Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 199 pages. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. For the first time history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect and to authorize a holocaust. -Michel Foucault qtd. Agamben (1998:3) Sacredness is a line of flight still present contemporary politics, a line that is such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sac7i. -Giorgio Agamben (1998:114-15) Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is one of those books that comes along all too infrequently, unsettling conventional answers and inspiring new questions a range of academic disciplines. We understand that this is a large claim with which to begin, but it is our hope this essay to show the immense range and depth of Agamben's insights and the implications of these insights for anthropologists, historians, legal theorists, sociologists, and others. Indeed, if the rapid commission of translations of Agamben's works are any indication, our prediction of his increasing theoretical influence would seem already the process of being fulfilled.1 Our claims for this text are, fact, matched by Agamben's own ambitious-and apocalyptic-declarations. Homo Sacer began, we are told a cryptic aside, as a response to the bloody mystification of a new planetary order; but soon, in the urgency of catastrophe, Agamben felt the need to confront and revise without reserve a range of terms that are central and seemingly self-evident the social sciences (p. 12). Amongst the points of critique, the sacredness of human and the paradox of sovereign power are at the forefront. Between them, Agamben hopes to do nothing less than reveal the originary and true nature of the modern political realm. His argument, succinctly summarized the concluding chapter of the text, is organized around three main points: 1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 2. The activity of sovereign power is the production of originary political element and threshold of articulation between nature and culture, xoe and bios. 3. Today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the biopolitical paradigm of the (p. 181) The precise meaning of these statements will become clearer the course of our exposition. For now we wish to stress that bare life should not be confused with natural life, is what, Agamben's view, is produced the originary (both original and originating) act of sovereignty.2 The production of this thus establishes a relation that defines the political realm and which Agamben calls, following Jean-Luc Nancy (1993), the relation of ban, or abandonment. Bare is produced and through this act of sovereignty the sense of being included the political realm precisely by virtue of being excluded. And it is this same life, once abandoned by the law at the outskirts of the polis, that has today, according to Agamben, fully entered the polls to the point of rendering outside and inside, and law, truly indistinguishable from one another. It is this way that the concentration camp, for Agamben, has become the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. Our primary purpose this essay is to trace the intellectual genealogies of each of the three claims outlined by Agamben his conclusion. Before we turn to this task, however, some initial remarks further clarifying these claims and their relation to one another will be helpful. …