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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Ontological hermeneutics van het 66...
In vet.<br>
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On 30-10-12 19:53, Antid Oto wrote:<br>
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<blockquote cite="mid:5090221C.1050701@gmail.com" type="cite">
<br>
¨The concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise of
power in western politics, including contemporary liberal
democracies"
<br>
(Agamben)
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modernism-modernity/v006/6.3lewis.html">http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modernism-modernity/v006/6.3lewis.html</a>
<br>
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (review)
<br>
Stephen E. Lewis
<br>
From: Modernism/modernity
<br>
Volume 6, Number 3, September 1999
<br>
pp. 163-166 | 10.1353/mod.1999.0030
<br>
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
<br>
Modernism/Modernity 6.3 (1999) 163-166
<br>
Book Review
<br>
<br>
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
<br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
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 <b>present (10)</b>.
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 <b>"life in general"
(66)</b> or <b>"pure being" (182)</b>, as opposed to the <b>"way
of life proper to men" (66)</b>. 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 <b>"the
element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most
intimate relation with sovereignty" (67).
</b><br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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...
<br>
<br>
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