Categories of Life

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2008) Vol. XLVI

Categories of Life: The Status of the

Camp in Derrida and Agamben
Vernon Cisney
Purdue University

Abstract
This essay is an exploration of the relationship between Agamben’s
1995 text, Homo Sacer, and Derrida’s 1992 “Force of Law” essay.
Agamben attempts to show that the camp, as the topological space of
the state of exception, has become the biopolitical paradigm for
modernity. He draws this conclusion on the basis of a distinction, which
he finds in an essay by Walter Benjamin, between categories of life,
with the “pro-tagonist” of the work being what he calls homo sacer, or
bare life—life that is stripped of its humanity and value. Five years
earlier, in 1990, Derrida had given a lecture at UCLA (later published
in its entirety as “The Force of Law”) in which he had analyzed the
very same essay by Benjamin and had highlighted the distinction
between “base life” and “just life.” The implications of his analysis show
a discomforting prox-imity between Benjaminian messianism and the
Nazi “final solution,” a conclusion that Agamben dismisses entirely. In
this paper, however, I demonstrate that the structures of the two works
are quite similar in many important ways. I argue that, though the
broad scope of Agamben’s work is original in many respects, and I
would not wish to reduce Agamben’s work to Derridean repetitions, he
nevertheless utilizes much more of Derrida’s analysis, specifically with
respect to the categori-zation of life, than he would like the reader to
believe.

If it is safe to assert that the French thought of the 1960s was,

by and large, concerned with a thoroughgoing rethinking of the
concept of difference, 1 it is becoming clearer that the legacy
with which that thought has left us is the penetrating necessity
to reexamine the concept of life. Giorgio Agamben, commenting

Vernon Cisney is currently pursuing his doctoral degree at Purdue

University. He is the author of “Gathering and Contestation: The Place
of Silence in Heidegger and Foucault” in On Language: Analytic,
Continental, and Historical Contributions (Cambridge, 2007). His
research interests include ancient philosophy, phenomenology, and its
relationship to the French philosophy of the late twentieth century.

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on the final essays of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, 2

speaks of “the statement of a legacy that clearly concerns the
coming philosophy, which, to make this inheritance its own, will
have to take its point of departure in the concept of life toward
which the last works of both philosophers gesture.” 3 Perhaps
one of the best examples of this metamorphosis can be seen in
the works of Jacques Derrida. It is well known that Derrida’s
thinking underwent many transformations and revitalizations
through the course of his career, expanding from what begins
early on as a “deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence”
into the realms of theological, literary, and political discourse.
Derrida no doubt surprised his listeners when, in October of
1989, speaking at a colloquium at Cardozo Law School, he said,
“If I were to say that I know nothing more just than what I call
today deconstruction … I know that I would not fail to surprise
or shock not only the determined adversaries of said decon-
struction or of what they imagine under this name, but also the
very people who pass or take themselves to be its partisans or
its practitioners. And so, I will not say it, at least not
directly….”4 Through the course of the lecture, entitled “Force of
Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Derrida carries
out an in-depth reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of
Violence,” in which he draws out what he takes to be a
dangerous distinction having to do with a “higher” or “lower”
form of human life, based on Benjamin’s distinction between
divine violence and mythic violence. This distinction will, by
the end of the essay, lead him to a conclusion that reads in
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” a dangerous, even if not
intentional, possibility of a justification of sorts for the Nazi’s
“final solution.”
Like Derrida, Agamben, a contemporary Italian philosopher,
thinks and writes in various disciplines, transcending tradi-
tional academic boundaries, conversing between literary theory,
political theory, linguistics, aesthetics, and even religious
discourse. Greatly influenced by such diverse figures as Aristotle,
Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, Agamben has no doubt become
one of the more important contributors to contemporary philoso-
phy. And, like Derrida, Agamben states explicitly, in his famous
work, Homo Sacer, that Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” is
indispensable for his thinking of the political. He claims, “In
laying bare the irreducible link uniting violence and law,
Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ proves the necessary and, even
today, indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty.”5
Despite this point, however, any would-be similarities between
the analyses of Derrida and Agamben are not wholly obvious.
Agamben cites Derrida only rarely, and usually only to disagree
with him,6 for instance, referring to his association of Benjaminian
divine violence with the “final solution” as a “peculiar misunder-
standing.” 7 To be sure, the projects diffract based on the two

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analyses: Derrida pointing to the association between divine

violence and the “final solution,” while Agamben, working in the
framework of Foucaultian biopower, argues for his thesis that
the camp has become the biopolitical paradigm for modernity.
For this reason, it is imperative to make clear that this paper in
no way seeks to reduce Agamben’s analyses to the status of
Derridean repetitions.
Nevertheless, the similarities are there and are sometimes
quite striking. Derrida’s elucidation of the distinction between
divine violence and mythic violence, and the accompanying
distinction between “just life” and “mere life” (bloßes Leben),
allows him to discuss a type of violence in Benjamin that is
deemed expiatory and salvific, insofar as it is bloodless, and
from this point Derrida makes the association with the Nazi’s
“final solution.” My contention is that Agamben’s analysis is
structurally similar to Derrida’s, the apparent differences and
disagreements notwithstanding. I cannot assert with any
certainty that Agamben deliberately employs Derrida’s most
insightful discoveries in Benjamin’s essay. However, it is clear
that Agamben wrote extensively about Benjamin prior to 1994,
when the complete French edition of Derrida’s “Force of Law”
essay was published. In none of the essays that I have been able
to locate (including one, published as late as 1992—just three
years prior to the publication of Homo Sacer—that prefigures
many of the themes of Homo Sacer) does Agamben mention his
crucial theme, which he calls the “protagonist” 8 of his book,
namely, bare life (bloßes Leben), the very life drawn out by
Derrida in “Force of Law.” Agamben’s first mention of this
important notion, so far as I can find, is in Homo Sacer in 1995
(in which he also cites, for the first time, “Force of Law”).
Moreover, it is on the basis of this type of life that Agamben is
able to advance his thesis that the camp has become the
biopolitical paradigm of modernity. With this in mind, it seems
plausible that the conclusion of Derrida’s analysis, rather than
being for Agamben a “peculiar misunderstanding,” reveals the
very structure according to which Agamben himself will carry
out his own analysis. The movement of this essay will take
place in two parts. The first will be a discussion of Derrida’s
most important deconstructive observations of Benjamin’s essay,
and the second will lay out the structure of Agamben’s thesis,
thus demonstrating the structural similarities.9

1. And He Reserveth Wrath for His Enemies

Derrida’s motivation in selecting Benjamin’s essay is clear, as
he states, “I believe this uneasy, enigmatic, terribly equivocal text
is haunted in advance … by the theme of radical destruction,
extermination, total annihilation, and first of all the annihilation
of the law, if not of justice….” 10 Derrida notes that Benjamin’s

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“Critique” is not a critique in the sense of a denouncement of

violence but, rather, a performance in delimitation, a restriction
designed to illustrate or point toward the most refined and
effective instantiation of violence. Indeed Benjamin himself
claims, “Since, however, every conceivable solution to human
problems … remains impossible if violence is totally excluded in
principle, the question necessarily arises as to what kinds of
violence exist other than all those envisaged by legal theory.”11
The question is not, for Benjamin, how to abolish violence but,
rather, how to make violence more effective, more just, even
more pure. This is a pursuit, messianic in tone, of a type of
violence beyond the boundaries of human legal theory. Derrida’s
uneasiness with the essay originates in this pursuit.
In the first part of the essay, Derrida draws out the impli-
cations of Benjamin’s very important distinction between
founding violence, which institutes a system of law, and
preserving violence, which maintains and sustains the existing
system. More relevant to our purposes, however, is a later
distinction between mythic violence and divine violence, which,
Derrida claims, “begins the last sequence, the most enigmatic,
the most fascinating and the most profound in the text.”12 The
discussion begins just after the above-cited paragraph in which
Benjamin gestures in the direction of a different type of
violence.
Mythic violence, according to Benjamin, is the Greek mani-
festation of divine violence. This violence establishes, rather
than enforces, a system of law and is realized in the expression
of force for the sake of force. Benjamin uses the story of Niobe
as his model.13 According to Benjamin, Niobe’s offense is not a
“crime” in the sense of a violation of a pre-existing law. Rather,
it is a challenge to fate, an expression of hubris that calls fate
into question, a challenge to which fate must respond, and that
fate must conquer. But the law itself is made manifest only in
the deliverance of violence that, in the same moment, enacts
the law, proclaims Niobe’s guilt, and exacts retribution. Of
course, in the stories, there is a vivid account of the force with
which the blood spews forth from the victims as they perish, an
important point for Benjamin, who notes, “For blood is the
symbol of mere life.” 14 This is crucial because, for Benjamin,
mythic violence is destructive, in the sense that it demands the
violence of murder for the sheer sake of the exercise of force as
a means of its own manifestation. Without the blood, without
the termination of life, mythic violence, for Benjamin, cannot
found a law. As Derrida notes, Benjamin’s emphasis on the
blood of mythic violence cannot be overstated, as it appears to
be the only identifying characteristic that separates mythic
violence from divine violence. Though mythic violence is indeed
destructive, it is not “properly destructive (eigentlich zerstörend),”
meaning that it is not annihilative. Niobe’s life is spared, and

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she is condemned all the more for the fate that befell her
children due to her own hubris.
Insofar as mythic violence establishes a law, it would seem
to be closely akin to what we referred to above as “founding
violence,” and indeed the two are related. However, Benjamin
claims, strictly speaking founding violence is a means to an end
that, in theory, would lay down its arms once the system is in
place. In the case of mythic violence, on the contrary, the
exercise of violence that establishes the system is not pro-
visionary; rather, it defines and is a presupposition of the
system itself. To establish the rule of law is to also establish a
system of power that is intimately connected to the violence
that founded it in the first place. Again, this is not annihilative.
The establishment of law that demarcates one territory from
another, for instance, in some sense leaves the lives and the
rights of the other intact, establishing instead the constant
threat of force in order to maintain respect for the boundaries.
In establishing itself, the system sets up as a matter of
necessity the means of enforcing itself, and the presence of the
enforcer is always haunted by the violence that put it in place.15
In this respect, mythic violence is the manifestation of all legal
violence, referred to above as “founding violence” and “preserving
violence.”
We recall that Benjamin seeks a type of violence that is
beyond this system, beyond the realm of legal violence. Indeed,
it is at this point that, as Derrida notes, the essay assumes an
ominous tone. Benjamin writes, “Far from inaugurating a purer
sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows
itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns
suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the pernicious-
ness of its historical function, the destruction of which becomes
obligatory” (my emphases). 16 This single statement is quite
revelatory. There is, it seems, a type of messianism inherent to
the essay (which is corroborated by some of Benjamin’s other
essays), a certain thirst for purity that demands, perhaps, the
annihilation of the impure and the abolition of all legal violence,
in short, the absolute destruction of everything hitherto called
“law” and “justice.” It is upon the ground of this discovery that
Benjamin opens the discussion for a “pure immediate violence
that might be able to call a halt to mythic violence,”17 embodied
in what Benjamin calls “divine violence.”
Divine violence is, point by point, opposed to mythic violence.
Where mythic violence founds a law, divine violence destroys all
systems of law. Where the former establishes boundaries, the
latter eliminates them. Where the former brings retribution, the
latter brings expiation. The former establishes threat; the latter
strikes without hesitation. Finally, the most important distinc-
tion, the former emphasizes the shedding of blood; the latter
kills without bloodshed. Against the mythic example of Niobe,

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Benjamin positions the Judaic example of the uprising led by

Korah against the authority of Moses. 18 For Benjamin, the
bloodless wrath of God is quite important, as we have already
stated, in that the divine violence of God destroys life, not for the
sheer sake of destruction but, rather, as a means of purgation.
The emphasis on the bloodshed in the Greek mythic tradition
reveals for Benjamin the inherent requirement of the destruc-
tion of life, whereas in the Judaic tradition, the destruction of
life is not carried out by God for its own sake but, rather, for
the preservation and expansion of a higher type of life. As
Benjamin claims, “Mythic violence is bloody power over mere
life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life
for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the
second accepts it.”19
On this foundation Benjamin begins the discussion of the
distinction between types of human life. It would appear that,
given the establishment of the law of God, once the law is in
place, the injunction “Thou shalt not kill”20 would condemn all
human acts of violence or murder. But such is not the case,
according to Benjamin. In fact, Benjamin claims that to hold in
equal esteem all human life, or to assert its sanctity, is “false,
indeed ignoble.” 21 For Benjamin, the distinguishing character-
istic separating humankind from the animals is our capacity for
justice. We are only truly human when we possess and exem-
plify the virtue of justice. Anything less than justice is less than
human, less than existence, strictly speaking, on a par with
animal and plant life. Bare human life, it seems, is no more
sacred than the life of an animal, according to Benjamin. For
this reason, Benjamin claims, “Those who base a condemnation
of all violent killing of one person by another on the command-
ment are therefore mistaken.”22
We should pause briefly to understand where we are. First,
mythic violence, preserving itself with the underlying presup-
position of its own force, is Benjamin’s general term that
applies to all prior and existing kingdoms and systems of law.
Against this impure violence of force stands the pure violence of
God, which kills for the sake of the living. It terminates the life
of those who are less than living, that is, bare life, insofar as
bare life is an unjust form of human life whose presence
contaminates and defiles the purity of the chosen ones. It is
expiatory and totalizing and seeks nothing less than the utter
annihilation of all impurities. Moreover, insofar as the prohibi-
tion of murder is not an absolute condemnation, space is left
open for the possibility that humanity may judge for itself the
cases in which it is appropriate to suspend the Mosaic prohi-
bition, in an exercise of expiation, for the sake of justice.
Benjamin goes so far as to set up what appear to be criteria for
determining whether an act of violence is a manifestation of
mythic or of divine violence. He claims that divine acts of

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violence are defined “not by miracles directly performed by God

but by the expiating moment in them that strikes without
bloodshed, and finally, by the absence of all lawmaking” (my
emphases).23 What defines an act of violence as divine is that it
is (1) expiatory, (2) bloodless, and (3) absent of the law.
But what is ultimately more disturbing and paradoxical,
according to Derrida, is that for Benjamin this structure, this
critique, is the only “philosophy” of history that allows the
totalizing advantage of identifying the historical structure of
mythic violence, and (in a move that is somewhat Hegelian,
close to Marxism, and haunted by a certain messianism) to
think beyond it, “to decide and to cut in history and on the
subject of history.” 24 It is the only philosophy of history that
allows the taking of a stance, of a position. All undecidability
rests on the side of mythic violence. Thus, Derrida claims,
history is on the side of divine violence, in that, as Benjamin
claims, following the destruction of systems of mythic violence,
in the absence of the state, “a new historical epoch is founded.”25
This would appear to bring to a close the meaning of the essay,
but Benjamin goes on, speaking in the conditional with respect
to revolutionary violence. “If,” he claims, “the existence of
violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured,
this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest
manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and
shows by what means” (my emphases). 26 The conditionality of
this statement, argues Derrida, rests not on its inherent
contingency but on the fact that, though all decidability rests
with divine violence, it is a type of decision that is “not acces-
sible to man.”27 Here, he claims, we are dealing with a different
type of undecidability, one that resists our conceptualization. On
the one hand, divine violence is decisive, pure, just, historical,
but on the other hand, it is recognizable, only by its effects, which
are beyond the boundaries of our comprehension. Benjamin
moreover claims that it is “less possible and also less urgent”28
for humankind to determine when pure violence will have been
manifested, as all certainty lies on the side of mythic violence,
but again, this certainty is certain only of its undecidability.
Derrida’s schematic formulation is, “On one side is the decision
without decidable certainty, on the other the certainty of the
undecidable but without decision.”29 Undecidability, in one form
or another, is on both sides of the divine–mythic distinction.
The last few sentences of the essay are quite revelatory. Just
after establishing this dual sense of undecidability, Benjamin
claims, “Once again all the eternal forms are open to pure
divine violence, which myth bastardized with law,” 30 and all
“mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive,’ is
pernicious,” as is “the law-preserving ‘administrative’ violence
that serves it.”31 Law, all law, it seems, is for Benjamin a “bastard”
instantiation of the purity of divine violence, which always

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stands outside the law. Benjamin is perhaps more decided on

the matter than he would have initially liked us to believe. In
the final turn of the essay, he opens the door to violent
revolution: “Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never
the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ violence”
(my emphasis).32 God authorizes the use of divine violence but
does not provide the means. We recall that, just prior to this,
Benjamin proclaimed that revolutionary violence is the highest
type of pure violence available to humankind. But it must
operate outside the law, rather than within (as in the case of a
worker’s strike). It aims at purification, expiation, and libera-
tion from all systems of rule. This epoch, which bears the
signature of God himself, “may be called ‘sovereign’.”
With all of this in mind, Derrida’s association, in his final
move in the essay, between divine violence and the “final
solution” does not seem so outlandish. To be clear, this associa-
tion is not an attempt to cast blame upon Benjamin but, merely,
to point to a dangerous temptation that the language of
Benjamin’s essay leaves open, thus casting a shadow of suspicion
over it. When we think of all that has been said in the course of
this analysis with respect to divine violence—that it is revolu-
tionary, that it strikes without hesitation, that it seeks the
annihilation of impurity, that it is expiatory, that it brings
history to a close and founds a new historical epoch, that its
effects defy human comprehension, that it seeks the radical
destruction of all previously existing systems of law, and above
all, that it seeks the utter annihilation of a lower form of life
without the shedding of blood—it is indeed a difficult associa-
tion to escape. As Derrida states, “When one thinks of the gas
chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion to an exter-
mination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause
one to shudder. One is terrified at the idea of an interpretation
that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an indecipher-
able signature of the just and violent anger of God.”33 And yet, it
is precisely this point that is, for Agamben, a “peculiar misunder-
standing.”34
Though, to be sure, the distinction between “just life” and
“mere life” is there, on the surface of Benjamin’s essay; it is
easily passed over in the overall context of divine violence that
frames it and in the discussion of the important historical
dialectic of systems of law. Benjamin spends not quite one
paragraph dealing with the distinction. Even Foucault, so far
as I can tell, for all of his important and insightful work on
biopower, does not explicitly make this distinction—just life as
opposed to bare life—though he does hint in its direction at
times. 35 If I am not mistaken, Derrida is the first to draw out
the important and disturbing implications of these categories
of life. With that, let us turn to Agamben’s analysis in Homo
Sacer.

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2. To Kill and Not Sacrifice

In Homo Sacer, to be sure, Agamben is in many ways operating
on a different plane than is Derrida. Rather than meticulously
deconstructing Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” Agamben
specifically questions the relationship between sovereignty and
bare life and draws on a wide variety of sources to develop a
contemporary and historically relevant answer to the question.
In a sense, it is an attempt to combine Foucault’s most insight-
ful discoveries in his studies of biopower with Hannah Arendt’s
penetrating analyses of totalitarianism. Despite the breadth of
inspiration, it is clear that Agamben’s analysis is guided largely
by Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” not just in the obvious case
of his “protagonist,” bare life but also in much of what he says
about the structure of sovereignty. My discussion of Agamben
will follow the basic structure of Agamben’s text, drawing out
the three points most relevant to our own discussion, namely,
the paradoxical logic of sovereignty, the life of homo sacer, and
Agamben’s argument for the camp as the nomos of modernity.
As we shall see, what Agamben finds and the conclusion he
draws are structurally very close to Derrida’s most important
conclusions with respect to Benjamin’s essay.
According to Agamben, “The paradox of sovereignty consists
in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and
inside the juridical order.”36 Agamben here follows to the letter
Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty, that “Sovereign is he
who decides on the state of exception.” 37 This paradox can
perhaps be best formulated by saying that the sovereign is, by
law outside the law, always able to suspend the juridical order
in a moment of crisis. The exception, then, is the rule, insofar as
it is the defining characteristic of the sovereign and that which
makes anything on the order of juridical rule possible. The
sovereign power over the state of exception is required in order
for a state to wield power and legitimacy and to demand respect
of its subjects and adversaries. Otherwise, it would have no
means by which it could deal with anomalous situations.
The exception, according to Agamben, is a type of exclusion,
outside the juridical order, as that to which the juridical order,
as such, does not apply. But most noteworthy is that the exclu-
sion is not wholly excluded in the sense of being completely
unrelated to the juridical order. Rather, the exclusion maintains
its relationship to the juridical order, as precisely that which is
outside of it, that which exceeds it. In this way, the outside of
the system is brought to the interior. As Agamben, citing Schmitt,
states, “there is no rule that is applicable to chaos.”38 In order to
address chaos, the juridical order must create a space, a gray
area, a zone of indistinction, in which the two may address each
other. This zone is what he calls the state of exception. The
juridical is suspended in order to address the chaos that consti-

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tutes the exclusion. For this reason, the “sovereign decision on

the exception is the originary juridico-political structure.” 39
From this decision, he determines what falls within, and what
exceeds, the rule of law; thus, in a sense, the entirety of the
juridical order is defined within the exception. Agamben argues
that, this being the case, the law lives off of what it excludes. So
with respect to the question of life itself, this relationship is one
of ban, in which the one who falls outside of the law does not
attain a level of indifference but is in fact actively abandoned
by the law. He exists in the zone of indistinction, neither truly
outside nor inside the juridical order. He is, in a sense, naked in
an indeterminate space, where the terms “life” and “law” do not
apply.
Transitioning into the discussion of homo sacer, Agamben,
once again giving due attention to the influence of Benjamin’s
essay, claims that, ‘“divine violence,’ constitutes the central
problem of every interpretation of the essay.”40 In this particular
section, Agamben himself makes two positive claims about the
status of divine violence. The first is that divine violence
“neither posits nor preserves law, but rather ‘de-poses’ it.”41 The
second claim is that “The violence that Benjamin defines as
divine is instead situated in a zone in which it is no longer
possible to distinguish between exception and rule.” 42 With
these two positive statements, I see little cause to think that he
is very far from Derrida on this reading. And yet, it is at this
stage of the essay that Agamben refers to Derrida’s “peculiar
misunderstanding.” Agamben uses the ambiguities of divine
violence to lead into the discussion of the bearer of guilt, “bare
life,” and to point to the fact that, even in Benjamin’s essay, there
is a conflict in understanding how one ought to see human life,
namely, as sacred or as expendable. It is upon this ground that
he begins to question the relationship, historically speaking,
between the sanctity of life and the notion of “bare life.”
Agamben begins the section by taking up Benjamin’s charge
in the “Critique” to examine the origins of the doctrine of the
sanctity of life. He does so by way of a fragment by Pompeius
Festus, a late second century Roman grammarian who writes
that homo sacer is the man who may be killed but not sacri-
ficed. 43 Agamben immediately admits the counterintuitive
nature of this claim. We typically think of the sacred as that
which must not be defiled, must not be injured, and certainly,
must not be killed. Conversely, if the sacred is to be killed, it is
so in virtue of the fact that it is sacred, which is to say, it is
killed in a sacrificial manner, as an offering to the gods (as in
the case of Abraham and Isaac). But in the case of homo sacer,
the termination of his existence is deemed neither homicide nor
sacrifice. Indeed it is against the law to sacrifice homo sacer.
In the figure of homo sacer, we meet with another zone of
indistinction. Homo sacer is excluded doubly—from human and

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divine law; thus, it occupies a state of exception, just as we saw

in the case of sovereignty. What, after all, is the status of a
human being who can be killed in a way that is neither homicide
nor sacrifice, neither in the boundaries of human law nor in the
boundaries of the divine? This double exclusion, coupled with
the violence to which he is always subject, is what characterizes
homo sacer. This violence itself seems to open up for Agamben a
sphere of human action that is neither secular nor sacred. We
recall that, according to the paradoxical logic of sovereignty, the
sovereign occupies a similar site, in that he is both inside and
outside the law. With all of this in mind, Agamben posits the
notion that there is a deep connection between sovereign power
and homo sacer, which is to say that homo sacer is the life taken
up in the sovereign ban. As Agamben states, “The sovereign
sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without
committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and
sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is
the life that has been captured in this sphere.” 44 So here
Agamben makes explicit what he takes to be the symmetrical
relationship between sovereignty and homo sacer. In other
words, the subject and the object, in this case, sovereign and
homo sacer, are together constituted by the singular act of
founding violence, by which the sovereign determines its I and
its other. Agamben sets up the opposition like so: “the sovereign
is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines
sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men
act as sovereigns.”45
He then draws out another important point, important for
our discussion not only in terms of what it says exactly but in
terms of the brevity of its development. In analyzing the rela-
tionship between sovereignty and bare life, he notes, following a
lead of Foucault,46 that the power over life and death, which in
Latin is rendered vitae necisque potestas, so characteristic of the
sovereign, originates formally in the patria potestas of Roman
law. This right of Roman law expresses the unconditional right
a father possesses over the lives and, if he so desires, the deaths
of his sons. (And by extension, the sovereign possesses this
same power over all subjects, as they are considered his
children.) Referring to an etymological study by Yan Thomas,47
Agamben claims that, in this particular grammatical construc-
tion, vitae necisque potestas, the term vita is used, not disjunc-
tively, as the opposite to necare, but as a corollary. In this sense,
life, in the juridical order, is seen as the counterpart to the
constant threat of death. More importantly, he mentions briefly
Thomas’s statement on the meaning of the necare. In, of all
places, a parenthetical comment that occupies two lines of text,
Agamben, following Thomas, claims that the proper meaning of
necare, strictly speaking, as opposed to mactare, is a death that
takes place without the shedding of blood.48 If I am not mistaken,

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this reference is the only one Agamben makes to a bloodless

death for bare life. But it is not without importance. I can only
wonder why Agamben, so eager to distance himself from Derrida,
would raise, even if only for a moment, a point that Derrida
focuses on so extensively. Sacred man, homo sacer, is he who can
be killed, but without bloodshed, and must never be sacrificed.
Lastly, in our analysis of the life of homo sacer, we see an
association that Agamben points to whereby homo sacer is
brought into proximity with a beast-man. According to an old
Germanic practice, Agamben claims, Germanic law was to be
founded upon peace, and he who violated this peacefulness was
to be banned from the city. There is an etymological connection
between the bandit, he who is without peace, and the werewolf,
in that the word wargus was used in both cases.49 As Agamben
notes, the werewolf, the fact that he is precisely a wolf-man, is
quite significant. He is neither wolf, wholly outside the law, nor
man, under the reign of law, but an indescribable amalgamation
of both. The werewolf lives in the zone of indeterminacy. In this
light, he draws parallels with Hobbes’s notion of the state of
nature, in which Hobbes claims that man is a wolf unto men.
The state of nature is not a supposed prehistorical epoch but,
rather, that which underlies and conditions the very existence
of sovereignty. It constitutes it and dwells constantly within. It
is essentially indistinguishable from what Agamben calls the
state of exception, upon which the ban and the rule are founded.
In other words, despite our insistence on contracts, on free will,
and rights, sovereignty is founded upon the state of exception,
for which the wolf is the paradigmatic figure, and insofar as the
state of exception is the ubiquitous possibility underlying all
sovereignty, the wolf always hides beneath. Another implication,
one that Agamben does not draw out explicitly, is that this
association provides the very rhetoric according to which
sovereignty is able to justify all sorts of methods of cruelty to
others on the grounds that those others are somehow less than
human. Again, we are reminded of Benjamin’s implied claim
that bare life is no more sacred than the life of an animal.
In addressing the question of the status of the camp, Agamben
states clearly at the outset that his analysis will remain on the
level of the formal/theoretical. This is justified in the sense that
he seeks, not the empirical description of the conditions of the
camp, but the juridico-political conditions of possibility that led
to the horrific events that took place in the camps. In other
words, he seeks the very essence of what it means to be a camp.
As I have already indicated, for Agamben, the camp stands as
the nomos of modernity, the biopolitical paradigm that
structures the modern juridical order. Let us briefly look at that
discussion.
The camp, according to Agamben (and I take this to be
uncontroversial), originates in a state of exception. It arises as a

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result of a perceived threat to the juridical order. When this

“threat” assumes an indefinite façade, the state of exception
abandons its temporariness and becomes the rule itself.50 When
the state of exception becomes the rule, the camp is the topo-
logical space that is opened up. But as the structure that we
have already analyzed indicates, the exception, as exclusion, is
not absolute, in the sense of indifference. The exclusion is
included, kept in relation to the rule of law, in its very exclusion.
This is indicative of the fact that what is first taken up into the
juridical order is the very state of exception itself. The sovereign
more fully manifests his own authority on the ban, in such a
way as to make it a permanent fixture, willing and producing
the situation of the state of exception ad infinitum. The camp is
thus a permanent zone of indeterminacy. Its inhabitants are
neither alive nor dead but occupy an indeterminate space. What
took place in the Nazi concentration camps, the atrocities
carried out on its inhabitants, is neither inside nor outside the
law. As Agamben writes, “Whoever entered the camp moved in a
zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and
rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective
right and juridical protection no longer made any sense.” 51
Everything in the camp is truly possible. Agamben makes the
interesting point that “one of the few rules to which the Nazis
constantly adhered during the course of the ‘Final Solution’ was
that Jews could be sent to the extermination camps only after
they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the
residual citizenship left to them after the Nuremberg laws).”52
This reduction to bare life was the “justification” for the Nazi
party that deprived the Jew of the protection of law, that placed
them in the zone of indistinction. In this sense, every event
within the camp is an enactment of the Nazi decision on the
status of bare life. The elimination of the Jewish people is the
constitution of the German people, in the state of exception. For
this reason, the juridical order and bare life themselves enter
into a zone of indistinction.
With this move, Agamben argues, he has identified the
essence of the camp. If the camp, he claims, “consists in the
materialization of the state of exception, and in the subsequent
creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule
enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that
we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time
such a structure is created….”53 For Agamben, the contemporary
experience, the rapid growth of the phenomena of the refugee,
and the growing dissociation of birth and the nation-state,
depriving more and more human beings worldwide of basic
human rights, is evidence that “the camp, which is now securely
lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of
the planet.”54 On Agamben’s understanding, much of the world
has now become bandit, without peace, wandering, lacking a

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home, without national identity, and thus, not quite human,

under the constant rule of the state of exception.

3. Conclusion
Here at the end of our discussion of Derrida and Agamben, it
becomes very clear that the two are not as far apart as Agamben
would like us to think. We recall that, for Derrida, Benjamin’s
notion of divine violence marks a radically revolutionary power
shift in which all previous systems of juridical rule are toppled.
Rather than founding a system of law, divine violence destroys
all law. I can think of no better model to conceive of Agamben’s
notion of the state of exception, as the indefinite suspension of
juridical order, than this revolutionary model of violence. Indeed,
Agamben himself claims that Benjamin’s divine violence is a
zone of indistinction (like the state of exception). Moreover, we
recall that Derrida is the first to draw out the implications of
Benjamin’s model of bare life as a life that is deemed not worth
living, somehow less than human, akin to the status of an
animal. For this reason, I cannot agree with Agamben’s claim
that the “decisive function” of bare life “in the economy of the
essay has until now remained unthought.”55 Agamben also, as we
saw, focuses extensively on the implications of this bare life,
calling him the “protagonist” of his book, and like Derrida, draws
out the lower-than-life understanding that puts bare life in the
category of the wolf, the animal, which, as such, is not worth
saving. We also note the emphasis on the blood. Granted, Derrida
makes much more of this concept than does Agamben, but it is
perhaps for this very reason that Agamben’s use of the concept is
so interesting. In the structure of Agamben’s book, the point of
blood seems almost insignificant. He does nothing else with it,
merely mentioning it in passing. But this prompts one to ask,
why mention it at all? Having read Derrida’s “Force of Law”
essay, I cannot but hear echoes of the expiatory status that
divine violence bestows upon its own actions. Indeed, in both
Derrida and Agamben, this expiatory element is operating. For
Derrida, divine violence seeks the utter annihilation of impuri-
ties, of the lower form of life. In Agamben, as we saw, this
expiation operates in that the annihilation of the Jewish body is
the constitution of the German biopolitical body. The two are
inseparable for Agamben.
As already stated, I cannot assert with certainty that
Agamben is deliberately utilizing Derrida’s structure in his own
analysis. What I can assert is that Agamben had already written
extensively on Benjamin prior to 1994, when “Force of Law” was
released in its totality. The three essays are titled, “Walter
Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemp-
tion” (1982), “Language and History: Linguistic and Historical
Categories in Benjamin’s Thought” (1983), and “The Messiah

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and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin”

(delivered in 1992, published in 1998). 56 Only once in these
three essays does Agamben even mention Benjamin’s “Critique
of Violence,” the essay that, in Homo Sacer, he calls the
“indispensable premise of every inquiry into sovereignty.”57 The
one citation is quite brief, mentioned almost in passing, in the
context of a larger discussion. In none of the essays does he
discuss at all the state of exception (paralleled by Derrida’s
analysis of divine violence) or the concept of bare life. This is
particularly interesting in the case of “The Messiah and the
Sovereign,” insofar as it was written in 1992, just three years
prior to the publication of Homo Sacer, and in many ways, pre-
figures many of the themes of Homo Sacer. (There is an analysis
of Kafka’s “Before the Law” that appears almost verbatim in
Homo Sacer.) Nevertheless, these two crucial elements do not
appear in the essay. I can also assert with some confidence that,
by the time he was writing Homo Sacer, he had read “Force of
Law,” as he in fact cites Derrida’s essay in the course of his
book. Given all of these circumstances, and given how close
Agamben is structurally to Derrida’s analysis, it seems at least
plausible that he is, to a large extent, indebted to Derrida for
his reading of Benjamin.
In the course of this essay, I have not attempted to reduce
Agamben to Derrida nor to undermine the originality of his
work. Indeed, Agamben is addressing many issues and working
within the framework of Foucault, Arendt, Hobbes, Benjamin,
and others who are constantly guiding him. To be sure, much of
the interesting work that he does, drawing out the etymological
relationships between sovereignty, sanctity, and the excluded, is
quite profound and no doubt very important. I have merely
attempted to show that, despite Agamben’s frequent attempts to
distance himself from Derrida and from deconstruction, it
seems clear that in many ways, he is using to his advantage
some of Derrida’s most important discoveries in the realm of
political discourse. Ultimately undeniable is that both Derrida
and Agamben, each in his own way, brings to light important
observations with respect to the question of the human, obser-
vations that may, if pursued, inspire us to never cease chal-
lenging established parameters, inquiring always as to what it
means to be a living human being. As Agamben writes, “This
inquiry, we may already state, will demonstrate that ‘life’ is not
a medical and scientific notion but a philosophical, political, and
theological concept, and that many of the categories of our philo-
sophical tradition must therefore be rethought accordingly.”58

Notes
1
See Todd May, Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas,
and Deleuze (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University

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 Vernon Cisney

Press, 1997). Though May contends that Foucault does not privilege
difference, I would argue that Foucault’s essay, “The Thought From
Outside,” demonstrates a contradiction to that claim and marks a
thread of thinking that can be traced throughout Foucault’s work. See
Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside,”
Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New
York: Zone Books, 1990).
2
These texts are, respectively, Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A
Life,” Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New
York: Zone Books, 2001), and Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and
Science,” trans. Carolyn Fawcett with Robert Cohen, Essential Works
of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume II: Aesthetics, Method, and Episte-
mology, ed. James Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The
New Press, 1998).
3
Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220.
4
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority,” trans. Mary Quaintance, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar
(New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 249.
5
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998), 63.
6
It is also noteworthy that Derrida, so far as I can find, men-
tions Agamben only one time. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two
Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 24.
7
Ibid., 64.
8
Ibid., 8.
9
The following texts were consulted in writing this essay: Robert
Bernasconi, “Politics beyond Humanism: Mandela and the Struggle
against Apartheid,” Working through Derrida, ed. Gary Madison
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993); Michael Naas,
Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Decon-
struction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); John
Llewelyn, “Responsibility with Indecidability,” Derrida: A Critical
Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992);
Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996); Anselm Haverkamp, “Anagrammatics of
Violence: The Benjaminian Ground of Homo Sacer,” Politics, Meta-
physics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,” ed.
Andrew Norris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005);
Rainer Maria Kiesow, “Law and Life,” Politics, Metaphysics, and
Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,” ed. Andrew Norris
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Adam
Thurschwell, “Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of
Derrida,” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio
Agamben’s Homo Sacer,” ed. Andrew Norris (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2005); Adam Thurschwell, “Specters of
Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in
Agamben and Derrida,” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003); Leonard
Lawlor, “Political Risks: On Derrida’s Notion of Différance,” Research
in Phenomenology 21 (1991): 81–96; Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and
Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington and

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 Categories of Life

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); Leonard Lawlor,

Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003);
Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New
Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); David
E. Johnson, “As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265–90; and Devin
Zane Shaw, “The Absence of Evidence Is Not the Evidence of Absence:
Biopolitics and the State of Exception,” Radical Philosophy Today,
Volume 4: Philosophy Against Empire, ed. Tony Smith and Harry van
der Linden (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center,
2006).
10
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 258.
11
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott,
in Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1996), 247.
12
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 287.
13
Niobe, according to the story, angered the goddess Leto on the
day of the feast, comparing Leto’s children, Apollo and Artemis,
unfavorably to her own fourteen children. Leto reacted, ordering her
children to kill Niobe’s offspring, an order they carried out, firing
poisoned arrows into the children as they practiced their physical
training.
14
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. This is also an important
claim for early Judaism, which in many passages in the Old Testa-
ment, prohibits the consumption of blood, specifically in the case of
animal sacrifice, on the grounds that it is the life of the animal and,
as such, is to be offered to God and not consumed by man. See, for
example, Leviticus 17:10–12.
15
It should be noted that one of Derrida’s tasks in initially laying
out the distinction between “founding violence” and “preserving
violence” was to, in fact, deconstruct that very distinction, positing
what he calls a “differential contamination” between the two. Derrida,
“Force of Law,” 272.
16
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249.
17
Ibid.
18
The story is found in the book of Numbers, chapter 16. In the
story, God creates a chasm in the earth that opens to swallow not
only Korah and his two accomplices but also their wives and children
and anyone associated with them. Immediately following this action,
fire consumes the 250 men who burned incense on behalf of Korah.
And this is but one example—there are numerous other stories of the
wrath of God being poured out in a bloodless manner: in a great
destructive flood; in a hail of fire, like the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah; or in some sort of earthquake that sunders the earth and
swallows the damned.
19
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250.
20
Exodus 20:13.
21
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 251.
22
Ibid., 250.
23
Ibid.
24
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 289.
25
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252.

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26
Ibid.
27
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 291.
28
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252.
29
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 291.
30
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 252.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 298.
34
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 63.
35
Clearly Foucault’s thought can be seen as a constant, ongoing
reflection on the question of life, and I do not wish to deny that fact.
Nor do I wish to say that such a distinction is not, on some levels,
operating in Foucault’s work, specifically with respect to biopower.
For example, “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign
who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of
everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have
become vital.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),
137. This seems to presuppose a type of life or a people worth saving,
and a type of life or a people that must be stamped out in order to
secure that end. The main point I am trying to make is that Foucault
does not so much make explicit this distinction and, hence, does not
completely think through the ramifications. It may be for this very
reason that, as Agamben notes, “Foucault never brought his insights
to bear on what could well have appeared to be the exemplary place
of modern biopolitics: the politics of the great totalitarian states of
the twentieth century.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 119.
36
Ibid., 15.
37
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept
of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985). Cited in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 11.
38
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 63.
41
Ibid., 64.
42
Ibid., 65.
43
Ibid., 71.
44
Ibid., 83.
45
Ibid., 84.
46
Foucault, History of Sexuality, 135.
47
Yan Thomas, “Vita necisque potestas: Le père, la cité, la mort,”
in Du châtiment das la cité: Supplices corporels et peine de mort dans
le monde antique (Rome: L’École française de Rome, 1984).
48
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 87.
49
Ibid., 104.
50
Indeed it is eerie to think of the war for “infinite justice”
against the “forces of evil,” in which we Americans are currently
engaged.
51
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 170.
52
Ibid., 132.
53
Ibid., 174.
54
Ibid., 176.
55
Ibid., 65.

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56
All three of these essays are available in Giorgio Agamben,
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
57
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 63.
58
Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 239.

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