The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  epidemics (which is just as clear an example of an undecidability between poli-

  tics and biology).

  It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones

  of indistinction, that the ways and the forms of a new politics must be thought.

  At the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, having distanced himself from the sex and sexuality in which modernity, caught in nothing other than

  a deployment of power, believed it would find its own secret and liberation,

  Foucault alludes to a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” as a possible

  horizon for a different politics. The conclusions of our study force us to be more

  cautious. Like the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the “body” too

  is always already caught in a deployment of power. The “body” is always already

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  153

  a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its plea-

  sure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of

  sovereign power. In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last

  incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life. In the person of the Führer,

  bare life passes immediately into law, just as in the person of the camp inhabitant

  (or the neomort) law becomes indistinguishable from biological life. Today a law

  that seeks to transform itself wholly into life is more and more confronted with

  a life that has been deadened and mortified into juridical rule. Every attempt to

  rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that

  we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoē and bios,

  between private life and political existence, berween man as a simple living being

  at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city. This is why the

  restoration of classical political categories proposed by Leo Strauss and, in a dif-

  ferent sense, by Hannah Arendt can have only a critical sense. There is no return

  from the camps to classical politics. In the camps, city and house became indis-

  tinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our biological body

  and our political body—between what is incommunicable and mute and what is

  communicable and sayable—was taken from us forever. And we are not only, in

  Foucault’s words, animals whose life as living beings is at issue in their politics,

  but also—inversely—citizens whose very politics is at issue in their natural body.

  Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to

  its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body—a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body—in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve

  the interlacement of zoē and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed

  into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly

  exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē. Here attention will also have to be given to the analogies between politics and the epochal situation

  of metaphysics. Today bios lies in zoē exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies ( liegt) in existence. Yet how can a bios be only its own zoē, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplōs that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life

  to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its

  own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field

  of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and phi-

  losophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence. First, however, it will

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  be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like a bare life to be

  conceived within these disciplines, and how the historical development of these

  very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture

  without risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe.

  Bibliography

  Translator’s note: The bibliography contains only those works cited in the text. In the case of works not originally published in English, the translations listed below were consulted; but all passages quoted in the text have been newly translated. Page references refer to works as they are first listed here.

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