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Giorgio
Agamben (Rome, 1942-) Homo
Sacer: sovereign power and naked life (1995) Homo
sacer, biopolitics Aristotle,
Arendt, Schmitt, Foucault,
Benjamin Interested
in the holocaust and the political status of refugees |
Giorgio Agamben is best known in the Anglo-American
world for his The Coming Community. He starts as an expert on Adorno,
Benjamin and aesthetics. His work concerns itself with the notion of
sovereignty and human rights within the modernist paradigm of biopolitical rule
within the political / judicial rather than social realm. Our interest in the
author lies in his notion of homo sacer, to which we will try and provide a
series of definitions:
Naked life here means the life that can be killed
but not sacrificed of the homo sacer (living dead).
In defining Homo Sacer Agamben runs through the
etimological origin of the term both within the studies of Roman law and
anthropological findings of Levi-Strauss, Mauss, Durkheim amongst others.
the task of metaphysics par excellence is the
politicisation of naked life.
A reference to Schmitt is functional to explaining
the paradox of sovereignty that lies in the notion of Ausnahme: ‘Sovereign
is who decides on the state of exception’. According to this, exception is
granted the highest status for the formulation of positive right, expressing at
once the limit of sovereign power and its legitimation. Only in so far as the
value of positive right can be suspended in a state of exception, it is able to
define normality as its realm of validity. ‘It is not the exception that gets
subtracted from the rule, but the rule that, suspending itself, gives raise to
the exception and only in this way can constitute itself as rule, by constantly
maintaining a relation to it. […] The situaion that is created by exception can
neither be defined as a factual situation, nor as a situation of right, but
institutes between the two a paradoxical threshold of indifference’. (22-23)
According to Schmitt then, the sovereign does not establish what is legal and
illegal, but rather the originary implication of the living within the sphere
of right, or, in his words, the ‘normal structuration of life relations’, wich
the law needs. The decision relates neither to a quaestio facti nor to a
quaestio iuris, but to the relation itself between fact and right.
From Schmitt Agamben moves onto citing Benjamin and
his critique of violence. Agamben criticised the tendency to see constituent
power as that which is granted with the task of defending the constitution. In
this move, the revolutionary moment that brings about a constitution and which
makes constituent power irreducible and external to constituted power and
juridical order, is relegated to a ‘pre-juridical’ and merely factual status.
Agamben then cites Benjamin’s idea of a relation of constituent to constitutive
power as that of a violence that brings about right to a violence that
preserves it. In this sense, the constitution presupposes itself as constituent
power (see Seyes and Negri), and in this form it expressed the paradox of
sovereignty. ‘Just as sovereign power is presupposed as state of nature, that
is then maintained in a relation of exclusion with respect to the state of
right, so does it separate itself into constituent and constitutive power and
still relates to both by placing itself in their point of indifference.’ (48)
Violence, according to Benjamin, occurrs where exception and rule become
undistinguishable. He calls the link between violence and right naked life
(blos Leben). Naked life is the element which, in a state of exception, hold
the most intimate relation to sovereignty.(76).
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