The End of Bare Life?

Abstract

Since Giorgio Agamben's influential critique of the liberal-democratic state, scholars have offered a more fulsome engagement with the ways that this formation extends Foucauldian biopolitical discourses by foregrounding the emergence of biological existence as “the new political subject.” InHomo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare LifeAgamben argues that it is impossible to understand the development, vocation, and contradictions of the modern state “if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject, but, above all, man's bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested in the principle of sovereignty.” Bare or pure life is the human as animal in nature without political definition or mediation. It is the isolation of the metaphysical from the various forms of concrete life that defines and conditions Western politics. Projects that imagine political communities as grounded in belonging or endeavor to found political rights in the citizen are in vain. The figure of thehomo sacer – the “sacred man” who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” – is one of the most distinctive elements of Agamben's project of redefining sovereignty in biopolitical terms. Contra notions of collective political sovereignty as the basis of state politics, the figure of thehomo sacerattends to a more authoritarian model that pivots on the role of state authorities in simultaneously conditioning and dis/avowing the movement from bare life to rights-bearing subject.