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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

homo sacer: a life unworthy of being lived « Previous | |Next »
June 1, 2005

I'd read some more of Giorgio Agamben's interesting Homo Sacer as I flew to and fro from Canberra yesterday. I'm finding the book a bit of a struggle, but it's genealogical account of homo sacer coupled to its use of Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault is dealing with a central problem in political life.

As we have seen Agamaben argues that the figure of homo sacer, classically seen as able to be killed but not sacrificed, is the figure of a person who has committed a certain kind of crime is banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen are revoked.To a homo sacer, Roman law no longer applied, although he was still "under the spell" of law. Homo sacer was excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the mirror image of the sovereign (a king, emperor, or president) who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g. for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).

The figure of hom sacer becomes a life unworthy of being lived in modernity. That is the life of a stateless person in Australia's detention camps, and so homo sacer becomes a juridico-political concept linked to sovereignty.

Agamben links this to the sovereignity (sovereign is he who decides on what constitutes the state of exception)--which was deployed and defined as the arrival of the refugee boat people and the Tampa incident in 2001. Agamben says:

"If it is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception, has the power to decide which life may be killed without the commission of homicide, in the age of biopolitics this power becomes emancipated from the state of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceasess to be politcally relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value, not only is the problem of life's non-value thereby posed, as Schmitt suggests but further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision."

This leads to a transformation in Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as he who decides on what constitutes the state of exception:
"In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life as such. Life--which, with the declaration of rights, had as such been invested with the principle of sovereignty --now itself becomes the place of sovereign decision."

This places asylum seekers, refugees, and mandatory detention at the centre of political life. You can see why I continue to struggle with Agamben's texts.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:54 PM | | Comments (0)
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