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Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

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The obscurity embedded in the Roman Law that declared one who was condemned to death "sacred" is never really clarified here. It is better and more succinctly described in _Means Without Ends_.
In this is book, Agamben soberly traces the origin of the single most deracinating event in human history: the Holocaust. Soberly, because Agamben sees the Holocaust not as an anomaly, but as an unavoidable consequence given the political origin of the West. But this book is not so much about the Holocaust per se, but about the various historical interventions concerning the notion of the Sovereign that wove the matrix of Western politics into what it became capable of in the 20th century.
The locus of Agamben's view of modernity is the (concentration) camp. Agamben stresses the fact that the camp is not only a place where the unspeakable takes place but more importantly and fundamentally where a human being is stripped "Naked", stripped of 'bios' and exposed as mere 'zoe', such that anything--including the unspeakable--CAN be done to him since nothing could be considered a criminal act. The camp, according to Agamben, is "the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule."
Agamben argues that the camp is the new biopolitical NOMOS of the planet by connecting the dots that Carl Schmitt first drew but left unconnected. Closer to the homefront, Agamben's meditation ultimately takes us to see the totalitarian implications behind those "gated communities" in the US today, and the impossibility of dying without the State's approval. If a good life is hinged on the hope of a good death, should the State define and decide who shall get "good death" (euthanasia)?

When all politics is about life, the shadow of death disappears. At this point life itself, despite its glory, is in terrible danger of burning up in this high-noon of the political world. Putting this point less obliquely one might say, with Giorgio Agamben in his Homo Sacer, that a world which is increasingly concerned with ridding itself of any political value except that of serving the exigencies which are thrown up by the brute fact of maintaining biological human life is a world which is dangerously unstable. The danger may lie in either of two directions. The first is that the emergence of a strong political value which co-opts a vision of the importance of biological human life but redefines the borders of 'human' gains an immediate political legitimacy in 'cleansing' the political populace of what become cast as simply vermin. The second danger is that the lack of political value apart from life itself leaves a space wherin 'life itself' increasingly begs definition, and with this definition arrive categories of life regarded as less valuable and, ultimately, as 'life not worth living'. Both of these features can be recognised as elements of the political program of National Socialist Germany. Agamben, untypically, sees Nazi Germany not as a historical abberation, but rather as an extreme case of what characterises all Western political systems and which springs from 'politics' itself, rather than any particular playing out of a political scheme. This is the condition of 'biopolitics', the condition of life as valuable or not within an overall scheme of governance. This condition reaches its paradigm expression in 'the camp', where life is usable or expendable outside the restraints of any legal structure. The argumentation in this book is very complex and opaque. The reader is not helped by the fact that such central concepts as 'sacred' and 'biopolitics' are extensively reworked from the way in which they are generally used in social science literature at this time, without this fact being signposted or even acknowledged. Furthermore, the overall argument relies on a heady admixture of classical philosophy, politics, linguistics and ethology. The ground which is covered is galloped over, rather than taken at walking pace, and the whole trip is not for the faint-hearted. The novelty of the argument, however, which links liberal democracy to totalitarian government merits detailed examination in that it reanimates basic political theoretical discussion in a field which is in danger of stagnation around the notion of the victory of liberal democracy. The only other writer who is engaged in a similar task from a similar perspective of what might be termed 'Grand Political Theory', and with comparable intellectual resources, is Antonio Negri - another Italian left-wing scholar. These two writers mark an attempt to re-invent theoretical politics, and for anyone with a serious interest in this field Homo Sacer is necessary, if not easy, reading.

This book is part of an extraordinary, multi-volume project. And part of an on-going effort to continue thinking with Foucault, Deleuze, and Benjamin at the final point of their work (when it was interrupted by their untimely deaths).

However, to respond to one of the other reviewers: the comparison of William Haver with Agamben is completely off-base. Haver cannot hold a candle to Agamben. Agamben is patiently fleshing out the contours of an important, but little understood or acknowledged concept: the state of exception. Haver is a careeer academic who writes and publishes in order to get and keep tenure. Comparing them is patently absurd.

This book is almost perfect. Agamben discusses facts that no one else does. And puts it all in a sober Lacanian package that any self-respecting theorist will have to admire. He is literally the new Foucault.

I have one reservation. That's on his conclusion that the world has become a death camp. When it comes to the political sacred, this is mostly right on. But the world is going to look a lot more like the kind of camp through which the subhumans of World War II were processed when the religious sacred catches up....

I just wish to add the name of another brilliant writer who is covering similar territory re: biopower; war; links between liberal-humanism, democracy & fascism; mass death, and other such cheerful topics. His writings are difficult, with many references to Lacan. But in reality, his arguments -- his interventions -- can often stand without the support of Lacanian analyses. I know this because I was a student of his at Binghamton University (SUNY).

As his student, I read Negri a full 10 years before the publication of 'Empire', and I've recently noticed that his teaching has generated at least one successful American academic specialist on Negri, as well as specialists in other very original areas of study.

The name of this exceptional teacher, thinker and scholar is William Haver. He publishes in Japan as well as the U.S. Most of his publications consist of articles and essays in journals and anthologies. But he does have a book available here at Amazon and other major stores -- 'The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS' Stanford University Press. December 1996. (Paperback & hardcover available; it has a cover you will not forget.)

Find his articles, read his book, and find his contributions to other books. He ranks with the great social critics and theorists of our times. Really.

I'm responding to the reader from Korea below who requested a more concise explanation of why the homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. I haven't read this book, but I have read two articles ("Form-of-Life" and "Beyond Human Rights") by Agamben in the collection edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt called Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). These are excellent, concise articles which I recommend without reservation, and may be a good introduction to the "homo sacer."

Agamben writes: "Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of State-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history. We should not forget that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps - concentration camps - extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation. One of the few rules the Nazis constantly obeyed throughout the course of the 'final solution' was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg laws). When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when humans are tuly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in ancient Roman law: doomed to death."

The obscurity embedded in the Roman Law that declared one who was condemned to death "sacred" is never really clarified here. It is better and more succinctly described in _Means Without Ends_.
In this is book, Agamben soberly traces the origin of the single most deracinating event in human history: the Holocaust. Soberly, because Agamben sees the Holocaust not as an anomaly, but as an unavoidable consequence given the political origin of the West. But this book is not so much about the Holocaust per se, but about the various historical interventions concerning the notion of the Sovereign that wove the matrix of Western politics into what it became capable of in the 20th century.
The locus of Agamben's view of modernity is the (concentration) camp. Agamben stresses the fact that the camp is not only a place where the unspeakable takes place but more importantly and fundamentally where a human being is stripped "Naked", stripped of 'bios' and exposed as mere 'zoe', such that anything--including the unspeakable--CAN be done to him since nothing could be considered a criminal act. The camp, according to Agamben, is "the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule."
Agamben argues that the camp is the new biopolitical NOMOS of the planet by connecting the dots that Carl Schmitt first drew but left unconnected. Closer to the homefront, Agamben's meditation ultimately takes us to see the totalitarian implications behind those "gated communities" in the US today, and the impossibility of dying without the State's approval. If a good life is hinged on the hope of a good death, should the State define and decide who shall get "good death" (euthanasia)?

This book is a key text in the work of Giorgio Agamben and holds a special place in the growing cult surrounding him today, but like Remnants of Auschwitz that follows it, is deeply flawed and must be read with caution. Certainly worth reading, but not to be approached uncritically (as on display in the review below). D. LaCapra has recently written a cogent critique of Agamben's appropriation of the standpoint of the victims, essentially robbing them of their own voices and conflating their position with that of the perpetrators's in what Primo Levi termed the "grey zone", simply to further his own discourse (albeit an original one) on the Sublime (what LaCapra calls the "Traumatic Sublime"). Look for LaCapra (and a growing number of critics focusing upon Agamben's work, which is one of the latest fads in Academia) to balance this text. By all means read it; but maintain a critical distance (again, unlike the slavish "review" below, which is an attack on William Haver in the guise of an engagement with Agamben).
To the author of that mean-spirited review (obviously a former, disgruntled student of Haver's--and since I have encountered so few in my long acquaintance with him, I have a feeling I know who it is), I simply respond: Haver is anything but a "career academic writing for tenure" (he already has it) and his thinking, teaching and writing are an inspiration. I agree with the earlier review lauding his work and placing him, rightfully, alongside Hardt and Negri, et al. At any rate, beware Agamben's reading of the Muselmann in Remnants in Auschwitz, which is the logical outcome of his original, but flawed, thesis in Homo Sacer.