Giorgio Agamben 

(/əˈɡæmbən/; Italian: [aˈɡamben]; born 22 April 1942) is

an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception,
[7]
 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept
of biopolitics (carried forth from the work of Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. since the
World Trade Centre attacks in September 2001, has challenged the wide use of emergency measures for
people control. Indeed, while en route to give lectures at New York University in January 2004, Agamben
became personally involved when, at New York airport, he refused to conform to the US requirement that
visitors provide biometric information to confirm their identity. As a result, Agamben was unable to enter the
United States and had to return to Italy. Agamben has taught at the universities of Verona and Venice in Italy,
and has been a visiting professor at the College de philosophie in Paris, as well as at a number of American
universities, such as the University of California at Irvine. His contributions to political philosophy on the
subjects of life (particularly bare life), sovereignty, power, the law and the exception have now been
recognised as opening up a new era in thinking about politics. During the 1960s, Agamben wrote a thesis on
the political thought of Simone Weil at the University of Rome and, in 1966 and 1968, attended Martin
Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars in Provence, France, on Heraclitus and on Hegel.  During the 1980s, Agamben
edited the Italian edition of Walter Benjamin’s works, and it is Benjamin’s essay, ‘Critique of Violence’, which
has greatly influenced Agamben’s analyses of sovereignty. Always in touch with developments in artistic life,
Agamben played the part of Philip in Pasolini’s film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

Zoe, Bios and Biopolitics

A key distinction maintained as a continual source of reflection by Agamben in his work – one stemming from
Aristotle and classical Greek political thought – is that between zoe– and bios as descriptors of life. Zoe– refers
to life as bare physical survival, including biological reproduction and domestic labour (of the
household: oikos), as well as all the labour required to sustain biological life – the labour that was largely done
by slaves. Zoe– is thus the level of necessity and of means, not that of ends. The latter is the province of bios.
Thus, for classical Greek culture, to remain immured in bare life was to remain at the animal level of necessity,
rather than to achieve a fulfilling way of life as bios: life as freedom and ends.
Bios is the sphere of politics proper – of the polis – the sphere of freedom and the creation of a form of life. It is
the sphere from which slaves, women and children were excluded, as they were part of life as zoe-. They could
not arise to the level of freedom. Hannah Arendt (a key influence on Agamben) even goes so far as to equate the
social domain in its essence with necessity (with means), which implies that purely social activity would be
excluded from the polis (see Arendt 1958: 38–49). Agamben is particularly interested today in the mode of
exclusion of such a category of activity or existence – of zoe- – as the being/activity of bare life.

Those who are banned from the domain of political beings are reduced by the sovereign to life defined
only in terms of zoē (ibid: 183), recognised by the sovereign only as biological beings.

In addition, Agamben is interested in the focus on bare life that emerges in Foucault’s theory of ‘biopolitics’.
First mentioned as early as 1976 in the last chapter of the first volume of the  Histoire de la sexualite´ (Foucault
1976: 183), the term was further elaborated in lectures Foucault gave in Paris at the Colle`ge de France in the
academic year, 1978–79.

Biopower is distinguished for Foucault from sovereign power. This new technology of
power, he argues, ‘has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than
display itself in its murderous splendor’ (1990: 144).

Like the theme of governmentality, biopolitics has become an important aspect of Foucault’s thought, even
though it was never the subject of a full-length book, and is quite different to the approach Foucault later takes
to the history of sexuality, where the individual subject assumes centre stage.
For Foucault, biopolitics arises in the eighteenth century, and is defined as ‘the way attempts were made to
rationalise the problems raised for governmental practice by phenomena proper to a collection of living beings
constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, races’ (Foucault 1989: 109). Agamben sees this
as the emergence, in the political domain, of bare life, after so many centuries of its being excluded. Biopolitics
brings the domain of power and government out of a strictly juridical framework, where, in particular,
Liberalism had placed it, and into the domain of life as the health – in the broadest sense – of populations. For
Agamben, the emergence of the technology of biopower signifies, not a break in the history of Western
politics, but the expansion of the existing biopolitical imperative of the State, as bare life moves from
the periphery to the centre of the State’s concerns, entering in modernity into the political order as the
exception
increasingly becomes the rule (1998: 9).

‘Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State […] does
nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life ’
The production of bare life through the exception, and the preoccupation of State power with the
management of zoē, advance increasingly and in parallel throughout modernity, reaching an apex in
the 20th century as the concentration camp system of the totalitarian State attempted the first ‘normal
and collective […] organization of human life founded solely on bare life’ (ibid: 135).

Homo sacer and Sovereignty

‘Exclusion’ also needs explanation. For what is excluded is invariably included in some way – if we are dealing
with the domain of politics. Biopolitics brings with it the echo of Roman Law, where homo sacer is the one who
cannot be sacrificed (cannot have a definite legal or moral status), yet is the one who can be killed by anyone –
because of this entity’s bare life status.

has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate in
the rites of his gens, nor […] can he perform any juridically valid act. What is more, his entire
existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him
without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. (ibid: 183

 Homo sacer is thus the point of exception that gives the law its capacity to function according to the normal
case. The law needs an outside, external element so as to constitute its internal order. Homo sacer is thus
included in the legal system only by being excluded (in this sense it evokes the membership of set theory, as
discussed by Badiou, where belonging does not entail membership. Homo sacer belongs to the polity without
being a member).
The ‘sacer’ in homo sacer evokes the sacred, but not as sacrifice. Sacrifice entails purification and consecration
prior to the act of killing (the sacrifice). A passage – frequently paraphrased by Agamben, from Emile
Beneveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society (1973), explains exactly what is at stake: ‘A man who is
called sacer is stained with a real pollution which puts him outside human society: contact with him must be
shunned. If someone kills him, this does not count as homicide’ (Benveniste 1973: 453).
Homo sacer, then, is the outcast who can be killed, but not sacrificed. Sacrifice is a ritualised activity and thus
has a quasi-legal status as it is enacted according to forms of the law (Agamben 1998: 102). Homo sacer is
never subjected to ‘sanctioned forms of execution’ (Agamben 1998: 103) Thus, ‘sacer’, in the sense that
Agamben wants to emphasise is ‘bare life’, is ‘zoe-, in the Greek sense, the fact of being alive and nothing more,
the fact of life exposed to death. According to our author, ‘the production of bare life is the originary activity of
sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998: 83). The point is that the sacredness of life is currently claimed to be opposed to
power, whereas homo sacer implies that sacredness is constitutive of power. A symmetry exists between the
two. Sacredness (inclusive exclusion) becomes the original mode of the inclusion (as that which is excluded) of
bare life in the juridical order. Life is sacred only to the extent that it is ‘taken into the sovereign exception’
(Agamben 1998: 85).
Many questions arise about the nature of the relationship between homo sacer, the law and sovereignty in the
complicated history of human, and particularly European, societies, and Agamben addresses a number of these.
He considers, for example, the relationship between religious sentiment and the sacred, the nature of the
sovereign’s body, the connection between Roman law and modern legal forms, the basis, in the foundation of
democracy, of Habeas corpus as a presentation of the (natural) body (Agamben 1998: 124). He also addresses
these questions in his quest to show that sovereignty and bare life are inextricably linked, that vita is not a
juridical concept in Roman law, but is excluded. In answer to the criticism that he is on thin ice when it comes
to legal history, Agamben has claimed in an interview that he is working with paradigms, not taking an
historical or sociological approach (Raulff 2004: 609).1

State of Exception
 in this book, 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. State of Exception
Quite pointedly (for it touches upon post 9/11 politics), a state of exception, which is homo sacer, gives force to
sovereignty. 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, p. 2).

after Carl Schmitt, whose work is also analysed in his more recent work, State of Exception (2005), Agamben
says that the one is sovereign who can determine the state of exception. The paradox of sovereignty is that the
sovereign, like homo sacer, is both ‘outside and inside the juridical order’ (Agamben 1998: 15). According to
Schmitt, Liberalism is unable to understand the true nature of politics because it assumes that, on the whole, the
juridical system will incorporate political events, will anticipate them and so make legal relations the dominant
form of political relations. One should think here of constitutions setting the ground rules of political conduct
and the court system as ensuring that constitutions are adhered to by all parties. Were such circumstances to be
the norm, there would not be any issue of establishing the nature of sovereignty. However, Schmitt argues,
political life is subject as much to the contingent and the unpredictable as it is to any normality anticipated by
the law. The contingent and the unpredictable form the basis of the state of exception. The sovereign must, first
of all, decide when a state of exception exists and, second, decide upon strategies – including the suspension of
normal legal processes – to deal with it. These include, above all, calling a state of emergency. There is thus a
correlation between the sovereign and the exception. The exception has no power as such (for the exception is
determined by the sovereign); however, without the exception, it would be impossible for sovereignty to be and
to maintain itself. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, Agamben invokes the old German term ‘ban’ to describe this
situation (Agamben 1998: 28–29). He who is banned by the law is not simply set outside the law, but is
‘abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside,
become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or
inside the juridical order’ (Agamben 1998: 28–29, Agamben’s emphasis). Thus, the law both posits the
sovereign and makes the sovereign the one who is also outside the law. This is the paradox of sovereignty.

Bare Life:-

‘Exclusion’ also needs explanation. For what is excluded is invariably included in some way – if we are dealing
with the domain of politics. Biopolitics brings with it the echo of Roman Law, where homo sacer is the one who
cannot be sacrificed (cannot have a definite legal or moral status), yet is the one who can be killed by anyone –
because of this entity’s bare life status.

has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate in
the rites of his gens, nor […] can he perform any juridically valid act. What is more, his entire
existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him
without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. (ibid: 183

homo sacer is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (basileus) – a king, emperor, or president
– who stands, on the one hand, within law and outside the law. Giorgio Agamben
mentioning 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
brogated , 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. Agamben opines that laws have always assumed the authority to define "bare life"
– zoe, as opposed to bios, that is 'qualified life' – 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.[39 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 the political
body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition (zoe).[40] 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. 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.

Natural, or bare life is the subject of the French Declaration of 1789, not the free self-conscious individual.
Also, the Declaration separates active rights of the citizen from passive rights acquired by virtue of one’s
humanity. Can passive rights (those acquired simply by virtue of being human) be sustained and defended? The
record is not good when it comes to supporting refugees and stateless people.

Refugees put sovereignty in question because they cannot be classified in terms of ‘blood and soil’, ‘nativity and
nationality’ (cf. the German ‘blood and soil’ and the juridical ius soli and ius sanguinis, from Roman law), but
only in terms of passive human rights (Agamben 1998: 131). The problem is that human rights are linked to the
rights of the citizen. Bare life has no rights.

What is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual cases but – as happens more and more
often today – a mass phenomenon, both these organisations [Bureau Nansen (1922) and the UN High
Commission for Refugees (1951)] and individual states prove themselves, despite their solemn invocations of
the ‘sacred and inalienable’ rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of
confronting it adequately. (Agamben 1998: 133)

The problem concerns the separation of the rights ofman fromthe rights of the citizen. Rwanda is an example
where human life, as sacred, could be killed but not sacrificed.

As Hannah Arendt said, human rights are connected to the fate of the nation-state, and that when the latter
declines, so does the defence of human rights. The implication is that globalisation impacts negatively on human
rights.

Camp:-
A key element of politics for Agamben is that it is a big mistake to see the
Holocaust as sacrifice. Rather, the Jew becomes homo sacer (can be killed by
anyone, but not sacrificed). ‘The dimension in which the extermination took
place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics’ (Agamben 1998: 114). The
work of both Foucault and Arendt is limited, however, to the extent that it
does not include a consideration of the camps. The historical
concentration camp, such as those of the Spanish in Cuba or
the British in South Africa, Agamben writes, were born ‘out of
a state of exception and martial law’ (ibid: 167). The Nazi
concentration camp is the exemplar of the space of the state of exception,
created under the Schutzhaft (protective custody), which allowed for
imprisonment without trial, and had no need for a juridical foundation in
existing institutions. The camp is included in the political system through its
own exclusion. ‘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’ (Agamben 1998: 170). Unlike
previous uses of ‘states of emergency’ based on a factual situation, the camp
is the ‘most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized’ (Agamben
1998: 170) in order to confirm the power of the sovereign. No act committed
against the inmates of the camps could count as a crime. Agamben
locates the camp in such spaces as the Stadio della Vittoria in
Bari to which thousands of Albanian immigrants were
consigned in 1991 before being forcibly deported, and the
Vélodrome d’Hiver where in 1942 Jews were detained
following mass arrests by the French police before being sent
to Auschwitz (ibid: 174). Agamben’s analysis of the process by
which the state of exception has become generalised shows,
however, that our conception of the camp should not be
limited to historico-geographical instances. Rather, the camp,
as the space of the exception, must be understood as an ever-
present condition existing in potential within the political
order.
Today, as politics has been transformed ‘into the realm of
bare life (that is, into a camp)’ (ibid: 120), and the exception
has been realised as a permanent and stable condition, ‘all
citizens can be said […] to appear virtually as homines sacri‘.
Auschwitz
In a separate book, which elaborates on the nature of the camps, Remnants of
Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002) Agamben investigates how
witnessing and thus testimony are possible in relation to the Nazi
concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz. Agamben’s view is that it is
possible and that to deny this is, unconsciously, to accept the Nazi view that
no one would believe the survivors of the camps when they described what
happened. The camps are thus an inexpressible mystical realm. It is also
important to link the camps to law, even if many (including Eichmann)
wanted to put them beyond the law. Using Emile Benveniste’s theory of
enonciation, (enunciating act) which sees subjectivity established in the act of
language, Agamben analyses the category of the Muselmann (Moslem),
described particularly poignantly in Primo Levi’s writings.
The Muselmann is a person in the last stages of survival, on the edge of
death, a person whose status consists of nothing other than being ‘bare life’.
Testimony takes place in the space between the sayable and the unsayable
which captures the position of the Muselmann. Testimony takes place even
though the subject (as in the e´nonciation) is constitutively fractured.
In sum, Agamben argues for the possibility of ‘speaking Auschwitz’, or
bearing witness, against the notion (asserted by the Nazis), that the event is
too monstrous ever to be ‘sayable’. Agamben is for the idea that Auschwitz is
sayable, that there can be a witness: ‘The witness attests to the fact that there
can be testimony because there is an inseparable division and non-
coincidence between the inhuman and the human, the living being and the
speaking being, the Muselmann and the survivor’ (Agamben 2002: 157).
Again: ‘The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely
in the name of an incapacity to speak – that is, in his or her being a subject ’
(Agamben 2002: 158, Agamben’s emphasis). It is a matter of establishing a
monument to the impossibility of fixing the truth in relation to real events, or
to memory. Testimony occurs where there is an impossibility of speaking.

What we have witnessed, then, is the depth of insight that Agamben’s theory
has achieved in addressing the question of the camps.