Giorgio Agamben |
Much of Giorgio Agamben's work
since the 1980s can be viewed to leading up to the so-called Homo Sacer-project, that properly
begins with the book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this series of works,
Agamben responds to Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics.
In his main work "Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an
obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature
of law and power in general.
Under the Roman Empire, a man
who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his
rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be
killed by anybody, while his life on the other hand was deemed
"sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.
Roman law no longer applied to
someone deemed a Homo sacer, although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben
defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the
form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer
was therefore excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time.
This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (basileus) — a king, emperor, or president — who stands, on the one
hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural
person) and outside of the law (since as a body
politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).
Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign
as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely
"suspended" without being abrogated. But if Schmitt's aim is to
include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on
the contrary demonstrates that all life cannot be subsumed by law. As in Homo
sacer, the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the
juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.
Since its origins,
Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" — zoe (Gk. ζωή), as opposed to bios (Gk. βίος): qualified life — is, by making this
exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it
the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate
"political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has
carried on from Antiquity to Modernity — from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz.
Aristotle, as Agamben
notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of
"bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (Gk. ζῆν,
zen), but existing with regard to the good life (εὖ ζῆν,
eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this
ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the
State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is
supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included
precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life".
Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which
determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord
with its bios) by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception)
of what is to remain outside of the political body—which is at the same time
the source of that body's composition (zoe). According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens
into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but
has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since
this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of
sovereignty.
Agamben would
continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life",
ultimately leading to the "State
of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture at European Graduate School at describing the eclipse
that politics has undergone. Instead of leaving a space between law and life,
the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute
politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the
state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship
between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state
of exception for humanity to act against the State.
State of Exception
(2005)
In this book, Giorgio
Agamben traces the concept of 'state of exception'
(Ausnahmezustand) used by Carl Schmitt to Roman justitium and auctoritas. This leads him to a response to
Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power
to proclaim the exception.
Agamben’s text State
of Exception investigates the increase of power by governments employed in
supposed times of crisis. Within a state of emergency, Agamben refers to the
states of exception, where constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded
and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a
government.
The state of
exception invests one person or government with the power and voice of
authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the
past. “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic
and praxis blur with
each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an
enunciation without any real reference" (Agamben, pg 40). Agamben refers a
continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler’s rule.
“The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted
twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the
establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that
allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of
entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the
political system" (Agamben, pg 2).
The political power
over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government — or
one form or branch of government — as all powerful, operating outside of the
laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall
be privileged and accepted as true and certain voices shall be heard as valued,
while of course, many others are not. This oppressive distinction holds great
importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both
acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within
a time of crisis.
Agamben’s State of Exception investigates
how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a
prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this
prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their
citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President George
W. Bush on 13 November 2001, Agamben writes, “What is new about President
Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual,
thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the
Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the
Geneva Convention,
they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to
American laws" (Agamben, pg 3). Many of the individuals captured in
Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantánamo Bay
without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until 7 July 2006, these
individuals had been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions by the United
States administration.
The reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main
threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of a homo sacer, reduced
to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept of the homo
sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between 'bare life' (la vita
nuda, Gk. ζωή: zoê) and 'a particular mode of life' or 'qualified life.' In
Part III, section 7 of Homo Sacer, “The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern”, he
evokes the concentration camps of World War II. “The camp is the space that is
opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” Agamben says
that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical
concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those
events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The
conditions in the camps were "conditio inhumana," and the
incarcerated somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the
exception laws of Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such
as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal
subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct.
A Nazi officer poses next to dead bodies of tortured Jews in Auschwitz, the German concentration camp |
In United States criminal law,
people accused of committing crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate
themselves verbally, but can be compelled to incriminate themselves
physically.” In the process of creating a state of exception these effects can
compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of
committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his voice
and represent themselves. The individual can not only be deprived of their
citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. “Agamben
identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life.” Within
the state of exception, the distinction between bios (citizen) and zoe (homo
sacer) is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue
that Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the
concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9–11.
Agamben mentions that basic
universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and
sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws. In reaction to the
removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on
hunger strikes. Within a state of
exception, when a detainee is placed outside of the law, he is according to
Agamben, reduced to 'bare life' in the eyes of the judicial powers.
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