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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Agamben, exception, homo sacer, refugees « Previous | |Next »
May 14, 2005

Agamben argues that the place of sovereignty is on the threshold between what lies both inside and outside the law: life. He proposes that 'exception' can be interpretated as an originary structure where law exists by virtue of the exception it captures in itself---life--- in the sense that life 'can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere of law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion, only in an exceptio.' [16]

So we cannot definitively claim that the exception is either outside or inside the law. The exceptions, such as refugees or those interned in detention facilities have simply been abandoned: they are both inside and outside the law. This exception is Agamben's homo sacer. These people can be killed but the killing of them is neither a sacrifice, in the sense that they are not divine, nor murder, in that no law is broken. Why? Because they exist in the space between zoe and bios.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 PM | | Comments (0)
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