilsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wrote a loooong review explaining why I thought this book was annoying as hell, but I realized it can be summed up like this:

- What if Theweleit, but without a morbid (and fun) fascination for cruelty?

- What if Foucault, but aggressively unsexy?

- What if Derrida, but without the LSD?

Not surprised this guy went to Sapienza.

[Mira Madsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Menneskerettigheder vs. borgerrettigheder, humanitære institutioners problematiske menneskesyn, klassesamfund, koncentrationslejre, global retfærdighed, Folk og folk – Agamben kommer vidt omkring.

[tout · Rating 5 out of 5]

I set as goal for myself this year to read the entire Homo Sacer series by Giorgio Agamben (there are seven books in the series so far), either by myself or with others. Homo Sacer, the series, set out to define the foundational/ontological problems of the west and give the investigation a foundation in this book. There is what Agamben refers to as the originary problem of the "sovereign ban", which constitutes law and state power in the west through the sovereign's ability to bring into being and maintain an outside/exception and inside/rule, of both human beings as bare life reduced to its mere physical existence (zoe) and through the creation of exceptional spaces "beyond the law" as the camp.

The newer transformation of power, that concerns itself increasingly with managing the physical life of humans, having a concern for their reproduction as normal, healthy, productive bodies, which Foucault defined as biopolitics, revolves around the same problem of the exception that is the force behind law, or a relation, and nomos, through the diffusion of the exception as the rule, containing each being as an individual (amongst other forces of management), concerned as sovereign over its own self management.

We can see many examples of Homo Sacer, as those who were consecrated to have the capacity to be killed by anyone, but not murdered (as in the act being against the law to kill them). Trayvon Martin is a clear example. And through this example it would be wrong to see his killing and the absence of murder simply an issue of racial prejudice to be corrected, but as a force inherent to relations of sovereign power, that are particular to the west, which always will need to materialize itself through acts by continually creating its own outside, on those who are banned and bandits of its order.

[Emma Stark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who needs Stephen King when you can read Agamben?!? This theoretical work about the political steps it takes to arrive at the horrors of concentration camps, and how it really doesn't take all that much to get to Hitler's Final Solution (The mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and others) from where we are right now is truly terrifying! All that it really takes, Agamben suggests, is a system which removes political agency from one group of people, leaving them with only their "bare life" itself. Once you have made this move, any atrocities toward this group become possible, because even killing members of this excluded group would not be considered a homicide. Additionally, Agamben points out that we already have these excluded categories in our society today in the form of groups such as prisoners and the comatose. Agamben's "VP" chapter on the human experimentation performed in the concentration camps was chilling, creepy and difficult for me to read. I found myself scrunching into the fetal position as I thought of those doctors who not only performed unthinkable experiments on Jews, but who thought that they were providing a benefit to society as they did so (All of the experiments that Agamben describes were designed to enhance the survival rate of soldiers or aid in sterilization of undesirables). From this book, I learned that Mad Scientists really aren't all that frightening if they have to contend with the evils of these Nazi doctors.

[Luis Mella gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sin duda alguna el mejor libro que he leído sobre filosofía política, biopolítica y sobre la cuestión de la comunidad. Son pocos los autores que pueden recosntruir, ponerte a cuestionar todas las cosas que has visto en filosofía política, epistemología... hasta biología. La relación entre la vida al desnudo y su relación casi ambigüa o indistinguible con el soberano es la trama de este libro, si todos somos soberanos por nacimiento, entonces cualquiera de nosotros puede declarar la excepción jurídica y convertirnos en vida al desnudo, vida consagrada a la muerte. Entonces la paradoja de la política de occidente, al situar la vida como valor último de la política, no es un fenómeno reciente, sino un fenómeno que viene desde la política clásica y la distinción entre vida biológica común a todo ser vivo (Zoé) y forma de vivir según un grupo o individuo (Bios) ya llevaba consigo dicha fractura, sólo que la política moderna al poner la vida como objeto mismo de la política ha llevado la biopolítica a sus consecuencias más funestas: el campo de concentración. Un espacio que es el límite entre derecho y violencia, vida y política, interior y exterior, derecho y hecho, lícito e ilícito, cultura y naturaleza, humano y animal, y vida y muerte... es el umbral de indecibilidad entre cada uno de esos conceptos-límites.

Sin duda alguna, Agamben es uno de los grande.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agamben's claim in this book is that modern political theory (i.e., from Hobbes on forward), is premised on the State of Nature, the War of All Against All. This means that whatever form of government is chosen, it tends invariably towards either anarchy or to the concentration camp. Why? Because the government will be too weak to defend its citizens, and the State of Nature will reassert itself; or, with increased demands for rights on the parts of citizens, the state will need to enact ever more laws to protect and defend those rights, leading to the complete control of citizens in the concentration camp.

This is a controversial claim, and much of the theory (drawn from Foucault and Arendt) will not resonate well with American audiences who may be unfamiliar with their work.

Furthermore, Agamben's text is dense and difficult, as he's trying to get the reader to think about politics without using the language we've been accustomed to use for the last several centuries.

However, I think that if the reader perseveres, s/he will be rewarded. Agamben's argument is worth considering, and it will get the reader thinking about politics in a different way from the stale rhetoric of current debates.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the main argument, but I find the AB-BA (inclusive exclusion, exclusive inclusion; wolf inside a man, man inside a wolf) abstract theoretical discussions a bit off-putting. Please don't make me read Badiou.

Luckily, these arguments are front loaded in the text. Part I is this theoretical framing of the sovereign, mostly vis-à-vis Schmitt and Benjamin. Parts 2 and 3 explain Homo Sacer and the state of exception. Part 2 argument has neat historical examples of living dead (or dead living?) wax effigies in the times of Rome and medieval Europe. Part 3 focuses mostly on discussions of biopolitics and Nazi policies towards Germany's internal Homo Sacer.

Ironically, the argument is most clearly presented to us in the first page of the conclusion (181) when Agamben enumerates and explains his three "provisional conclusions." I argue for the editor to cut and paste this section (or better yet, copy and paste) before Agamben discusses the zoe/bios distinction in the Introduction.

A good read if you want to understand the threat that our biologically optimized progressive life world presents to us.

[Dagezi · Rating 1 out of 5]

What is it, like 2002 or 2004 already and we still feel compelled to explain the entirety of humanity by recourse to the ancient greek polis? I am so fucking tired of this shit. Fucking motherfucking fuck (okay I'm sort of done now but no promises). Walking down the same paths over and over again just wears the ruts deeper, people. God forbid we think about Persia or China or Egypt or some other other. Build some other fucking genealogies now! Okay. Done now.

[إيمان علاء الدين · Rating 4 out of 5]

قراءة نقدية لترجمة الكتاب وتعريف مدخلي لأجامبين عبر هذا الرابط
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[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Agamben’s short text “Pilate and Jesus” around Holy Week four years ago. It’s remarkable how fast time slithers through the ether. I actually did not realize until now how relevant Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” was to Holy Week and Easter also. Last year during the rapid spread of prison abolition activism, I had asked a friend (a PhD student, in Sweden at the time, studying non-incarceral medieval judicial systems in Scandinavia) if he had any recommendations for me regarding incarceration after I had finished reading Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” was one of his recommendations. I only had a slight inkling of how connected this text was with Easter beforehand, but having now gone through it, it’s helped me observe this liturgical season in a rather new light.

My main takeaway from this text was the interesting observation that Agamben makes regarding “the king and the beggar” (as Terry Eagleton phrases it). Agamben’s point is that exceptions (e.g. those that are excluded from a particular group) are foundational for constituting the norm (e.g. the central identity of that group). This functions both for monarchs with extremely concentrated power who are considered above and separate from the political body they govern, as well as ‘homo sacer’ the killable non-person stripped of any rights and separate from the political body who have basic protections afforded to them. One is excluded at the top of the body politic, the other from the bottom.

The first time I encountered an example of this, which drew stark parallels to the political framing of Jesus (as sovereign and as homo sacer), was in Philip Deloria’s book “Playing Indian”. Deloria talks about the Lenape leader Tammany (Tamanend) who became a hero within the revolutionary zeitgeist of America. Deloria writes:

“After the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, increasingly resistant colonists gleefully promoted Tammany from king to “tutular [sic] saint of America” and turned their May Day songs and revels into overtly politicized demonstrations of patriotic Americanness. The Indian saint’s supposed motto, Kwanio Che Keeteru… became… a patriotic slogan of the Tammany societies: “This is my right; I will defend it.” The societies created a body of myth to celebrate the recently canonized Tammany and the American continent for which he stood… Growing aged, Tammany refused to burden his family but instead put his lodge to the torch and reclined peacefully inside, perhaps destined to rise again someday. As they imaged and then appropriated this phoenixlike figure, the white members of the society sought to stake their claim on an essential Indian Americanness.”

These settlers engaged in a disturbing ritual of burning an effigy of ‘king’ Tammany:

“On May Day, for example, European revellers danced around the maypole—an ancient symbol of the united of the old sacrificial king and his successor—to celebrate not only the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, but also the oneness of the old year and the new. They frequently burnt the old king and used fire and ash symbolism to evoke the phoenix like connection between death and new life…”

“Tammany societies also celebrated the death of the Indian saint as an overthrow of an aged fertility figure. In Charleston, South Carolina, Tammany followers reenacted his mythic end by literally setting him on fire…”

I find it curious because this insurrectionary act of burning the effigy of a king and its connotation of sacrifice, and then its later adaptation to an Indigenous leader largely reconstructed within Anglo-American imagination — this all recalls for me the crucifixion at the core of the Christian tradition and the Roman appropriation of its revolutionary significance. This is another comment by Deloria that helps make sense of how American identity was wrapped up in the suppression of the old by the new:

“Tammany’s death was a metaphor for the “disappearance” of Indian people from the land, the destruction of the old cycle, the dawning of another era in which successor Americans would enjoy their new world. His implied rebirth, on the other hand, suggested that Americans were not successors so much as aboriginal Tammanys themselves. And if the new ruler was literally the same as the old, it was only fitting that the Tammany members shared his identity by clothing themselves in Indian garb.”

Indigenous genocide in this sense shares commonality with the Jewish genocide of the Shoah/Holocaust. Agamben frames the concentration camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the modern. If murder is prohibited, every enactment of the death penalty is a suspension of that prohibition – a state of exception. Such a suspension of the law for the sovereign (the one in power) is justified on the grounds that it is necessary to maintain order in society and prevent grievous crimes such as murder. Therefore murder is used to prevent murder. Agamben explains it this way:

“One of the paradoxes of the state of exception lies in the fact that in the state of exception, it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder (a person who goes for a walk during the curfew is not transgressing the law any more than the soldier who kills him is executing it). This is precisely the situation that, in the Jewish tradition (and, actually, in every genuine messianic tradition), comes to pass when the Messiah arrives. The first consequence of this arrival is that the Law (according to the Kabbalists, this is the law of the Torah of Beriah, that is, the law in force from the creation of man until the messianic days) is fulfilled and consummated. But this fulfillment does not signify that the old law is simply replaced by a new law that is homologous to the old but has different prescriptions and dif- ferent prohibitions (the Torah of Aziluth, the originary law that the Messiah, according to the Kabbalists, would restore, contains neither prescriptions nor prohibitions and is only a jumble of unordered letters). What is implied instead is that the fulfillment of the Torah now coincides with its transgression. This much is clearly affirmed by the most radical messianic movements, like that of Sabbatai Zevi (whose motto was “the fulfillment of the Torah is its transgression”).
From the juridico-political perspective, messianism is therefore a theory of the state of exception – except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority in force to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.”

Much of Agamben’s text here focuses on his elaboration on ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’, largely from Aristotle channelled through the writings of Arendt. While Arendt’s totalitarian thesis conflating Nazism and Soviet Communism surface a number of times in Agamben’s text, a view that I do not share with Agamben, I think he does make important points about how modern States (including those under the banner of ‘communism’ have been examples of his political theses concerning sovereignty and the state of exception). He uses the phrase ‘zone of indistinction’ to mark out moments where there is a collapse between Left and Right (what is more often referred to as red-brown alliances in contemporary discourse) but also between liberalism and totalitarianism (which is something I certainly agree with). Agamben gives an example of the Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing’ committed by ex-communist ‘ruling classes’. I don’t know enough about this stuff, so I will have to read up on that some time.

The main way Agamben uses his phrase ‘zone of indistinction’ is in reference to bios and zoe, where bare life falls under the domain of political life. ‘Zoe’ (bare life) becomes the principle mode of existence, which has come under political power (biopolitics) while ‘bios’ (the ‘good life’ or political life) has lost its distinction from basic survival. Agamben writes:

“…if classical politics is born through the separation of these two spheres, life that may be killed but not sacrificed is the hinge on which each sphere is articulated and the threshold at which the two spheres are joined in becoming indeterminate. Neither political bios nor natural zoē, sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zoē and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other.
It has been rightly observed that the state is founded not as the expression of a social tie but as an untying (déliaison) that prohibits (Badiou, L’être, p. 125).”

Agamben connects this biopolitical focus on 'bare life' (zoe) with the modern body politic in a fascinating way through Hobbes, who basically says the fact that everyone can be killed makes them equal. And so political equality becomes intertwined with biopolitics here. Agamben writes: "The great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the bodies of individuals, must be read in this light. The absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West." This is also a fascinating way to conceive of the church which in Christianity is thought of as the body of Christ which Agamben comments on citing remarks by Kantorowicz from his text "The King's Two Bodies." Christian testament texts often speak of Christ's followers ruling with Christ in the eschaton, whether by participating in the body of Christ or as individuals crowned together with Christ. I always thought this sounded like the Marxist notion of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Agamben actually comments on this and how he sees ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as an example of this state of exception:

“Today, now that the great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the rule, the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new perspective. The weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii aside, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular of the state of exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to the stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been shipwrecked.”

This is a fascinating aspect of power that I had not properly thought of before. Agamben works through notions of ‘constituting power’ both by way of the Nazi jurist Schmitt as well as the libertarian communist Negri. This segment is quite useful for trying to understand China today, but that is a tangent for another time. I wanted to include a comment Agamben makes regarding Trotskyist and Maoist notions of revolution:

“Here the basic problem is not so much how to conceive a constituting power that does not exhaust itself in a constituted power (which is not easy, but still theoretically resolvable), as how clearly to differentiate constituting from constituted power, which is surely a more difficult problem. Attempts to think the preservation of constituting power are certainly not lacking in our age, and they have become familiar to us through the Trotskyite notion of a “permanent revolution” and the Maoist concept of “uninterrupted révolution.” Even the power of councils (which there is no reason not to think of as stable, even if de facto constituted revolutionary powers have done everything in their power to eliminate them) can, from this perspective, be considered as a survival of constituting power within constituted power.”

I think Christianity sits at this very strange moment of history where a revolutionary group of Jewish peasants led by Jesus became the ideological backbone of empire and conquest. If communism is to take seriously the lessons of history, it cannot ignore the monstrosities committed under the banner of Christianity, a faith tradition named after a Jewish worker and agitator killed at the hands of Roman empire. Agamben again on Marxist notions of class war:

“At times the bloody flag of reaction and the uncertain insignia of revolutions and popular fronts, the people always contains a division more originary than that of friend- enemy, an incessant civil war that divides it more radically than every conflict and, at the same time, keeps it united and constitutes it more securely than any identity. When one looks closely, even what Marx called “class conflict,” which occupies such a central place in his thought – though it remains substantially undefined – is nothing other than the civil war that divides every people and that will come to an end only when, in the classless society or the messianic kingdom, People and people will coincide and there will no longer be, strictly speaking, any people.
If this is true, if the people necessarily contains the fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself, then it will be possible to read certain decisive pages of the history of our century in a new way. For if the struggle between the two “peoples” was certainly always under way, in our time it has experienced a final, paroxysmal acceleration.”

And Agamben again shows that this violence occurs even internally among leftist factions, and leftist infighting shares great similarities with Christian persecution internal to itself between various denominations and sects:

“It is important not to forget that the first concentration camps in Germany were the work not of the Nazi regime but of the Social-Democratic governments, which interned thousands of communist militants in 1923 on the basis of Schutzhaft and also created the Konzentrationslager für Ausländer at Cottbus-Sielow, which housed mainly Eastern European refugees and which may, therefore, be considered the first camp for Jews in this century (even if it was, obviously, not an extermination camp).
The juridical foundation for Schutzhaft was the proclamation of the state of siege or of exception and the corresponding suspension of the articles of the German constitution that guaranteed personal liberties.”

These states of exception, justifications of performing things contrary to the ends one wants to achieve but for the sake of those ends is a great paradox, one in which I will have to think through more carefully. I think Agamben provides a lot to ponder here. Granted a lot of this book was over my head. It was very dense, and certainly not easy reading for me. But it’s a fascinating thing to ponder, especially on this Good Friday.

[Ellison Moorehead]

Me ha suscitado más preguntas que respuestas y me ha recordado mucho a mucho Foucault (a quien cita continuamente). Y Foucault y yo lo dejamos hace mucho y me cansa escuchar hablar de él. Es de estos ensayos que empiezan con la edad media europea y con unos textos oscuros legales y/o médicos y de allí te llevan al siglo 20 sacando conclusiones generales y contundentes, aunque indefinidas, y tú te quedas impresionada aunque sea sólo por la cultura tan amplia que se acababa de demostrar. Un libro que me hubiera gustado más hace 10 años, seguramente, uno que no leí cuando tocaba, como me pasa con Negri.

En otras noticias pero relacionadas: Heidegger nos cae mal que qué tremendo HDP.

[Gerald Sigmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like shit 💔

[Helmi Chikaoui · Rating 5 out of 5]

نقطه انطلاق أغامبين هي التمييز المفاهيمي الذي يميز، وفقاً له، التقليد السياسي الغربي منذ العصور اليونانية القديمة. فيذكر أغامبين أن الخط الرئيسي للفصل والتمايز ليس هو الفرق بين الصديق والعدو، ولكن الفرق بين الحياة العارية (زوي (zoé) ) والوجود السياسي ( بايوس BIOS) ، بين الوجود الطبيعي والوضع القانوني للإنسان على التوالي
إن منطق السيادة هو منطق الاستيلاء على الحياة، وهو منطق يسعى إلى عزل ‹الحياة العارية» كاستثناء. وتتعرض هـذه الـحـيـاة ليس فقط إلـى عنف سـيـادة وسلطة الـمـوت، ولـكـن ً أيـضـا إلـى قـرار يهيئ ويحدد قيمتها، وفـي هـذا الـمـجـال تـضـع السلطة الـسـيـاديـة نفسها مـن خـلال إنـتـاج «جـسـد البيولوجيا السياسية» الـذي تمارس عليه سلطاتها.
هذه الحالة من عدم الاعتراف تحصرالفرد داخل حدوده البيولوجية التي تديرها الدولة أيضا رغما عنه
لقد كتب فوكو ليفسر الأهمية التي اتخذها الجنس في الصراعات السياسية أن " الحق " في الحياة والحق في الجسد ، الحق في إستعادة ما نحن وكل ما يمكن أن نكونه . في الواقع هو مطلب الحياة العارية التي تقود إلى تفوق الخاص على العمومي والحريات الفردية على الإلتزامات الإجتماعية . ولأن الظاهرة البيلوجية وإحتياجاتها أصبحتا في كل مكان الظاهرة الحاسمة سياسيا ، تحولت فيه السياسة الى بيو - سياسة ، حيث لم يعد الرهان يتمثل من بعد ذلك إلا في تحديد شكل النظام السياسي الأنجع لتأمين مراقبة الحياة العارية ومت��تها والعناية بها .
وهذا ما كان يعمل عليه فوكو إبان السنوات الأخيرة من حياته ، عندما بدأ بتوجيه ابحاثه بشكل ملح أكثر فأكثر نحو ما كان أسماه " البيو-سياسة " والتي تعني السلطة البيولوجية التي تتعلق ببنية السلطة الإنخراط المتزايد لحياة الإنسان الطبيعية في آليات وحسابات السلطة .

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review of Roberto Esposito - ibid..note to Agamben - the world is not one big concentration camp..then again, the more I think about it, he's got a point...ignorance is bliss. Subjectivity involves living dependently upon an other - and having one's life determined by conscience, and knowledge...hmm, if this is the criteria for determining if the world is one big Auschwitz then I have to admit he is convincing on that one - but what would a world without conscience look like? And, is that true freedom?

Yes, Giorgio we all know, the holocaust totally sucked balls. And for your generation, it was the most important event in the 20th century. My generation does not give a shit about any of that though. We are too busy ignoring the contemporary holocausting that is going on because of our selfish decadence...piss on that! I want to read some more about how powerless we all are - yet, this is what pisses me off the most about Agamben - he does not offer any viable solutions to the problem of efficacy. Like Foucault, he bitches for nearly 300 pages - horrifies the reader showing us the exact size and length of the shaft - and then he just says, Oops, there is nothing anyone can do about this...k, I'm tired of asshole intellectuals building political mountains that nobody dare scale (I'm looking at you Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault). Blecht, time to get back to playing video games and living the world's truest philosophy - Ignorance is Bliss.

[Julianne]

Many interesting insights, but I'm a bit frustrated by methodology: it often feels like he's working on the wrong level of abstraction for the points he's trying to make. There are a lot things I don't understand about this book, some of which are probably the result of mere ignorance (and the fact that I'm only half way through) and some of which seem very hard to imagine an adequate understanding of in any case (for example: an ontology in which potentiality is freed from Being? how would that work?)
I also don't know what to make of the fact that he occasionally seems to forget that when one speaks of law, one is speaking allegorically, and allegorical figures are formed--as Angus Fletcher (side note to Anthony--remember how Dr. Lehner used to talk about him?) tells us, by omitting some crucial aspect of the thing in question. Just as Spenser has to cut away half of the natural world in an act of violence (Teskey) in order to shape his allegory (night, woods, wilderness, all cut away), Agamben has to cut away the better part of law to be able to discuss its movements. I guess it's worth it, but I don't know. Maybe if he were writing in excellent verse I'd be sold on the whole thing. Sometimes it just seems like messianic history all over again. I guess there are worse things.