[D66] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

[Antid Oto]

¨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...