3.20.2006
Homo Sacer (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Homo Sacer is the working out of the following three theses in a careful consideration of the history of rights to life and juridical power, sovereignty and the state, and violence against those considered not worthy of life. There is a lot of Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Schmitt, Hobbbes, Rousseau, Foucault and Arendt here (among others).
"1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West." (181)
Zoe is the simple fact of living and was conceived by the Greeks as being outside the sphere of the political. Bios is "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group." (1) Agamben takes up Foucault's work on biopower to discuss zoe's entry into the sphere of the political. He begins this work in the first part of Homo Sacer by taking up the question of sovereignty. Sovereignty is a paradox because it is both inside and outside juridical power and gets to determine what is the exception to the law. The exception is defined in negation (or something more complicated that goes like this: 'The exception does not substract itself from the rule; rather the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule." (18) "The exception is what cannot be included in the wole of which it is a member cannot be a member of the whole in which it is already included." (25)) Agamben then goes on to discuss Nomos, "the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction." (31) Sovereign power divides itself into constituting and constitued power, it's sorta a tautology, but constituting power is outside and determines the system while constituted power is inside and maintains the system (I think). Agamben then relates this to the law and the ban - "Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained soley as the 'zero point' of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment." (51) Agamben moves to the second part of his book on bare life as linked to sovereign power, "soveriegn violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, inside and outside, violence and law." (64)
He begins the second part with an examination of the classical figure of the homo sacer, the one who can't be sacrificed, but can be killed (and killed with impugnity) and the misreadings of this figure. "It is important...that the originary juridico-political dimension that presents itself in homo sacer not be covered over by a scientific mythologeme that not only explains nothing but is itself in need of an explanation." (80) "What defines the homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed." (82) "The very body of the homo sacer is, in its capacity to be killed but not sacrificed, a living pledge to his subjection to a power of death." (99) Here we see the link with biopower.
Finally, Agamben moves to the position of homo sacer in modernity: "In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term 'sacred' continues the sematic history of homo sacer and not that of sacrifice (and this is why demystifications of sacrificial ideology so common today remain insufficient, even though they are correct). What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent is precisely in the most profane and banal ways." (114) In modernity, homo sacer is bare life (I think).
The camp comes to be central in this final part of the book. "In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order." (169) "One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics...is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside." (131) "The refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of politics in which bare life is no longer separated and expected, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights." (134)
Agamben considers the question of the defense of euthenasia as a negotiating of bare life / homo sacer. He also considers the Versuchspersonen, humans used for medical experiments. Also the designation of brain death and its links to organ transplantation.
Keywords
Ban, Zoe, Bios, Camp, Power,Sovereignty, Law, Nomos, Violence, State of Exception.
Other Thoughts
I dunno, man, maybe I should be dead - that is all I ever feel when I read books about the ethics of brain death and transplants and life in general. I mean, seriously, I should be dead. Or at least on dialysis. Not just sitting here in the Columbia Library, going to eat pizza after I write this and maybe drinking a beer, even. And see, it's still all about me. I am such a turd.
Good thing I am learning French, maybe I can read Jean-Luc Nancy's L'Intrus this summer and figure some of this stuff out.
"Like concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the 'body' too is always already caught in a deployment of power. The 'body' is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power. In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life." (187)
Other QE Works Cited
Benjamin, W. Illuminations. (Film and Media Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Homo Sacer is the working out of the following three theses in a careful consideration of the history of rights to life and juridical power, sovereignty and the state, and violence against those considered not worthy of life. There is a lot of Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Schmitt, Hobbbes, Rousseau, Foucault and Arendt here (among others).
"1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West." (181)
Zoe is the simple fact of living and was conceived by the Greeks as being outside the sphere of the political. Bios is "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group." (1) Agamben takes up Foucault's work on biopower to discuss zoe's entry into the sphere of the political. He begins this work in the first part of Homo Sacer by taking up the question of sovereignty. Sovereignty is a paradox because it is both inside and outside juridical power and gets to determine what is the exception to the law. The exception is defined in negation (or something more complicated that goes like this: 'The exception does not substract itself from the rule; rather the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule." (18) "The exception is what cannot be included in the wole of which it is a member cannot be a member of the whole in which it is already included." (25)) Agamben then goes on to discuss Nomos, "the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction." (31) Sovereign power divides itself into constituting and constitued power, it's sorta a tautology, but constituting power is outside and determines the system while constituted power is inside and maintains the system (I think). Agamben then relates this to the law and the ban - "Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained soley as the 'zero point' of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment." (51) Agamben moves to the second part of his book on bare life as linked to sovereign power, "soveriegn violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, inside and outside, violence and law." (64)
He begins the second part with an examination of the classical figure of the homo sacer, the one who can't be sacrificed, but can be killed (and killed with impugnity) and the misreadings of this figure. "It is important...that the originary juridico-political dimension that presents itself in homo sacer not be covered over by a scientific mythologeme that not only explains nothing but is itself in need of an explanation." (80) "What defines the homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed." (82) "The very body of the homo sacer is, in its capacity to be killed but not sacrificed, a living pledge to his subjection to a power of death." (99) Here we see the link with biopower.
Finally, Agamben moves to the position of homo sacer in modernity: "In modernity, the principle of the sacredness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our culture the meaning of the term 'sacred' continues the sematic history of homo sacer and not that of sacrifice (and this is why demystifications of sacrificial ideology so common today remain insufficient, even though they are correct). What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent is precisely in the most profane and banal ways." (114) In modernity, homo sacer is bare life (I think).
The camp comes to be central in this final part of the book. "In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order." (169) "One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics...is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside." (131) "The refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of politics in which bare life is no longer separated and expected, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights." (134)
Agamben considers the question of the defense of euthenasia as a negotiating of bare life / homo sacer. He also considers the Versuchspersonen, humans used for medical experiments. Also the designation of brain death and its links to organ transplantation.
Keywords
Ban, Zoe, Bios, Camp, Power,Sovereignty, Law, Nomos, Violence, State of Exception.
Other Thoughts
I dunno, man, maybe I should be dead - that is all I ever feel when I read books about the ethics of brain death and transplants and life in general. I mean, seriously, I should be dead. Or at least on dialysis. Not just sitting here in the Columbia Library, going to eat pizza after I write this and maybe drinking a beer, even. And see, it's still all about me. I am such a turd.
Good thing I am learning French, maybe I can read Jean-Luc Nancy's L'Intrus this summer and figure some of this stuff out.
"Like concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the 'body' too is always already caught in a deployment of power. The 'body' is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power. In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life." (187)
Other QE Works Cited
Benjamin, W. Illuminations. (Film and Media Studies)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
# posted by SMRT : 4:47 PM
