Presentation: Homo Sacer: Introduction and Part 3

Suzanne Becker
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
9 February 2016

• Ancient West (mostly with reference to Aristotle), the sovereign ruler and activity of political life was termed bios, while bare life other than political was called zoē.

  bios

  the form or way of living proper to an individual or group

  zoē

  the simple act of living common to all living beings

• Aristotle's Politics: Man is born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life
  • Bios, life in the polis (the city), is where men learn the fundamentals of a virtuous good life.
  • Other people participate in the realm of zoē, bare life, including necessities of living at home excluded from the political realm.
• Foucault: analyzed modern biopolitics, two research lines:
  1. Political techniques with the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its center.
  2. Technologies of the self and processes of subjectivization connecting the individual to external power.
• Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
• Perhaps the original activity of sovereign power: production of a biopolitical body
• Homo Sacer: who may be killed but not sacrificed
• The homo sacer is in a state of exception to the state. The sovereign is in a state of exception symmetrical to homo sacer: sovereign power designates the limit of bare life; homo sacer has no political or religious rights or benefits.
  • A sovereign creates its own power.
  • In the single man it was justified by explicitly transcendent sources, in the democracy following the French declaration of independence, it is justified by rights belonging to the citizen.
• Modern democracy seeks the bios of zoē

Timeline

1679

Writ of habeus corpus: right for imprisoned body to stand trial to petition freedom seen as foundation of modern democracy, according to Agamben: makes bare life the new political subject.

1789

Declaration of the Rights of Man: bare life became the source and bearer of rights. The citizen is part of the state, which preserves rights.

1914–1918

First World War: unrest, increase of denationalized, denationalization processes. Birth-state link disrupted.

1920

Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived published by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche. Represented the first juridical articulation of the fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity according to Agamben.

1933

Nazi eugenics program, already active elsewhere, including US (and especially California).

1942

National Socialists description of population as living wealth.

The Camp

• Once the state of exception is affirmed that allows the camp to exist, it is confirmed in the judicial order, because it is affirmed as a state of exception outside of it.
• In deciding the exception according to Agamben: …the sovereign decision on bare life seems to be displaced from strictly political motivations and areas to a more ambiguous terrain in which the physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles.
• The exception becomes the norm. The State has a state of exception in the form of the camp in Western societies where rights are suspended.
• Hitler's state of emergency, now indefinitely repeated?
• Is bare life already politicized? How can it be understood, and how can we understand the divided structure of the state and its exception(s)?