III.
The Homo Sacer and the Sovereign Exception:
Some Preliminary
Notes on Agamben’s Political Philosophy
Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life is at once a standalone volume and the inaugural volume
of a series of books that also bears the name Homo Sacer (of which Remnants
of Auschwitz is the third volume, though it was the second to be
published). Agamben begins the book, first published in Italian in 1995, with a
reference to two words for “life” in ancient Greek, zoē (natural or biological life) and bios (“the form or way of living proper to an individual or a
group”), a basic lexical distinction that allowed for Aristotle’s well-known definition
of the human as a “political animal” (that is, an animal with the additional
capacity for politics).[i]
Agamben notes that in most ancient systems of law, only bios, the qualified life of human beings, is formally legislated,
while zoē as such was excluded—excluded
from, yet always already implicated by, the polis.[ii]
And it is precisely this originary moment of the politicization of natural life
that, for Agamben, marks the beginning of biopolitics,
a political structure organized around the control and maintenance of
biological life.
Drawing on the work of Foucault, Agamben sees the mass
production of “bare life” (a form of life that results from the violent
separation or extraction of zoē from bios) as the concealed operation of
modern politics, common to the totalitarian states of the twentieth century and
today’s liberal democracies. However, whereas Foucault sees the inclusion of
biological life as specific to the modern era of governmentality,[iii]
Agamben shows how this inclusion, which is operative even in the earliest
juridico-institutional systems, ensures that the “production of a biopolitical
body is the original activity of sovereign power.”[iv]
For Agamben, this mass production of bare life is prefigured by the homo sacer (literally “sacred human”), a
figure in ancient Roman law who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”[v] In
other words, the homo sacer is one
who is deprived of both a political and religious identity and therefore may be
killed with total impunity; it is the ban from any form of political contact or
legal intervention that, paradoxically, brings this one under the fullest
manifestation of the law’s power.
The juridical mechanism that allows for this paradoxical
“inclusive exclusion” is the state of exception, or the sovereign ability to
suspend any and every law in a time of political crisis.[vi]
The state of exception must not be understood as a measure “external” to the
law; rather, the sovereign exception is originarily present as a “virtual
rupture”—the capacity within every law to be suspended by the sovereign.[vii] For
this reason, Agamben takes seriously the controversial political theorist Carl
Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of
exception.”[viii]
In this way, Agamben’s work examines the political implications when the state
of exception becomes a working paradigm of government rather than a
provisionary measure, at which point the exception to the rule and the rule
itself enter into a “zone of indistinction.”[ix]
This is why Agamben dedicates an entire book to the question
of Auschwitz; for, contrary to Foucault, who explored the operations of
biopower through such social institutions as the psychiatric hospital (Madness and Civilization) and, most famously,
the prison (Discipline and Punish),
Agamben chillingly concludes that the paradigm of modern government is, rather
than Foucault’s omnipresent panopticon, the camp.[x] The
camp, Agamben argues, is the structure that “normalizes” or “realizes normally”
the state of exception, and the legal and juridical processes through which the
Jewish people and other ethnic minorities were interred in concentration camps
in Nazi Germany, are, in fact, still in operation today.[xi] To
understand what is at stake for people living under this political paradigm,
then, Agamben argues that one must examine the most violent, extreme historical
example of the sovereign exception and the production of bare life; one must
commit to an investigation into the circumstances of the Nazi death camps. As
Agamben notes, Hitler’s ascension to power was immediately followed by the
suspension of all the articles of the Weimar Constitution ensuring individual
liberties. Consequently, “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of
exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can
be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal
civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political
adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be
integrated into the political system.”[xii]
It is with this context and perspective in mind that I turn
to my reading of Remnants of Auschwitz.
[i]
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 1, 7. An analogous distinction, one that will be
essential to Remnants of Auschwitz,
presents itself between voice
(belonging to most biological life) and language
(belonging only to humans).
[ii]
Ibid., 2.
[iii]
See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, ed.
Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
In defining loosely the concept of “biopower,” Foucault notes, “…Starting from
the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental
biological fact that human beings are a species” (1).
[iv] Ibid., 6. See also 82-83.
[v] Ibid., 8. This use of the term “sacred” in homo sacer is potentially misleading to
the modern reader because of the subsequent sedimentation of modern
anthropological understandings of the category “sacred.” The homo sacer is sacred in the sense that
s/he already belongs to the gods of the underworld. This explains both the
unpunishability of the act of murdering the homo
sacer (whose death is now of practical rather than moral importance) as
well as the unsacrificeability of the homo
sacer (“to sacrifice” in the ancient context literally meant “to make
holy”; because the homo sacer is
already sacred, s/he cannot be made holy and therefore cannot be sacrificed).
See pp. 71-74.
[vi]
Ibid., 26-27.
[vii]
Ibid., 37.
[viii]
Cited ibid., 11. This statement will be more fully explicated and theorized in
a later work, The State of Exception
, trans. Kevil Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); see esp. the
preliminary discussion (1-4) and the brief history of its usage as a governing
paradigm (11-22).
[ix]
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception,
26.
[x]
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 119, 123.
[xi] Ibid., 170. Examples of contemporary manifestations
of the camp abound: In State of Exception, written only two years after September
11, Agamben focuses on the USA Patriot Act and illegal (or, more precisely,
“non-legal”) internment of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay (see esp.
3-4). However, as Agamben himself would point out, the only necessary
step to transform a sports stadium or gated community into a camp, whether in
the United States or elsewhere, would be an executive decision.
[xii]
Agamben, State of Exception, 2.
