Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction

4. Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben

53 4 Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben F O R S O M E T I M E now, the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has been receiving growing attention and appreciation.1 Yet it was only with the appearance of Homo Sacer in 1995 that he became known to a wider audience (Agamben 1998). The book was an international bestseller, and its author became an intellectual star. The reason for this lay not least in the work’s brilliance in bringing together philosophical reflection with political critique. Above all, however, his fundamental thesis is provocative enough to have earned him greater notice outside of philosophical circles. For Agamben asserts nothing less than the “inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” (ibid., 10) and defines the concentration camp as the “biopolitical paradigm of the West” (ibid., 181). Homo Sacer is the first volume of a four-volume work of which further volumes have in the meantime appeared and in which Agamben expands and concretizes his thesis. In these works, Agamben reads the present as the catastrophic terminus of a political tradition that has its origins in ancient Greece and that led to the Nazi concentration camps. Whereas the advent of biopolitical mechanisms in the 17th and 18th centuries signaled for Foucault a historical caesura, Agamben insists on a logical connection between sovereign power and biopolitics. That is, biopolitics forms the core of the sovereign practice of power. The modern era signifies, accordingly, not a break with the Western tradition but rather a generalization and radicalization of that which was simply there at the beginning. According to 54 Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben Agamben, the constitution of sovereign power assumes the creation of a biopolitical body. Inclusion in political society is only possible, he writes, through the simultaneous exclusion of human beings who are denied full legal status. In what follows, I present Agamben’s revision of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics and discuss its analytical merits as well as its limits. The first section briefly presents Agamben’s initial thesis, and the second part investigates its diagnostic potential for an analysis of contemporary societies. In the third section, I identify several theoretical problems posed by Agamben’s conception of biopolitics, including his implicit adherence to a juridical conception of power, his fixation on the state, his neglect of socioeconomic aspects of the biopolitical problematic, and the quasi-ontological foundation of his theoretical model. The Rule of the Exception Agamben takes up not only Foucault’s works but also those of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Georges Bataille. He begins with a distinction that he believes has determined the occidental political tradition since Greek antiquity. The central binary relationship of the political is not that between friend and enemy but rather the separation of bare life (zoé) and political existence (bíos)—that is, the distinction between natural being and the legal existence of a person. According to Agamben, we find at the beginning of all politics the establishment of a borderline and the inauguration of a space that is deprived of the protection of the law: “The original juridico-political relationship is the ban” (1998, 181). Agamben outlines this hidden foundation of sovereignty through a figure he derives from archaic Roman law: homo sacer. This is a person whom one could kill with impunity, since he was banned from the politico-legal community and reduced to the status of his Sovereign Power and Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben 55 physical existence. For Agamben, this obscure figure represents the other side of the logic of sovereignty. “Bare life,” which is considered to be marginal and seems to be furthest from the political, proves to be the solid basis of a political body, which makes the life and death of a human being the object of a sovereign decision. From this perspective , the production of homines sacri represents a renounced yet constitutive part of Western political history. The trace of homo sacer runs from Roman exiles through the condemned of the Middle Ages to the inmates of Nazi camps, and beyond. In contemporary times, Agamben conceives of “bare life” as existing, for example, in asylum seekers, refugees, and the brain dead. These apparently unrelated “cases” have one thing in common: although they all involve human life, they are excluded from the protection of the law. They remain either turned over to humanitarian assistance...