ABSTRACT
The writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben have become, rather suddenly, one of the obligatory references for critical academic interpretations of U.S.-dominated geopolitics since September 11, 2001. The reason is not difficult to discern. Agamben’s analyses of politics focus on fundamental philosophical questions and unfold chiefly by way of close commentary on ancient and modern legal and constitutional doctrines. Nevertheless, his account of the primordial basis of state sovereignty seems to have found perfect illustrations in the blinkered, bound, and orange-clad “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay; the hooded victims of the torture filmed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and the mysterious unidentified captives moved by “extraordinary rendition” to CIA-run “black sites” for interrogation. These prisoners are examples of what Agamben, drawing on ancient Roman jurisprudence, calls homo sacer, or, following Walter Benjamin, “bare life,” that is, people who have been subjected to the sovereign “ban,” individuals “set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” (Agamben 1998, 82). As such they not only represent violations of international law, as has often been remarked since 9/11, but also, much more fundamentally, embody and reveal what Agamben, writing before the attacks, had theorized as an absolutely fundamental keystone of modern political life.
