a wolf who is transformed into a man—in other words, a bandit, a homo sacer.
Far from being a prejuridical condition that is indifferent to the law of the city,
the Hobbesian state of nature is the exception and the threshold that constitutes
and dwells within it. It is not so much a war of all against all as, more precisely,
a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else, and in which everyone is thus wargus, gerit caput lupinum. And this lupization of
man and humanization of the wolf is at every moment possible in the dissolutio
civitatis inaugurated by the state of exception. This threshold alone, which is
neither simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or sacred life, is the
always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty.
Contrary to our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms
of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts, from the point of view of sov-
ereignty only bare life is authentically political. This is why in Hobbes, the foundation of sovereign power is to be sought not in the subjects’ free renunciation
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of their natural right but in the sovereign’s preservation of his natural right to do
anything to anyone, which now appears as the right to punish. “This is the foun-
dation,” Hobbes states, “of that right of Punishing, which is exercised in every
Common-wealth. For the Subjects did not give the Soveraign that right; but
onely in laying down theirs, strengthned him to use his own, as he should think
fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall Law) as entire, as in
the condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour”
( Leviathan, p. 214, emphasis added).
Corresponding to this particular status of the “right of Punish ing,” which
takes the form of a survival of the state of nature at the very heart of the state, is
the subjects’ capacity not to disobey but to resist violence exercised on their own
person, “for . . . no man is supposed bound by Covenant, not to resist violence;
and consequently it cannot be intended, that he gave any right to another to lay
violent hands upon his person” (ibid.). Sovereign violence is in truth founded not
on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state. And just as sover-
eign power’s first and immediate referent is, in this sense, the life that may be killed
but not sacrificed, and that has its paradigm in homo sacer, so in the person of the sovereign, the werewolf, the wolf-man of man, dwells permanently in the city.
א In Bisclavret, one of Marie de France’s most beautiful lays, both the werewolf’s particular nature as the threshold of passage between nature and politics, animal world
and human world, and the werewolf’s close tie to sovereign power are presented with
extraordinary vividness. The lay tells of a baron who is particularly close to his king ( de sun seinur esteit privez [v. 19]), but who, every week, after hiding his clothes under a stone, is transformed into a werewolf ( bisclavret) for three days, during which time he lives in the woods stealing and preying on other creatures ( al plus espés de la gaudine / s’i vif de preie e de ravine) . His wife, who suspects something, induces him to confess his secret life and convinces him to reveal where he hides his clothes, even though he knows that
he would remain a wolf forever if he lost them or were caught putting them on ( kar si
jes eusse perduz / e de ceo feusse aparceuz / bisclavret serei a tuz jours) . With the help of an accomplice who will become her lover, the woman takes the clothes from their hiding
place, and the baron remains a wolf forever.
What is essential here is the detail, to which Pliny’s legend of Antus also bears wit-
ness ( Natural History, bk. 8), of the temporary character of the metamorphosis, which is tied to the possibility of setting aside and secretly putting on human clothes again. The
transformation into a werewolf corresponds perfectly to the state of exception, during
which (necessarily limited) time the city is dissolved and men enter into a zone in which
they are no longer distinct from beasts. The story also shows the necessity of particular
formalities marking the entry into—or the exit from—the zone of indistinction between
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the animal and the human (which corresponds to the clear proclamation of the state of
exception as formally distinct from the rule). Contemporary folklore also bears witness to this necessity, in the three knocks on the door that the werewolf who is becoming human
again must make in order to be let into the house:
When they knock on the door the first time, the wife must not answer. If she
did, she would see her husband still entirely as a wolf, and he would eat her and
then run away into the forest forever. When they knock on the door the second
time, the woman must still not answer: she would see him with a man’s body
and a wolf’s head. Only when they knock on the door the third time can the
door be opened: for only then are they completely transformed, only then has
the wolf completely disappeared and has the man of before reappeared. (Levi,
Cristo si éfermato a Eboli, pp. 104–5)
The special proximity of werewolf and sovereign too is ultimately shown in the story.
One day (so the lay tells), the king goes hunting in the forest in which Bisclavret lives, and the dogs find the wolf-man as soon as they are let loose. But as soon as Bisclavret
sees the sovereign, he runs toward him and grabs hold of his stirrup, licking his legs and his feet as if he were imploring the king’s mercy. Amazed at the beast’s humanity (“this
animal has wits and intelligence / . . . I will give my peace to the beast / and for today I will hunt no more”), the king brings him to live with him, and they become inseparable.
The inevitable encounter with the ex-wife and the punishment of the woman follow.
What is important, however, is that Bisclavret’s final transformation back into a human
takes place on the very bed of the sovereign.
The proximity of tyrant and wolf-man is also shown in Plato’s Re public, in which the transformation of the guardian into a tyrant is approximated to the Arcadian myth
of Lycean Zeus:
What, then, is the cause of the transformation of a protector into a tyrant? Is
it not obviously when the protector’s acts begin to reproduce the myth that is
told of the shrine of Lycean Zeus in Arcadia? . . . The story goes that whoever
tastes of one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is
inevitably transformed into a wolf. . . . Thus, when a leader of the mob [ demos],
seeing the multitude devoted to his orders, does not know how to abstain from
the blood of his tribe . . . will it not then be necessary that he either be killed
by his enemies or become a tyrant and be transformed from a man into a wolf?
( Republic, 565d–565e)
6.3. The time has come, therefore, to reread from the beginning the myth
of the foundation of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau. The state of
nature is, in truth, a state of exception, in which the city appears for an instant
(which is at the same time a chronological interval and a nontemporal moment)
tanquam dissoluta. The foundation is thus not an event achieved once and for all
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O SACER I
but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision.
What is more, the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of the citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element, the Urphänomen of politics. Yet this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture.
This is why the thesis stated at the logico-formal level at the end of the
first part above, according to which the originary juridico-political relation is
the ban, not only is a thesis concerning the formal structure of sovereignty but
also has a substantial character, since what the ban holds together is precisely
bare life and sovereign power. All representations of the originary political act
as a contract or convention marking the passage from nature to the State in a
discrete and definite way must be left wholly behind. Here there is, instead, a
much more complicated zone of indiscernability between nomos and physis, in which the State tie, having the form of a ban, is always already also non-State
and pseudo-nature, and in which nature always already appears as nomos and
the state of exception. The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in
terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to confront the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy constitutionally incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from
the form of the State.
The relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder
than breaking from it. The ban is essentially the power of delivering something
over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to some-
thing presupposed as nonrelational. What has been banned is delivered over to
its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one
who abandons it—at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time
captured. The age-old discussion in juridical historiography between those who
conceive exile to be a punishment and those who instead understand it to be a
right and a refuge (already at the end of the republic, Cicero thought exile in op-
position to punishment: Exilium enim non supplcium est, sed perfugium portusque
supplicii, “Exile is not a penalty, but a haven and a refuge from penalty” [ Pro Caec. , 34]) has its root in this ambiguity of the sovereign ban. Both for Greece and for Rome, the oldest sources show that more ancient than the opposition
between law and punishment is the status—which “cannot be qualified either as
the exercise of a law or as a penal situation’’ (Crifò, L’esclusione dall città, p. 11) —
of the person who goes into exile as a consequence of committing homicide, or
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who loses his citizenship as a result of becoming a citizen of a civitas foederata
that benefits from an ius exilii.
The originary political relation is marked by this zone of indis tinction in
which the life of the exile or the aqua et igni interdictus borders on the life of homo sacer, who may be killed but not sacrificed. This relation is more original than the Schmittian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow citizen and
foreigner. The “estrarity” of the person held in the sovereign ban is more inti-
mate and primary than the extraneousness of the foreigner (if it is possible to de-
velop in this way the opposition established by Festus between extrarius, which is to say, qui extra focum sacramentum iusque sit [“whoever is outside the hearth, the sacrament, and the law”], and extraneus, which is to say, ex altera terra, quasi exterraneus [“whoever is from another land and almost extraneous”]).
Now it is possible to understand the semantic ambiguity that we have al-
ready noted, in which “banned” in Romance languages originally meant both
“at the mercy of ” and “out of free will, freely,” both “excluded, banned” and
“open to all, free.” The ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion
that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception: bare life and power,
homo sacer and the sovereign. Because of this alone can the ban signify both the
insignia of sovereignty ( Bandum, quod postea appellatus fuit Standardum, Gunt-
fanonum, italice Confalone [Muratori, Antiquitates, p. 442]) and expulsion from the community.
We must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations
and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the banishment of sacred life
is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness.
The banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule,
the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization
and every territorialization. And if in modernity life is more and more clearly
placed at the center of State politics (which now becomes, in Foucault’s terms,
biopolitics), if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real
sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri, this is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the
beginning.
Threshold
IF the originally political element is sacred life, it becomes understandable
how Bataille could have sought the fulfilled figure of sovereignty in life expe-
rienced in the extreme dimension of death, eroticism, excess, and the sacred, and
yet also how Bataille could have failed to consider the link that binds that life to
sovereign power. “The sovereignty of which I speak,” he writes in the book bear-
ing that name, which was conceived as the third section of The Accursed Share,
“has little to do with that of states” ( La souveraineté, p. 247). What Bataille is attempting to think here is clearly the very bare life (or sacred life) that, in the
relation of ban, constitutes the immediate referent of sovereignty. And to have
proposed the radical experience of this bare life is precisely what, despite every-
thing, renders Bataille’s effort exemplary. Unwittingly following the movement
by which life as such comes to be what is at stake in modern political struggles,
Bataille attempted to propose the very same bare life as a sovereign figure. And
yet instead of recognizing bare life’s eminently political (or rather biopolitical)
nature, he inscribes the experience of this life both in the sphere of the sacred—
which he understands, according to the dominant themes of the anthropology
of his day taken up by Callois, as originarily ambivalent: pure and filthy, repug-
nant and fascinating—and in the interiority of the subject, to which the experi-
ence of this life is always given in privileged or miraculous moments. In the case
of both ritual sacrifice and individual excess, sovereign life is defined for Bataille
through the instantaneous transgression of the prohibition on killing.
In this way, Bataille immediately exchanges the political body of the sacred
man, which can be killed but not sacrificed and which is inscribed in the logic of
exception, for the prestige of the sacrificial body, which is defined instead by the
logic of transgression. If Bataille’s merit is to have brought to light the hidden
> link between bare life and sovereignty, albeit unknowingly, in his thought life
still remains entirely bewitched in the ambiguous circle of the sacred. Bataille’s
work could offer only a real or farcical repetition of the sovereign ban, and it
is understandable that Benjamin (according to Pierre Klossowski’s account)
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stigmatized the Acéphale group’s research with the peremptory phrase “You are
working for fascism.”
Not that Bataille does not discern that sacrifice is insufficient and that it is,
in the last analysis, a “comedy.” (“In sacrifice, the one being sacrificed identifies
with the animal struck with death. Thus he dies watching himself die, and even
by his own will, at peace with the weapon of sacrifice. But this is a comedy!”
[“Hegel,” p. 336].) Yet what Bataille is unable to master is precisely (as is shown
by his interest in the pictures of the young Chinese torture victim, which he
discusses in The Tears of Eros) the bare life of homo sacer, which the conceptual apparatus of sacrifice and eroticism cannot grasp.
It is Jean-Luc Nancy’s achievement to have shown the ambiguity of Bataille’s
theory of sacrifice, and to have strongly affirmed the concept of an “unsacrifice-
able existence” against every sacrificial temptation. Yet if our analysis of homo sacer is correct, and the Bataillian definition of sovereignty with reference to transgression is inadequate with respect to the life in the sovereign ban that may be killed,
then the concept of the “unsacrificeable” too must be seen as insufficient to grasp
the violence at issue in modern biopolitics. Homo sacer is unsacrificeable, yet he may nevertheless be killed by anyone. The dimension of bare life that constitutes
the immediate referent of sovereign violence is more original than the opposition
of the sacrificeable and the unsacrificeable, and gestures toward an idea of sacred-
ness that is no longer absolutely definable through the conceptual pair (which
is perfectly clear in societies familiar with sacrifice) of fitness for sacrifice and
immolation according to ritual forms. In modernity, the principle of the sacred-
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