ABSTRACT
No-one has embodied the nodal point of where political and legal theory, philosophy, and ethics intersect in order to conceptualize what he and others have termed “bare life”—the catastrophic production of biological life devoid of politico-symbolic cover—more dramatically and more provocatively than Giorgio Agamben when he represents it by way of the figure of the homo sacer. 1 Homo sacer, the “sacred man,” a person who is banned, who may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual: that is, a person who has no legal or social meaning, is reduced to bare biological life, and who does not even control whether or not he lives. The emergence of “bare life,” creaturely human beings no longer framed by legal and formal protection, is, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, produced by the world of “the camps,” referring obviously to Auschwitz as well as to more recent reincarnations of such social, humanitarian, and legal catastrophes; a world in which the state, which in liberal democracies provides the legal definition, categorization, and protection of individuals, can metamorphose into a “killing machine” that can enable “life” and take it away to produce a population that has in some way been purified. “Bare life,” for Agamben, is a universal, ahistorical category produced by a sovereign who under certain circumstances has the power to decide who (or what) should become an exception to the social community, who should become a “little piece of the real,” to use a Lacanian concept of which I will make use a little later in order to inflect Agamben’s thought with Lacan’s.
