I'm reading Agamben's fragmentary, dense, multi-layered Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with the sovereign, the one who decides over life and death of its subjects; and the second deals with the engimatic figure of homo sacer, the "sacred man", one who can be killed and not sacrificed; but who can be killed with impunity.
According to Agamben, the connection between politics and life is fundamental to the Western tradition and there is a close and originary bond between sovereignty and this politics of life. Agamben argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, which is distinguished from bios, or politically or morally qualified life, the particular form of life of a community. The constitution of the political is made possible by an exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously makes bare life a condition of politics.
In contrast to arguments that understand political community as essentially 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.
The 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. Consequently, there is a difference for Agamben between biopolitical life and bare life:----the former being the managed political subject of power relations, and the latter being the necessary negative referent by which power-relations (through the sovereign exception) demarcates what counts as legal life, life that matters. So there there is a limit, or an 'outside' to power relations in biopolitical life.
That is Agamben's argument.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 4, 2005 05:08 PM | TrackBackGary
It has been a few years since I have read Homo Sacer, but I recall that in the second half he references Hannah Arendt's discussion of the "Right to Have Rights" in Origins of Totalitarianism. He sees her critique of the Universal Rights of Man as parallel to the distinction between bio-politics and bare life. Arendt points out that those who are excluded from the political sphere, such as the refugee and the Jew in Europe, have no rights. That the claims made on behalf of our universal humanity were meaningless in the face of those who were declared "outside" the law.
He also points to the odd fact that Foucault, writing 25 years after Arendt, made no reference to her work when he analyzes bio-politics. I believe he attributes this to the difficulty of thinking about the subject, and not to some short coming of Foucault. Again, it has been about 5 years since I read it. What strikes me is how uncanny the analysis appears in light of what the United States is doing right now. The Enemy combatant certainly seems to be the perfect witness to bare life.
I have been away from your site for a while and I have really missed it.
Thanks
Posted by: Alain on May 5, 2005 02:11 AMAlain,
The refugee and the Jew in 20th centry Europe who have no rights have become the refugees and illegal immigrants of the 21st century.
These are the new figures of a bare life--the state of just being alive. They live in the detention camps that are placed outside the political/moral life of the political community of the nation-state.
Detention camps, and their modes of violence and exclusion, are now an integral feature of our western liberal democracies.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on May 9, 2005 01:56 PM