1

Pallavi Paul

Critical Theory
to Cultural Studies

Introduction- Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life.

-Giorgio Agamben.
-To try and understand Agamben’s theoretical and political endeavor, it would be of
use to start where he ends his introduction to his 1998 book Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life. He says, “In the course of the undertaking it became clear that
one cannot accept as a guarantee any of the notions that the social sciences thought
they had defined or presupposed as evident, and that many of these notions
demanded- in the urgency of catastrophe- to be revised without reserve.”[14]
-Agamben traces in the piece the distinctions that have traditionally been drawn up
between ‘zoe’(which is the simple fact of life/living) and ‘bios’( which he describes
as a qualified, particular way of life). Both Aristotle and Plato, he informs, have
maintained this distinction in their description of various kinds of lives. This
difference between ‘zoe’ and ‘bios’ was so pronounced that to combine their usage in
a single description would have been unimaginable. Further the natural affinity
between ‘bios’ and politic (i.e. the affairs of society more complex than the simple
fact of life) assumed a natural separation between ‘zoe’ and politic. This difference
was upheld according to Agamben in the ‘classical’ world. “ To speak of a zoe
politike of the citizens of Athens would have made no sense” [1]
- Further, “political” was not an attribute of the living being as such but rather a
specific difference that determines the genus zoon( i.e. the difference between
species) [ibid] Man was distinct from animals in that sh/e had the additional capacity
for political existence.[2]
-Michel Foucault, as Agamben notes, in The History of Sexuality writes of the
turning of politics into biopolitics in the Modern era as natural life/ zoe, began to be
included in mechanisms of State power. According to Foucault, the ‘threshold of
biological modernity’ can be traced to the point at which individual, simple, living,
bodies become crucial to political strategies. “What follows is a kind of bestialization
of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques…” [10]
-According to Agamben, it is only when this link between bare life and politics is
interrogated further, that the enigmas of our time (like Nazism) can start to make
sense to us. Further it is this blurring that is the ‘foundational and decisive event of
modernity’[ibid] and signals the need to radically rework the political-philosophical
categories of classical thought. It is the “bio-political horizon”[ibid] then that can help
one make sense of this modernity.
-Tracing the two lines of thought in Foucault’s work, Agamben delineates his ideas of
‘political techniques’ (the ways by which the State integrates natural life of
individuals) and ‘technologies of the self’ (by which the individual through processes
of subjectivization binds him/herself to an external power). In his last writings,
Agamben informs, Foucault had argued that the “modern Western State has integated
techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to
an unprecedented degree”… “ the political double bind is constituted by
individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power…”
 2
Pallavi Paul

Critical Theory
to Cultural Studies
[11]
- The question that Agamben poses to Foucault’s exposition is that, where can the
zone of intersection between state power and techniques of individualization be
located? Is there a unitary centre where the ‘political double bind’ can truly realize
itself? Finally is it possible and useful to hold subjective technologies and political
techniques apart?
-Agamben argues that in placing bare life within the political realm brings into view
the founding (and concealed) nucleus of sovereign power. In the traditionally
articulated exclusion of bare life from politics, he sees existing an implied inclusion.
To note here is that politics becomes the fundamental structure of Western thought on
which life, and the living being is qualified and the categories of zoe/bios, bare
life/political life, exclusion/inclusion, come into conversation.
-The striking thing then about Modern life, according to Agamben is not what
Foucault pointed out about the impinging of political strategy on individual lives,
because by inclusion/exclusion ‘sacer’/bare life has always existed as the haptic on
the margins of political power. But what can be specifically attributed to Modernity is
the setting in of ‘irreducible indistinction’ between the two. “At once excluding bare
life from and capturing within it political order, the state of exception (emphasis
mine) actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which
the entire political system rested.” [12]
-Agamben also dwells on the internal paradox of modern democracy which drives it
extremely close to totalitarian systems of power. The ‘aporia’ of modern democracy is
that it presents itself as a vindication and liberation of ‘zoe’ but is trying to transform
its own bare life into a way of life. “…it wants to put the freedom and happiness of
men into play in the very place -bare life- that marked their subjection”.[13]
-It is this aporia that places and drives modern democracy to be complicit with its
seeming enemy. The kind of political practice that needs to emerge then, is that
biopolitics that thinks of bare life not as an exception to politics and therefore not in
an exclusion/inclusion relationship with it.
-The idea of sovereignty, is revisited by Agamben and questions are asked of it
afresh. According to him Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as “he who decides on
the state of exception”. Here sovereignty borders on the sphere of life and becomes
undistinguishable from it , further the question of sovereignty was often reduced to
‘who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very
threshold of political power was never called into question.”[14]
-Now when the massive structures are in states of dissolution and “emergency has
become the rule”, questions must be posed afresh.
-Finally, Agamben’s piece is not only an undoing of the distinctions between ‘zoe’
and ‘bios’, but also between any distinctions that hold apart life and its various
manifestations from the multiple and camouflaged strategies of power (which too are
indistinguishable from each other).