The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  or rather something like a vanishing point that the different perspectival lines

  of Foucault’s inquiry (and, more generally, of the entire Western reflection on

  power) converge toward without reaching.

  The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection be-

  tween the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this

  work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two

  analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the politi-

  cal realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power.

  It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State

  therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and

  bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence

  between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse

  spheres) between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.

  If this is true, it will be necessary to reconsider the sense of the Aristotelian

  definition of the polis as the opposition between life ( zēn) and good life ( eu zēn) .

  The opposition is, in fact, at the same time an implication of the first in the sec-

  ond, of bare life in politically qualified life. What remains to be interrogated in

  the Aristotelian definition is not merely—as has been assumed until now—the

  sense, the modes, and the possible articulations of the “good life” as the telos of the political. We must instead ask why Western politics first constitutes itself

  through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. What

  is the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included

  by means of an exclusion?

  The structure of the exception delineated in the first part of this book appears

  from this perspective to be consubstantial with Western politics. In Foucault’s

  statement according to which man was, for Aristotle, a “living animal with the ad-

  ditional capacity for political existence,” it is therefore precisely the meaning of this

  “additional capacity” that must be understood as problematic. The peculiar phrase

  “born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life” can

  be read not only as an implication of being born ( ginomenē) in being ( ousa) , but

  10

  HOMO SACER I

  also as an inclusive exclusion (an exceptio) of zoē in the polis, almost as if politics were the place in which life had to transform itself into good life and in which

  what had to be politicized were always already bare life. In Western politics, bare

  life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.

  It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper

  place of the polis in the transition from voice to language. The link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of man as “the

  living being who has language” seeks in the relation between phonē and logos: Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and

  pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their nature

  has developed to the point of having the sensations of pain and pleasure and of

  signifying the two). But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting

  and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of

  the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings,

  and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city. (1253a, 1o–18)

  The question “In what way does the living being have language?” corre-

  sponds exactly to the question “In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?”

  The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it,

  even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of

  Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation

  between the living being and the logos is realized. In the “politicization” of bare life—the metaphysical task par excellence— the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own

  faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The funda-

  mental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that

  of bare life / political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself

  to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that

  bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

  The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in

  which human life is included in the juridical order [ ordinamento]* solely in the

  * “Order” renders the Italian ordinamento, which carries the sense not only of order but of political and juridical rule, regulation, and system. The word ordinamento is also the Italian translation of Carl Schmitt’s Ordnung. Where the author refers to ordinamento as Ordnung, the English word used is the one chosen by Schmitt’s translators, “ordering.”—Trans.

  HOMO SACER

  11

  form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key

  by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of po-

  litical power will unveil their mysteries. At the same time, however, this ancient

  meaning of the term sacer presents us with the enigma of a figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West. The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected

  or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is

  not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis—which is, in itself, absolutely ancient—nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the

  projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that,

  together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule,

  the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the politi-

  cal order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion

  and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it

  within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very

  separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested.

  When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself

  in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political

  order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation

  from it. Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which

  State power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another

  process is set in motion that
in large measure corresponds to the birth of mod-

  ern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an

  object but as the subject of political power. These processes—which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other—nevertheless

  converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical

  body of humanity.

  If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democ-

  racy, then, it is that modern democracy presents itself from the beginning as a

  vindication and liberation of zoē, and that it is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoē. Hence, too, modern democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—“bare life”—that marked their subjec-

  tion. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights

  and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his dou-

  ble sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To

  become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplish-

  12

  HOMO SACER I

  ments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why de-

  mocracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over

  its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving

  zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.

  Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states

  in post-democratic spectacular societies (which begins to become evident with

  Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord)

  may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democ-

  racy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. Today politics

  knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the

  contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism—which

  transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle—will

  remain stubbornly with us. According to the testimony of Robert Antelme, in

  fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that “calling into

  question the quality of man provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging

  to the human race” ( L’éspèce humaine, p. 11).

  The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism

  (which here we must, with every caution, advance) is obviously not (like Leo

  Strauss’s thesis concerning the secret convergence of the final goals of liberalism

  and communism) a historiographical claim, which would authorize the liqui-

  dation and leveling of the enormous differences that characterize their history

  and their rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a

  historico-philosophical level, since it alone will allow us to orient ourselves in re-

  lation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of the millen-

  nium. This idea alone will make it possible to clear the way for the new politics,

  which remains largely to be invented.

  In contrasting the “beautiful day’’ ( euēmeria) of simple life with the “great difficulty” of political bios in the passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics. The twenty-four centuries that have since gone by have brought only

  provisional and ineffective solutions. In carrying out the metaphysical task that

  has led it more and more to assume the form of a biopolitics, Western politics

  has not succeeded in constructing the link between zoē and bios, between voice and language, that would have healed the fracture. Bare life remains included in

  politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely

  through an exclusion. How is it possible to “politicize” the “natural sweetness” of

  zoē? And first of all, does zoē really need to be politicized, or is politics not already contained in zoē as its most precious center? The biopolitics of both modern

  HOMO SACER

  13

  totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism certainly con-

  stitute answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a completely new politics—

  that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful

  day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the

  perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

  Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty (“Sovereign is he who decides on the

  state of exception”) became a commonplace even before there was any under-

  standing that what was at issue in it was nothing less than the limit concept of

  the doctrine of law and the State, in which sovereignty borders (since every limit

  concept is always the limit between two concepts) on the sphere of life and be-

  comes indistinguishable from it. As long as the form of the State constituted the

  fundamental horizon of all communal life and the political, religious, juridical,

  and economic doctrines that sustained this form were still strong, this “most ex-

  treme sphere” could not truly come to light. The problem of sovereignty was re-

  duced to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain

  powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into

  question. Today, now that the great State structures have entered into a process

  of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the

  rule, the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of

  the form of the State in a new perspective. The weakness of anarchist and Marx-

  ian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure

  and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii aside, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends

  up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and

  the theory of the State (and in particular of the state of exception, which is to

  say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to the

  stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been

  shipwrecked.

  This book, which was originally conceived as a response to the bloody mys-

  tification of a new planetary order, therefore had to reckon with problems—first

  of all that of the sacredness of life—which the author had not, in the beginning,

  foreseen. In the course of the undertaking, however, it became clear that one

  cannot, in such an area, accept as a guarantee any of the notions that the social

  sciences (from jurisprudence to anthropology) thought they had defined or pre-

  supposed as evident, and that many of these notions demanded—in the urgency

  of catastrophe —to be revised without reserve.

  This page intentionally left blank

  PART ONE

  The Logic of Sovereignty

  This page intentionally left blank

  1

  The Paradox of Sover
eignty

  1.1. The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the

  same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is

  truly the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state

  of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own validity, then “the

  sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it, since

  it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto” (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 13). The specification that the sovereign is “at the same time outside and inside the juridical order” (emphasis added) is not insignificant: the

  sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places

  himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can also be formulated this

  way: “the law is outside itself,” or: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law,

  declare that there is nothing outside the law [ che non c’è un fuori legge].”

  The topology implicit in the paradox is worth reflecting upon, since the

  degree to which sovereignty marks the limit (in the double sense of end and

  principle) of the juridical order will become clear only once the structure of the

  paradox is grasped. Schmitt presents this structure as the structure of the excep-

  tion ( Ausnahme):

  The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification,

  but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical formal element: the decision

  in absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question

  of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid. Every general rule

  demands a regular, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and

  which is submitted to its regulations. The rule requires a homogeneous medium.

  This factual regularity is not merely an “external presupposition” that the jurist

  can ignore; it belongs, rather, to the rule’s immanent validity. There is no rule that

  is applicable to chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense.

  A regular situation must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if

  this situation is actually effective. All law is “situational law.” The sovereign cre-