ABSTRACT
Agamben’s work can be read as a critique of society and as a diagnosis of cultural crisis and its focus, in the project entitled Homo Sacer, is the relation between law and life, that is, the institutional integration of life. It is useful at this point to summarize Agamben’s position regarding this relation, before elaborating on it in more detail. In light of the dogma of secular sovereignty or civil society, in the absence of a point of transcendental support for authority and authenticity, sovereign governmentality requires, from inception, an intimate relation between sovereignty and subjectivity. But such a production of subjectivity in its intimate link to the image-suffused secular sovereignty ‘in the name of the people’ or ‘in the name of the law’ solves the embarrassing difficulty of instituting a counterfactual, a priori, legally or politically qualified subjectivity by displacing or excluding what it considers each time to be waste. But it does not stop there since it requires the zone of bare life be turned into its own everpoliticizable territory. Sovereign is he who decides on who is, each time, (un)political waste.
