Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
[synopsis]
In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to fill in a gap between Foucault’s twin analyses of the large-scale modern “political techniques” and “technologies of the self”, which create both subjectivity and subjection at the level of the individual body-minds. He traces the origin of the distinction between individual life and the political to the originary difference between two Ancient Greek words for life: zoe, which connotes life common to all living beings, and bios, which is the properly human form of life capable of striving for the good life in the community. Agamben argues that this distinction, crucial, for example, to Aristotle’s theory of politics, is in fact never complete; “animal” or “bare” life is always already included in the polis by virtue of its exclusion. Simultaneously, in theories of sovereignty since Hobbes (i.e. in modern ones), the legal order of the polis is itself conditioned by the sovereign exception, the ability of the sovereign to suspend existing laws, thereby exposing the bare life of the citizens to his arbitrary action.
The twin logics of exception and exclusion find their respective expressions in the figures of the sovereign and of the homo sacer: a man who, in archaic Roman law, could legally be killed, yet who could not be used in human sacrifice. Agamben’s argument develops around the interrelation between these two figures, which codifies the inclusion of bare (neither political nor spiritual) life in the political as a matter of the Sovereign’s decision. “[T]he sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (53).
Having analyzed the linked paradoxes of sovereignty and bare life in the first two parts of the book, Agamben addresses the Nazi death camps, an ultimate example of biopolitics, as the product of a long history of the nation-state, biopolitics, and liberalism. He argues that “Fascism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated – no matter how paradoxical it may seem – in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights” (76-7). His analysis of continuities between contract theories of sovereignty, the habeas corpus writ of 1679, declarations of rights (such as the French revolutionary “Rights of Man and Citizen”), Nazi policies, and contemporary crises of migrant populations, aims at debunking the myth of Nazism’s uniqueness and disconnection from the Western liberal tradition which culminates with the enshrinement of universal human rights.
Following Hannah Arendt, Agamben argues that “rights” as such depend on the link of the nation-state with the biological body, i.e. the bare life, of its natural-born citizens. They are thus necessarily biopolitical. As the state loses power and validity in a period of globalization, the rights which we have come to call universal progressively lose all protection. Convinced of the inevitable failure of any “humanitarianism separated from politics,” (78) Agamben calls for the abandonment of the language of rights, and for a rethinking of bare life and the body in order to confront the exigencies of the contemporary biopolitical moment.
[corpus]
Tracing the evolution of modern liberal democracy from the writ of habeas corpus, Agamben underlines the often occluded significance of the body as both origin and object of national and personal sovereignty. Contrasting habeas corpus with its earlier analogues deriving from the Magna Carta, he writes:
Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. (73)
The body emerges as the guarantee of the “sovereign subject’s” legal rights, even though it is thereby subjected to “isolation” as bare life within the subject as a whole (73). Simultaneously, with the rise of theories of national sovereignty (crystallized in the French Revolution), both citizenship (the conferral of rights) and sovereignty (as the source of power) become localized in the moment/fact of birth. The “sovereign subject’s” body unites “the principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty” which earlier periods kept distinct (76). Since sovereignty comes from the people, and “the people” are those who are born citizens, the body of the citizen at the moment of birth combines rights, sovereignty, and law, in a single biopolitical unit. However, the real significance of the body is occluded by the fiction of citizenship.
The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen. (76)
This part of Agamben’s analysis is a necessary step in his demonstration of the continuity of Nazism with the liberal consensus which preceded and followed it. Simultaneously, it sheds light on the contemporary “fetal politics” analyzed by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. The intimate relation (not to say confusion or indistinction) between nationhood, personal and national sovereignty, rights, nativity, and “life,” so pervasive in the abortion debates in the contemporary United States, emerges as the symptomatic manifestation of biopolitics inherent in the foundations of the liberal nation-state. The figure of the child, and of the fetus, derives a part of its power from this underlying theoretical presupposition of the unity of nativity, rights, and sovereignty.
[the contemporary moment]
Throughout, Agamben refers occasionally to the contemporary, late capitalist consumerist Western society as the current, and insidious stage in the development of biopolitics. Yet, while calling consumerism an empty and unsustainable alternative to fascism, he never comes to analyze it in any detail. He chooses to address even the question of the decision on the comatose patients' death as a "sovereign" decision seemingly non-conditioned by the multi-layered market structures and rhetorics which pervade the contemporary medical world in fact (the family's "choice" of treatment/services, organs as commodities, commercialization of research, and so on).
[the project]
One of Agamben’s most intriguing suggestions regarding Nazi biopolitics is what he calls its assumption of bare life “as a task” (88). On a basic level, this means the active production of two opposing forms of bare life: the “valid,” protected German and the condemned denationalized Jew. However, in a dense paragraph devoted to the relation of Nazism and Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, Agamben further suggests the possibility of a politics that would similarly embrace bare life as a project, with opposite, i.e. liberating, effects.
Turning to contemporary biopolitical realities, Agamben argues that the zone of indistinction located in the life capable of being killed is in fact the only “sphere of human action” available, (52) the only space for true politics outside of the limitations of law, rights, and nation-states. It is, therefore, the space of his intervention. But while he wants to mobilize bare life, make it into a project, his mode of thought repeatedly seems to entify, ossify the conditions he analyses, by means of his powerfully suggestive figures.
A case in point is one of the few positive models offered toward the end of the work: the gesturalization (and thus a kind of transcendence, for lack of a better word) of bare life in the form of the Roman priest Flamen Diale, whose every move followed rigidly prescribed rules and conveyed meaning, remains a figure, never becoming a project or a praxis to be mobilized (102-3).
[encore un effort (the body)]
Returning in conclusion to the problem of the body, Agamben warns against embracing it wholeheartedly as the space of potential freedom from the law. “Like the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the “body” too is always already caught in a deployment of power” (105). Rather than a vehicle of escape from the biopolitics of modernity, the body is for him the site of a project that could be termed becoming-biopolitical, the work of building a new politics:
Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body – a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body – in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoē and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. (105)
The questions and aporias of bare life and sovereignty of the body must, for Agamben, be addressed head-on. There is no technological, archaizing, self-actualizing, or hybridizing escape.
[discussion question]
How can we understand the analysis of the paradigmatic progressive biopoliticisation of the Western democracies, which A. describes as the erasure of hitherto-stable categories, in relation to the broad crisis of distinct categories produced by the counter- or a-modernity in Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern?