ABSTRACT
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben draws upon metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, set theory, and the philosophy of language to advance a number of radical politico-philosophical claims. In contrast to conceptions of political community that depict it as a common ‘belonging’ in a shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that ‘the original political relation is the ban’ in which a mode of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a historically specific form of political authority that arises with modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the essence of the political. Similarly, biopolitics is not, as Foucault sometimes suggests, incompatible with sovereign as opposed to disciplinary power, nor is it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Instead it is the original form of politics, ‘the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios.’ Attending to the etymology of the word decide, one can understand this sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life from merely existent life, political and human life from the life of the non-human. As this cutting defines the political, the production of the inhuman – which is correlative with the production of the human – is not an activity that politics might dispense with, say in favor of the assertion of human rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself, ‘today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ (Agamben 1998a, 181). The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are reduced to bare life; and the torture this life suffers is nothing else but its ex-clusion from the polis as a distinctively human life. The bare life that is produced by this abandonment by
the state is not biological life, ‘not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element’ (ibid., 88). This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi in If This is a Man. One speaks of the Shoah as industrialized mass death, and of the camps as ‘factories of death.’ But the product of these factories is not death but, as Arendt puts it, a mode of life ‘outside of life and death’ (Arendt 1966, 444). If for Arendt, however, the production of Muselmänner is anti-political, in that the camps are spaces in which plurality is foreclosed, for Agamben it is the emergence of the essence of the political.
