Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Agamben writes: "Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of State-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history. We should not forget that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps - concentration camps - extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation. One of the few rules the Nazis constantly obeyed throughout the course of the 'final solution' was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg laws). When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when humans are tuly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in ancient Roman law: doomed to death."


On the consequence of the split between Bios and Zoe   May 2, 2004
Sagan Lazar (In yo monitor)
37 out of 43 found this review helpful

The obscurity embedded in the Roman Law that declared one who was condemned to death "sacred" is never really clarified here. It is better and more succinctly described in _Means Without Ends_.
In this is book, Agamben soberly traces the origin of the single most deracinating event in human history: the Holocaust. Soberly, because Agamben sees the Holocaust not as an anomaly, but as an unavoidable consequence given the political origin of the West. But this book is not so much about the Holocaust per se, but about the various historical interventions concerning the notion of the Sovereign that wove the matrix of Western politics into what it became capable of in the 20th century.
The locus of Agamben's view of modernity is the (concentration) camp. Agamben stresses the fact that the camp is not only a place where the unspeakable takes place but more importantly and fundamentally where a human being is stripped "Naked", stripped of 'bios' and exposed as mere 'zoe', such that anything--including the unspeakable--CAN be done to him since nothing could be considered a criminal act. The camp, according to Agamben, is "the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule."
Agamben argues that the camp is the new biopolitical NOMOS of the planet by connecting the dots that Carl Schmitt first drew but left unconnected. Closer to the homefront, Agamben's meditation ultimately takes us to see the totalitarian implications behind those "gated communities" in the US today, and the impossibility of dying without the State's approval. If a good life is hinged on the hope of a good death, should the State define and decide who shall get "good death" (euthanasia)?


Homo Sacer is a must read.   June 5, 2006
Scott Odekirk (pocatello, idaho)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

Agamben's best known work lives up to the hype. One of the most powerful aspects of this book is its shocking predictions about the world to come. Published many years before the initiation of the war on terror, Agamben signals the beginning the of a style of governance built on permanent exception. He insists that the extermination of the Jewx by the Nazis was not simply a horrible enigma that should never return, rather biopolitical atrocities have continued to intensify. This book is a must read for any person interested in understanding how the deep seated structure of sovereignty and its spatio-temporal course through power relations have brought us to the seeming limit poit of exception become rule. A handbook for contemporary politics. This is a great book.


Agamben on the Politics of "Life"   June 29, 2009
Tony See (Singapore, Switzerland, Shanghai)
This is a must read for any serious student of philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence and international studies. Agamben here displays his mastery of the Greek, Roman, Judaic and modern traditions through his insight into the very heart of our modern understanding of the term "life."

Using a genealogical method, he traces our understanding of "life" back to a break between "bios" and "zoe" itself, a break that is to lead step-by-step, through a series of historical accidents and judicial decisions, eventually to genocide, concentration camps and the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. Believe it or not the roots of this human tragedy can be traced back to as early as Roman antiquity - a point that would have definitely made Heidegger raise his eyebrows.

This has special significance in relation to the thoughts of Heidegger and Arendt and should provide a shock to those who still, despite our current political and economic crisis, believe that we live in an age of progress and Enlightenment.



Practical post-modernism   June 1, 2003
2 out of 19 found this review helpful

This book is almost perfect. Agamben discusses facts that no one else does. And puts it all in a sober Lacanian package that any self-respecting theorist will have to admire. He is literally the new Foucault.

I have one reservation. That's on his conclusion that the world has become a death camp. When it comes to the political sacred, this is mostly right on. But the world is going to look a lot more like the kind of camp through which the subhumans of World War II were processed when the religious sacred catches up....