The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and the Tasks of Political Thinking

The debate over abortion rights, the status of the right of entry for refugees, the debate over health care in the United States, the right of individuals to bear arms in order to protect themselves - all these questions constituting much political debate in contemporary America and elsewhere would, according to the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben’s latest politico-philosophical pursuit, fall under the category of homo sacer .

To most Anglo-American readers, the term homo sacer is probably unfamiliar as it refers to a juridical category of ancient Roman law where an individual accused of a crime cannot be sacrificed for having committed said crime. However, from the Roman writer Pompeius Festus, we learn that what is crucial about homo sacer is that although “it is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide.” (quoted in Agamben, p. 71) Homo sacer thus presents a limit-concept that Agamben traces throughout the history of Western political thought and situates as the fundamental element of sovereign power. The paradox of sovereignty for Agamben - and the political dilemma par excellence - is that the sovereign sphere is structured by the logic of homo sacer such that “the life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred - that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed - and in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.” (Agamben, p.83)

A conceptual link is thus established between sacredness-sovereignty-life where the function of sovereignty is to delimit a zone of indistinction that constitutes life as sacred. What is crucial for Agamben is that the sacredness of life does not necessarily need to refer to a sense of the sacred linked to an originary divine status (i.e., because we are all made in god’s image). Rather, the sacredness of homo sacer refers specifically to the characteristic feature of sovereignty that allows for the possibility of killing without requiring the divine overtones usually associated with sacrifice. In this regard, sovereign power and bare life are linked precisely because it is sovereignty that constitutes a life as bare through the foundation of a zone of indistinction.

In his discussion of the paradox of sovereignty, Agamben borrows from Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of the logic of the sovereign ban. The structure of sovereignty, he explains, is exemplified by the Schmittian notion of exception whereby the sovereign structure of law has its force in the possibility of the suspension of the rule such that a state of exception emerges. That which is outside of the sphere of influence of sovereignty thus does not comprise the constitutive outside of sovereignty but rather, the outside is already included in the domain of the sovereign by means of the suspension of the juridical order’s validity. In this respect, “the rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension.” (Agamben, p. 18)

What emerges through the logic of the paradox of sovereignty is an event Agamben calls the zone of indistinction. In the suspension of the rule through the state of exception, what we are presented with is a complex plateau where such philosophically distinct categories as state of nature and law, outside and inside, exception and rule flow through one another to the point of literal indistinction. On Agamben’s account, the operation of sovereignty abandons individuals whenever they are placed outside the law and in so doing, exposes and threatens them to a sphere where there is no possibility of appeal. (Agamben, p. 29) What is crucial for Agamben’s entire project, then, is to point out how the zone of indistinction collapses the possibility of making distinctions - which is to say further, to point out how political philosophy finds the limit of thinking in the...