The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  * In thirteenth-century Florence, popolo minuto referred to the class of artisans and tradespeople and popolo grasso referred to the commercial classes and bourgeoisie.—Trans.

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  ordering of various arts and trades. But starting with the French Revolution, when it be-

  comes the sole depositary of sovereignty, the people is transformed into an embarrassing

  presence, and misery and exclusion appear for the first time as an altogether intolerable

  scandal. In the modern era, misery and exclusion are not only economic or social concepts

  but eminently political categories (all the economism and “socialism’’ that seem to dom-

  inate modern politics actually have a political—and even a biopolitical—significance).

  In this sense, our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to over-

  come the division dividing the people, to eliminate radically the people that is excluded.

  This attempt brings together, according to different modalities and horizons, Right and

  Left, capitalist countries and socialist countries, which are united in the project—which

  is in the last analysis futile but which has been partially realized in all industrialized countries—of producing a single and undivided people. The obsession with development is as effective as it is in our time because it coincides with the biopolitical project to produce an undivided people.

  The extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new significance

  in this light. As the people that refuses to be integrated into the national political body (it is assumed that every assimilation is actually only simulated), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way. And we must see the extreme phase of the internal struggle that divides People

  and people in the lucid fury with which the German Volk—representative par excellence of the People as a whole political body—sought to eliminate the Jews forever. With the

  Final Solution (which did, not by chance, involve Gypsies and others who could not be

  integrated), Nazism darkly and futilely sought to liberate the political scene of the West from this intolerable shadow in order to produce the German Volk as the people that finally overcame the original biopolitical fracture. (This is why the Nazi leaders so obstinately repeated that in eliminating Jews and Gypsies, they were actually also working for

  the other European peoples.)

  Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between ego and id, one could

  say that modern biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which “Where

  there is bare life, there will have to be a People”—on condition that one immediately add

  that the principle also holds in its inverse formulation: “Where there is a People, there

  will be bare life.” The fracture that was believed to have been overcome by eliminating

  the people (the Jews who are its symbol) thus reproduces itself anew, transforming the

  entire German people into a sacred life consecrated to death, and a biological body that

  must be infinitely purified (through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases). And in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within

  itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third

  World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental bio-

  political fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.

  Threshold

  THREE theses have emerged as provisional conclusions in the course of this

  inquiry:

  1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of

  indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).

  2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life

  as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature

  and culture, zoē and bios.

  3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental bio-

  political paradigm of the West.

  The first of these theses calls into question every theory of the contractual ori-

  gin of state power and, along with it, every attempt to ground political communi-

  ties in something like a “belonging,” whether it be founded on popular, national,

  religious, or any other identity. The second thesis implies that Western politics is a

  biopolitics from the very beginning, and that every attempt to found political liber-

  ties in the rights of the citizen is, therefore, in vain. The third thesis, finally, throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies,

  and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the

  world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare

  life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that

  defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.

  In the syntagm “bare life,” “bare” corresponds to the Greek haplōs, the term by which first philosophy defines pure Being. The isolation of the sphere of pure

  Being, which constitutes the fundamental activity of Western metaphysics, is not

  without analogies with the isolation of bare life in the realm of Western politics.

  What constitutes man as a thinking animal has its exact counterpart in what con-

  stitutes him as a political animal. In the first case, the problem is to isolate pure

  Being ( on haplōs) from the many meanings of the term “Being” (which, according to Aristotle, “is said in many ways”); in the second, what is at stake is the separa-148

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  tion of bare life from the many forms of concrete life. Pure Being, bare life—what

  is contained in these two concepts, such that both the metaphysics and the poli-

  tics of the West find their foundation and sense in them and in them alone? What

  is the link between the two constitutive processes by which metaphysics and pol-

  itics seem, in isolating their proper element, simultaneously to run up against an

  unthinkable limit? For bare life is certainly as indeterminate and impenetrable

  as haplōs Being, and one could say that reason cannot think bare life except as it thinks pure Being, in stupor and in astonishment ( almost astonished, Schelling).

  Yet precisely these two empty and indeterminate concepts seem to safeguard

  the keys to the historico-political destiny of the West. And it may be that only

  if we are able to decipher the political meaning of pure Being will we be able

  to master the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power, just as it

  may be, inversely, that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare

  life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology. Brought to the limit of pure

  Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics (into reality), just as on

  the threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory.

  Georges Dumézil and Károly Kerényi have described the life of the Flamen

  Diale, one of the greatest priests of classical Rome. His life is remarkable in that it is at every moment indistinguishable from the cultic functions that the Flamen

  fulfills.
This is why the Romans said that the Flamen Diale is quotidie feriatus and assiduus sacerdos, that is, in an act of uninterrupted celebration at every instant. Accordingly, there is no gesture or detail of his life, the way he dresses or

  the way he walks, that does not have a precise meaning and is not caught in a

  series of functions and meticulously studied effects. As proof of this “assiduity,”

  the Flamen is not allowed to take his emblems off completely even in sleep; the

  hair and nails that are cut from his body must be immediately buried under an

  arbor felix (that is, a tree that is not sacred to the gods of the underworld); in his clothes there can be neither knots nor closed rings, and he cannot swear oaths;

  if he meets a prisoner in fetters while on a stroll, the prisoner’s bonds must be

  undone; he cannot enter into a bower in which vine shoots are hanging; he must

  abstain from raw meat and every kind of leavened flour and successfully avoid

  fava beans, dogs, she-goats, and ivy . . .

  In the life of the Flamen Diale it is not possible to isolate something like

  a bare life. All of the Flamen’s zoē has become bios; private sphere and public function are now absolutely identical. This is why Plutarch (with a formula that

  recalls the Greek and medieval definition of the sovereign as lex animata) can say that he is hōsper empsuchon kai hieron agalma, a sacred living statue.

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  HOMO SACER I

  Let us now observe the life of homo sacer, or of the bandit, the Friedlos, the aquae et igni interdictus, which are in many ways similar. He has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate

  in the rites of his gens, nor (if he has been declared infamis et intestabilis) can he perform any juridically valid act. What is more, his entire existence is reduced to

  a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him

  without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or

  a foreign land. And yet he is in a continuous relationship with the power that

  banished him precisely insofar as he is at every instant exposed to an uncondi-

  tioned threat of death. He is pure zoē, but his zoē is as such caught in the sovereign ban and must reckon with it at every moment, finding the best way to

  elude or deceive it. In this sense, no life, as exiles and bandits know well, is more

  “political” than his.

  Now consider the person of the Führer in the Third Reich. He represents

  the unity and equality of stock of the German people (Schmitt, “Staat,” p. 42).

  His is not a despot’s or a dictator’s authority, which is imposed on the will and

  the persons of the subjects from outside (ibid., pp. 41–42). His power is, rather,

  all the more unlimited insofar as he is identified with the very biological life of

  the German people. By virtue of this identity, his every word is immediately law

  ( Führerworte haben Gesetzkraft, as Eichmann did not tire of repeating at his trial in Jerusalem), and he recognizes himself immediately in his own command ( zu

  seinem Befehl sich bekennenden [Schmitt, “Führertum,” p. 679]). He can certainly

  have a private life, but what defines him as Führer is that his existence as such

  has an immediately political character. Thus while the office of the chancellor of

  the Reich is a public dignitas received on the basis of procedures foreseen in the Weimar constitution, the office of the Führer is no longer an office in the sense

  of traditional public law, but rather something that springs forth without medi-

  ation from his person insofar as it coincides with the life of the German people.

  The Führer is the political form of this life: this is why his word is law and why

  he demands nothing of the German people except what it in truth already is.

  Here the traditional distinction between the sovereign’s political body and

  his physical body (whose genealogy Kantorowicz has patiently reconstructed)

  disappears, and the two bodies are drastically contracted into one. The Führer

  has, so to speak, a whole body that is neither private nor public and whose life is

  in itself supremely political. The Führer’s body is, in other words, situated at the

  point of coincidence between zoē and bios, biological body and political body. In his person, zoē and bios incessantly pass over into each other.

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  Now imagine the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant. Primo Levi

  has described the person who in camp jargon was called “the Muslim,” der

  Muselmann —a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken

  away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic

  (hence the ironical name given to him). He was not only, like his companions,

  excluded from the political and social context to which he once belonged; he was

  not only, as Jewish life that does not deserve to live, destined to a future more or

  less close to death. He no longer belongs to the world of men in any way; he does

  not even belong to the threatened and precarious world of the camp inhabitants

  who have forgotten him from the very beginning. Mute and absolutely alone,

  he has passed into another world without memory and without grief. For him,

  Hölderlin’s statement that “at the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the

  conditions of time and space” holds to the letter.

  What is the life of the Muselmann? Can one say that it is pure zoē? Nothing

  “natural” or “common,” however, is left in him; nothing animal or instinctual

  remains in his life. All his instincts are canceled along with his reason. Antelme

  tells us that the camp inhabitant was no longer capable of distinguishing be-

  tween pangs of cold and the ferocity of the SS. If we apply this statement to the

  Muselmann quite literally (“the cold, SS”), then we can say that he moves in an

  absolute indistinction of fact and law, of life and juridical rule, and of nature and

  politics. Because of this, the guard suddenly seems powerless before him, as if

  struck by the thought that the Muselmann’s behavior—which does not register

  any difference between an order and the cold—might perhaps be a silent form

  of resistance. Here a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life finds itself

  confronted with a life that is absolutely indistinguishable from law, and it is pre-

  cisely this indiscernibility that threatens the lex animata of the camp.

  Paul Rabinow refers to the case of Wilson, the biochemist who decided to

  make his own body and life into a research and experimentation laboratory

  upon discovering that he suffered from leukemia. Since he is accountable only

  to himself, the barriers between ethics and law disappear; scientific research can

  freely and fully coincide with biography. His body is no longer private, since

  it has been transformed into a laboratory; but neither is it public, since only

  insofar as it is his own body can he transgress the limits that morality and law

  put to experimentation. “Experimental life” is the term Rabinow uses to define

  Wilson’s life. It is easy to see that “experimental life” is a bios that has, in a very particular sense, so concentrated itself on its own zoē as to become indistinguishable from it.

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  HOMO SACER I

  We enter the hospital room where the body of Karen Quinlan or the over-

  comatose person is lying,
or where the neomort is waiting for his organs to

  be transplanted. Here biological life—which the machines are keeping func-

  tional by artificial respiration, pumping blood into the arteries, and regulating

  the blood temperature—has been entirely separated from the form of life that

  bore the name Karen Quinlan: here life becomes (or at least seems to become)

  pure zoē. When physiology made its appearance in the history of medical sci-

  ence toward the middle of the seventeenth century, it was defined in relation to

  anatomy, which had dominated the birth and the development of modern med-

  icine. And if anatomy (which was grounded in the dissection of the dead body)

  was the description of inert organs, physiology is “an anatomy in motion,” the

  explanation of the function of organs in the living body. Karen Quinlan’s body

  is really only anatomy in motion, a set of functions whose purpose is no longer

  the life of an organism. Her life is maintained only by means of life-support

  technology and by virtue of a legal decision. It is no longer life, but rather death

  in motion. And yet since life and death are now merely biopolitical concepts,

  as we have seen, Karen Quinlan’s body—which wavers between life and death

  according to the progress of medicine and the changes in legal decisions—is a

  legal being as much as it is a biological being. A law that seeks to decide on life

  is embodied in a life that coincides with death.

  The choice of this brief series of “lives” may seem extreme, if not arbitrary.

  Yet the list could well have continued with cases no less extreme and still more

  familiar: the Bosnian woman at Omarska, a perfect threshold of indistinction

  berween biology and politics, or—in an apparently opposite, yet analogous,

  sense—military interventions on humanitarian grounds, in which war efforts

  are carried out for the sake of biological ends such as nutrition or the care of