Product Description

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over life is implicit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94121 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-31
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

Customer Reviews

Homo Sacer
Skipping the introduction, which is more relevant on the second and third read, Agamben extends the Foucauldian theme of biopolitics to law, nature, Nazism, eugenics, the daseinanalytic, sovereignty, euthanasia, and finally, which is where we expected him to head, given the blueprint of Auschwitz on the front cover, the concentration/extermination camp.
Agamben examines Schmitt's sovereignty as being founded on an exclusion of the bare life that incorporates this exclusion into its very centre, "including" it, as it were, in the form of an exception. Agamben goes beyond this: the bare life, unqualified life, can be killed, and is subject to death itself at all times, without however, being subject to a sanctioned death or a sacrifice. This makes of the modern homo sacer a globalized (or de-localized) psuedo-citizen of the globalized psuedo-state, a nomad that law can only include by exclusion.
Modernity is thought by tracing Foucault, Arendt and others to an intersection of their thinking, where we find a "zone of indistinction" where rule and exception intermingle, where biopolitics emerge as law and law as life; where fact and law are indistinguishable. This indistinction founds the Nazi temprement and other "humanitarian" temprements that see the life of people as coterminous with (bio-) political concern and preservation (and of what falls "outside" of bios as a matter for un-concern).

Agamben shows how the topology of the (bio-) political concern for life has just this obverse plane in thanatopolitics, a politics of death. The dialogue that constitutes the alive and the dead is always talking: the decideability of death appears now as "an epiphenomenon of transplant technology" and as dependent on life-support, the medical discourses on brain-death versus somatic death, and in all senses (like birth) death is a fully political event.

Life and death constituted by the sovereignty of a law that enables its own lawfulness from a zone of indistinction: this was the exception to the rule in which law could be changed by speaking from its very fringe. In modernity, this fringe is no longer the exception but the rule. Life and death are determined daily by an ongoing dialogue.

This work is challenging to thought. Its implications are frightening, but the anxiety is irreducible: the structural (or topological) similarity between the ontological question of Being and the political question of "bare life" is more than just a parallel. A being whose way of being is of unavoidably facing its Being as a matter for concern (the daseinanalytic) is coterminous with a life whose qualified and political existence is that of unavoidably facing the except-ed "bare life".

Agamben delivers a post-structural bombshell here, showing how, in modernity, the historicisation of the withdrawing "transcendent" leaves us with a situation in which zoe (life) becomes meaningful only as it loses its contours and is absorbed into bios (qualified life). As such, Auschwitz was not an isolated pocket of racist irrationalism, but the very paradigm of this indistinction between citizen and being, between law and fact.

Although I would classify Agamben as a post-structuralist or a critical theorist, there is more of a "genuinely human" concern in Agamben than occurs in any other contemporary philosopher that I can name, even those who still willfully appropriate the name of humanism.

Be ready, if you haven't already, to do some background reading in continental structuralism and phenomenology: Foucault, Arrendt, Heidegger, etc. And be prepared for some gymnastics: e.g. thinking of the outside of law not as an orignary chaos, but as the "excepted region" the relation to which defines the lawful "from within".

Absolutely pertinent to the contemporary situation in which (as Slavoj Zizek uses his reading of Homo Sacer) terrorism belongs to globalisation, and the exception (detention) belongs to human rights and liberties.

Agamben is not just a philosopher in the enlightenment sense, but in a new classical sense he is also a prophet and a diviner.

I implore you, if you are wavering, to read Homo Sacer.

Difficult, interesting, problematic
This is an extremely heavy philosophical text which is not for beginners or those unfamiliar with continental philosophy.

The basic thesis Agamben advances is that sovereignty (hence state power) is constructed through the exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion-as-exception) of "bare life", which is to say, the body and relations of force. This exclusion returns in the figure of sovereign power (as law-making and thus as excess over law) and its construction of homo sacer, a type of subject who can be "killed but not sacrificed" (and who is thus outside both profane and sacred law). Homo sacer reaches his apogee in the camp, such as Nazi concentration camps. The camp is the "paradigm" of the modern state, and homo sacer and the "state of exception" in which the state suspends basic rights is becoming the normal condition of politics.

There are several problems here. The first is that Agamben is prone to argue by assertion and exegesis. The result is that his claims are largely unsupported and "take it or leave it" - either you're convinced by his account or you aren't. The second is that he doesn't draw political conclusions from what is obviously a political subject. If the state of exception and homo sacer are inherent to state sovereignty as such, Agamben's thesis would seem to be a powerful case for anarchism, yet he never draws any such implication, nor addresses the corresponding question of how else bodies can be "politicised". Thirdly, the thesis isn't really as original as Agamben seems to think - it's a repetition of themes arising in the work of A. Hirschman, John Zerzan, ecofeminists such as Robyn Eckersley, the Frankfurt School (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment"), and a host of other authors dealing with the exclusion of the "natural", the emotional and the embodied from masculine, industrial, or public institutions. An engagement with such prior literature would have strengthened Agamben's case, not least in allowing him to show how his thesis differs from theirs, and what precisely is added by ideas such as homo sacer and bare life.

A contribution to thinking about the contemporary state
This is an important book, and one which deserves wide readership. It deals with the relationship between sovereignty and bare life, and explores this theme through the concept of the "homo sacer" - a man in ancient Rome whose life is not subject to conventional legal protection (he can be killed, but not put to death under the law), and thus exists within the state of exception - a legal space where, paradoxically no law exists, that defines the limit of the law.

With the advent of National Socialism - brilliantly analyzed through Agamben's application of Foucault's notion of "biopolitics" - homo sacer becomes central to the way in which citizenship and life are conceived by the state. The concentration camp, an arena legally constituted where no law exists, becomes the ultimate space where sovreignty over life is constituted. Even with the disappearance of Auschwitz in 1945, argues Agamben, the concentration camp casts its shadow over the way the state describes life, different legal categories of life and their limits. While perhaps Agamben concepts could be tested more thoroughly in their various mid and late twentieth century contexts in order to refine his argument, this is a compelling (and terrifying) view of the operation of state power and politics in our era.