ABSTRACT OF AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (INTRODUCTION)'

ABSTRACT OF AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (INTRODUCTION)'

• The greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the world life, which was splat between:
  a) Zoe: which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)
  b) Bios : which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group
  • But to speak of a zoe politike of the citizens of Athens would have made no sense
    • In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined – as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of the oikos, 'home'
    • At the beginning of The Politics, Aristotle takes the greatest care to distinguish the oikonomos (the head of an state) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life, from the politician, and he scorns those who think the difference between the two is one of quantity and not of kind.
    • He opposes the simple fact of living (to zen) to politically qualified life (to eu zen) of the politician
  • It's for a society of politicians and politicity tied to language that Aristotle defines man as a politikon zoon, not for the ideal society, not for a society of only Zoe and Bios
  • Foucault refers to this very definition at the end of History of Sexuality as he summarizes the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power and politics turns into Biopolitics
    • For millenia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question
    • For Foucault this shift occurred along with the passage from the 'territorial state' to the 'state of population', and the creation of a 'government of men'.
      • Agamben points that as a result of such process, by the first time in history it was possible for one same rationality to protect life and to authorize holocaust
      • Foucault notes that the triumph of capitalism would not have been possible without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the 'docile bodies' that it needed.
        • Almost twenty years before Foucault, Hannah Arendt through her concept of homo laborans have noted that the decadence of modern politics was due to the overshadow of natural life, which she considers primary, by political action.
    • Agamben agrees with Foucault that the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought
    • Agamben criticizes Foucault for not addressing certain key places of modernity, like the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century
      • Agamben says that the enigmas that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remains with us (nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain – biopolitics – on which they were formed
        • Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc) – and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction – will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon.
        • Only a reflection that, taking up Foucault's and Benjamin's suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to this political practical calling
    • Agamben criticizes Foucault also for not clearly pointing at which space the individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power meet each other – Agamben even recalls some critiques according to which Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power.
      • This mismatch is one between Foucault's studies on political techniques (totalizing state) and his studies on the technologies of the self (individualization)
      • If Foucault calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge?
        • Agamben points that certain subjective aspects in the genesis of power were already implicit in the concept of servitude volontaire in Etienne de La Boetie
        • Agamben proposition thus is to enquire precisely the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power – the two analyses cannot be separeted
          • The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power
            • In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.
              • The modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.
            • What remains to be interrogated in the Aristotelian definition is not merely – as has been assumed until now – the sense, the modes, and the possible articulations of the good life as the telos of the political. We must instead ask why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life.
              • I particularly find this very close to the Deconstructivist approach of Butler.
              • It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language
              • The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it
                • Politics therefore appears to be the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized
                • The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/ political existence, zoe/ bios, exclusion/ inclusion.
                  • There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an exclusive exclusion
                  • If we match this with Deleuzze's explanation for the universality of castration as a necessity to articulate language, than politics can also be said to be an universal structure?
• With this framework of understanding, Agamben suggests to analyse the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed
  • This is an obscure figure of archaic Roman Law, in which human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), which Agamben believes to be useful on revealing the sacrament of sovereignty and the codes of political power.
  • The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis – which is, in itself, absolutely ancient – nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.
    • In this process the disciplinary process of State power posing the subject as object is made indistinguishable from the democratic process of subjects as agents.
    • Modern politics is based on zones of indistinction between the exclusive poles
    • To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.
    • Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism – which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle – will remain stubbornly with us
    • Points to the inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarism but without denying their divergences as well
    • Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion
    • Until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it
    • He says that the limits of sovereignty, as every limit, is a conceptual one, in this case opposing the sovereign to life
    • The problem of sovereignty was reduced [by orthodox Marxism] to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question
      • As State gets increasingly dissolved due to emergencies he suggests that one should inquire about the substance of the state and its limits rather than its leading rulers
        • For one such task he advises to revise all notions claimed to be evident, just like he was lead to revise the sacredness of life to understand how the construct of this argument reifyied life and at the same time enabled it to be killed
          • The Homo Sacer may be killed, but yet not sacrificed.
• Overall coments and dunderstandings about the chapter:
  • Bare life is the politicized form of zoe
  • Agamben uses the Homo Sacer to explain bare life
    • Homo Sacer is abandoned by the divine (zoe) and profane law (bios)
      • Bare life doesn't belong neither to zoe nor to bios
• For Agamben the Biopower has always existed as tyrans used to exert political control over bodies. What marks the uniqueness of modern politics, however, is the generalization of Homo Sacer in the sense that the categorizations operated through Biopolitics get blured and politics become a space of indistinction centered on those very blurings.
  • In one such space everyone is subjected to become Bare life.