[D66] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

[Antid Oto]

Ontological hermeneutics van het 66... In vet.

182 is a member of the Mian-Chowla sequence 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mian-Chowla_sequence>: 1, 2, 4, 8, 13, 21, 31, 45, 66, 81, 97, 123, 148, 
182


On 30-10-12 19:53, Antid Oto wrote:
>
> ¨The concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise of 
> power in western politics, including contemporary liberal democracies"
> (Agamben)
>
> http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modernism-modernity/v006/6.3lewis.html 
>
> Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (review)
> Stephen E. Lewis
> From: Modernism/modernity
> Volume 6, Number 3, September 1999
> pp. 163-166 | 10.1353/mod.1999.0030
> In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
> Modernism/Modernity 6.3 (1999) 163-166
> Book Review
>
> Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
>
> Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Giorgio Agamben. Trans. 
> Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 
> 1998. Pp. xii + 199. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
>
> The central claim in Giorgio Agamben's latest book to be translated 
> into English (the Italian original was published in 1995) is extremely 
> provocative: the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the 
> exercise of power in western politics, including contemporary liberal 
> democracies. He pursues his argument not through historiographical 
> inquiry but, rather, through what he calls an 
> "historico-philosophical" analysis of nothing less than the 
> fundamental structure of sovereign power as exercised in the West from 
> Aristotle to the *present (10)*. Through primary reference to Carl 
> Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, the book defines sovereignty as a 
> relation of exclusionary inclusion between the sovereign power and 
> what Agamben terms "bare life." Bare life ("la nuda vita") is 
> something like *"life in general" (66)* or *"pure being" (182)*, as 
> opposed to the *"way of life proper to men" (66)*. Within the context 
> of the sovereign relation, bare life is the part of the political 
> subject's existence excluded from the juridical order instituted by 
> the sovereign power. Nevertheless, this exclusion of bare life from 
> the juridical order in fact constitutes a hidden inclusion with 
> relation to sovereign power because the sovereign power must, in order 
> to be able to manifest its absolute authority at any given moment, 
> reserve the right to suspend the juridical order it instituted. Thus 
> the thing upon which sovereign power exercises its absolute, 
> extrajuridical power within the state of exception is the very thing 
> that was excluded at the moment of juridical institution: bare life. 
> Paradoxically, then, bare life is *"the element that, in the 
> exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with 
> sovereignty" (67). *
>
> If all of this sounds abstract, that's because it is. Indeed, for a 
> book intended as a response "to the bloody mystification of a new 
> planetary order," it is in many ways too abstract, particularly in its 
> first third (12). Only when Agamben arrives at the second of his three 
> sections, the one devoted to the "protagonist" of the book, homo sacer 
> (sacred man, the incarnation, so to speak, of bare life), does the 
> sovereign relation Agamben is describing become clear in concrete 
> terms (8).
>
> This second section of the book is the most "historical" insofar as it 
> builds out of various well-chosen, logically and structurally 
> homologous examples of power relations drawn from archaic Rome to the 
> present a narrative account of the developing fate of the life of homo 
> sacer in relation to sovereign power. This narrative begins with homo 
> sacer, a man so designated in archaic Roman law as he who, in 
> punishment for a crime, cannot be sacrificed according to the methods 
> proscribed by divine law and yet may be killed without the killing 
> being considered murder according to the laws of the city. The life of 
> homo sacer thus, argues Agamben, concretely instantiates bare life's 
> relation of excluded inclusion with regard to sovereign power.
>
> From this fascinating point of departure, Agamben proceeds to 
> construct a chronological narrative of key moments of transformation 
> in homo sacer's relation to the sovereign, evoking along the way such 
> intriguing figures as the King and his two bodies in the English and 
> French royal contexts, the "wolf-man" of early medieval Anglo-Saxon 
> and Germanic law, the corpus singled out in the writ of habeas corpus, 
> and the citizen of the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du 
> citoyen." Then, in the book's third part, Agamben finishes his 
> protagonist's story with a consideration of the Nazi concentration 
> camp internee and such contemporary incarnations of homo sacer as the 
> comatose patient on life...
>
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