THE OM NIBUS HOMO SACER
MERIDIAN
Crossing Aesthetics
T H E O M N I B U S
HOMO
SACER
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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CONTENTS
I. HOMO SACER:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life
1
II, 1. STATE OF EXCEPTION
161
II, 2. STASIS:
Civil War as a Political Paradigm
247
II, 3. THE SACRAMENT OF LANGUAGE:
An Archaeology of the Oath
295
II, 4. THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government
363
II, 5. OPUS DEI:
An Archaeology of Duty
643
III. REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ:
The Witness and the Archive
761
IV, 1. THE HIGHEST POVERTY:
Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life
881
IV, 2. THE USE OF BODIES
1011
vi
CONTENTS
Index
1291
Credits
1323
THE OMNIBUS HOMO SACER
HOMO SACER I
HOMO
SACER
Sovereign Power
and Bare Life
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN
Contents
Introduction
5
PART ONE: THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNT Y
1. The Paradox of Sovereignty
17
2. ‘Nomos Basileus’
29
3. Potentiality and Law
36
4. Form of Law
44
Threshold
54
PART TWO: HOMO SACER
1. Homo Sacer
61
2. The Ambivalence of the Sacred
64
3. Sacred Life
69
4. ‘Vitae Necisque Potestas’
74
5. Sovereign Body and Sacred Body
78
6. The Ban and the Wolf
88
Threshold
94
PART THREE: THE CAMP AS BIOPOLITICAL
PARADIGM OF THE MODERN
1. The Politicization of Life
99
2. Biopolitics and the Rights of Man
105
3. Life That Does Not Deserve to Live
113
4. ‘Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People’
119
5. VP
127
6. Politicizing Death
132
7. The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern
137
Threshold
148
Bibliography
155
Das Recht hat kein Dasein für sich, sein Wesen vielmehr ist das
Leben der Menschen selbst, von einer Seite angesehen.
—Savigny
Law has no existence for itself; rather its essence lies, from a certain perspec-
tive, in the very life of men.
Ita in iure civitatis, civiumque officiis investigandis opus est, non quidem ut
dissolvatur civitas, sed tamen ut tanquam dissoluta consideretur, id est, ut
qualis sit natura humana, quibus rebus ad civitatem compaginandam apta
vel inepta sit, et quomodo homines inter se componi debeant, qui coalescere
volunt, recte intelligatur.
—Hobbes
To make a more curious search into the rights of States, and duties of Subjects,
it is necessary, (I say not to take them in sunder, but yet that) they be so
considered, as if they were dissolved, (i.e.) that wee rightly understand what
the quality of humane nature is, in what matters it is, in what not fit to make
up a civill government, and how men must be agreed among themselves, that
intend to grow up into a well-grounded State.
Euretē moi hē entolē hē eis zōēn, autē eis thanaton.
—Saint Paul
And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.
Introduction
THE Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word
“life.” They used two terms that, although traceable to a common ety-
mological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men,
or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. When Plato mentions three kinds of life in the Philebus,
and when Aristotle distinguishes the contemplative life of the philosopher
( bios theōrētikos) from the life of pleasure ( bios apolaustikos) and the political life ( bios politikos) in the Nichomachean Ethics, neither philosopher would ever have used the term zoē (which in Greek, significantly enough, lacks a plural).
This follows from the simple fact that what was at issue for both thinkers was
not at all simple natural life but rather a qualified life, a particular way of life.
Concerning God, Aristotle can certainly speak of a zoē aristē kai aidios, a more noble and eternal life ( Meta physics, 1072b, 28), but only insofar as he means to underline the significant truth that even God is a living being (similarly,
Aristotle uses the term zoē in the same context—and in a way that is just as
meaningful—to define the act of thinking). But to speak of a zoē politikē of
the citizens of Athens would have made no sense. Not that the classical world
had no familiarity with the idea that natural life, simple zoē as such, could be
a good in itself. In a passage of the Politics, after noting that the end of the city is life according to the good, Aristotle expresses his awareness of that idea with
the most perfect lucidity:
This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men
and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain the po-
litical community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind
of good in the mere fact of living itself [ kata to zēn auto monon] . If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [ kata ton bion] I clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [ zoē] as if it were a kind of serenity [ euēmeria,
<
br /> beautiful day] and a natural sweetness. (1278b, 23–31)
5
6
HOMO SACER I
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” ( Politics, 1252a, 26–35). At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle takes the greatest care to distinguish the oikonomos (the head of an estate) and the despotēs (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. And when Aristotle defined the end of the perfect community in
a passage that was to become canonical for the political tradition of the West
(1252b, 30), he did so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living ( to zēn)
to politically qualified life ( to eu zēn) : ginomenē men oun tou zēn heneken, ousa de tou eu zēn, “born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life” (in the Latin translation of William of Moerbeke, which both
Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua had before them: facta quidem igitur vivendi
gratia, existens autem gratia bene vivendi) .
It is true that in a famous passage of the same work, Aristotle defines man as a
politikon zōon ( Politics, 1253a, 4). But here (aside from the fact that in Attic Greek the verb bionai is practically never used in the present tense), “political” is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather a specific difference that determines the genus zōon. (Only a little later, after all, human politics is distinguished from that of other living beings in that it is founded, through a supplement of
politicity [ policitAa] tied to language, on a community not simply of the pleasant and the painful but of the good and the evil and of the just and the unjust.)
Michel Foucault refers to this very definition when, at the end of the first
volume of The History of Sexuality, 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 millen-
nia,” he writes, “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” ( La volonté, p. 188).
According to Foucault, a society’s “threshold of biological modernity” is sit-
uated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body
become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies. After 1977, the courses
at the Collège de France start to focus on the passage from the “territorial State”
to the “State of population” and on the resulting increase in importance of the
nation’s health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power, which is then
gradually transformed into a “government of men” ( Dits et écrits, 3: 719). “What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisti-
HOMO SACER
7
cated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities of the
social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect
life and to authorize a holocaust.” In particular, the development and triumph
of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, 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 The History of Sexuality, Hannah Arendt had
already analyzed the process that brings homo laborans— and, with it, biological
life as such—gradually to occupy the very center of the political scene of moder-
nity. In The Human Condition, Arendt attributes the transformation and decadence of the political realm in modern societies to this very primacy of natural
life over political action. That Foucault was able to begin his study of biopolitics
with no reference to Arendt’s work (which remains, even today, practically with-
out continuation) bears witness to the difficulties and resistances that thinking
had to encounter in this area. And it is most likely these very difficulties that ac-
count for the curious fact that Arendt establishes no connection between her re-
search in The Human Condition and the penetrating analyses she had previously
devoted to totalitarian power (in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether
lacking), and that Foucault, in just as striking a fashion, never dwelt on the ex-
emplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure
of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.
Foucault’s death kept him from showing how he would have developed
the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoē
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. It is even likely that if pol-
itics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics
has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The “enigmas”
(Furet, L’Allemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remain 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/pub-
lic, 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. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault’s and Benjamin’s sug-
gestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link
8
HOMO SACER I
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 its practical calling.
One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive aban-
donment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based
on juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of
the State), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which
power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life. As shown by a seminar
held in 1982 at the University of Vermont, in his final years Foucault seemed to
orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one
hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals
into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the
self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself
to his own identity and consciousness and,
at the same time, to an external
power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Fou-
cault’s work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back
to a common center. In one of his last writings, Foucault argues that the mod-
ern Western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with
procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks
of a real “political ‘double bind,’ constituted by individualization and the simul-
taneous totalization of structures of modern power” ( Dits et écrits, 4: 229–32).
Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely
unclear in Foucault’s work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Fou-
cault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If
Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is
exclusively based on juridical models (“What legitimates power?”) or on institu-
tional models (“What is the State?”), and if he calls for a “liberation from the the-
oretical 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? And, more generally, is
there a unitary center in which the political “double bind” finds its raison d’être?
That there is a subjective aspect in the genesis of power was already implicit in
the concept of servitude volontaire in Étienne de La Boétie. But what is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective
power? Can one be content, in such a delicate area, with psychological explana-
HOMO SACER
9
tions such as the suggestive notion of a parallelism between external and internal
neuroses? Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the
spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate
or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart?
Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically im-
plicit in Foucault’s work, it remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher,
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 1
