ABSTRACT
While Foucault’s work has been foundational to contemporary debates, no other single text has done as much to contribute to the proliferation of literature on biopolitics than Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998). Initially published in English translation in 1998, it was not for several years that the book really gained prominence. In retrospect, it appears that the popularity and prominence of the book was at least partially circumstantial, insofar as the hijacking of planes and destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City appeared to give rise to a new kind of politics – or at least brought to the fore latent tendencies within constitutional democracies such as the United States. In the wake of September 11, the politico-cultural scene of the early twenty-first century has been dominated by the so-called ‘War on Terror’, including events such as new and increased populations of displaced persons and refugees, indefinite detention, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary renditions, extra-judicial trials and revelations of state-sanctioned torture on the part of major democracies. In the light of these events, Agamben’s analysis of contemporary politics as a politics of the exception, in which the decisional capacities of the sovereign – especially the capacity to suspend the normal rule – are highlighted, seemed to have a particular pertinence. Of course, that Homo Sacer seemed to foretell of the post-September 11 political climate was not a matter of prediction on Agamben’s part; the apparent perspicacity of his discussions of the bleaker, ‘hidden’ side of Western politics was less a matter of knowing what would happen, as a matter of being sensitive to what could possibly happen, given the conceptual architecture that subtends Western political institutions.
