Agamben, “Bare Life,” and Archaic Greek Poetry

Abstract

In this article, I take up the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose biopolitical theories, and in particular, the idea of “bare life,” are widely adduced in contemporary, morally charged discussions of politics, immigration studies, and the marginalization of various social groups. Agamben builds his ideas upon a reading of Aristotle, but I argue that his identification of Aristotle as the ur-source of biopolitical thinking misses an earlier moralizing discourse found in archaic Greek literary sources. I analyze passages of archaic epic and iambic poetry that describe proto-biopolitical moments before suggesting that the Ionian pharmakos ritual represents an early example of working with something like Agamben’s “bare life.” Biopolitics requires the logistics and technical infrastructure of an advanced civic bureaucracy, but the narrative fantasy of a community cohering around the abjection of select members of the group can be found already in the moralizing strategies of archaic Greek biopoetics.