The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  ness of life is thus completely emancipated from sacrificial ideology, and in our

  culture the meaning of the term “sacred” continues the semantic history of homo

  sacer and not that of sacrifice (and this is why the demystifications of sacrificial ideology so common today remain insufficient, even though they are correct).

  What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without

  precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways. Our age is the one in

  which a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe’s highways than a

  war campaign, but to speak of a “sacredness of the highway railing” is obviously

  only an antiphrastic definition (La Cecla, Mente locale, p. 115).

  The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means

  of the term “Holocaust” was, from this perspective, an irresponsible historio-

  graphical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative ref-

  erent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a

  homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice,

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  but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed” inherent in the

  condition of the Jew as such. The truth—which is difficult for the victims to

  face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is

  that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as

  Hitler had announced, “as lice,” which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in

  which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics.

  If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of an unsacrificeable

  life that has nevertheless become capable of being killed to an unprecedented

  degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns us in a special way. Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving

  into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with

  the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure

  of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.

  PART THREE

  The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm

  of the Modern

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  1

  The Politicization of Life

  1.1. In the last years of his life, while he was working on the history of

  sexuality and unmasking the deployments of power at work within it,

  Michel Foucault began to direct his inquiries with increasing insistence toward

  the study of what he defined as biopolitics, that is, the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power. At the end of the first

  volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault, as we have seen, summarizes the process by which life, at the beginning of the modern age, comes to be what is

  at stake in politics: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a

  living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man

  is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”

  Until the very end, however, Foucault continued to investigate the “processes

  of subjectivization” that, in the passage from the ancient to the modern world,

  bring the individual to objectify his own self, constituting himself as a subject

  and, at the same time, binding himself to a power of external control. Despite

  what one might have legitimately expected, 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.

  The inquiry that began with a reconstruction of the grand enfermement in hospi-

  tals and prisons did not end with an analysis of the concentration camp.

  If, on the other hand, the pertinent studies that Hannah Arendt dedicated

  to the structure of totalitarian states in the postwar period have a limit, it is

  precisely the absence of any biopolitical perspective. Arendt very clearly dis-

  cerns the link between totalitarian rule and the particular condition of life that

  is the camp: “The supreme goal of all totalitarian states,” she writes, in a plan

  for research on the concentration camps, which, unfortunately, was not carried

  through, “is not only the freely admitted, long-ranging ambition to global rule,

  but also the never admitted and immediately realized attempt at total domina-

  tion. The concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total

  domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be achieved only

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  under the extreme circumstances of human made hell” ( Essays, p. 240). Yet what escapes Arendt is that the process is in a certain sense the inverse of what she

  takes it to be, and that precisely the radical transformation of politics into the

  realm of bare life (that is, into a camp) legitimated and necessitated total dom-

  ination. Only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into

  biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to

  a degree hitherto unknown.

  The fact that the two thinkers who may well have reflected most deeply on

  the political problem of our age were unable to link together their own insights

  is certainly an index of the difficulty of this problem. The concept of “bare life”

  or “sacred life” is the focal lens through which we shall try to make their points

  of view converge. In the notion of bare life the interlacing of politics and life

  has become so tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. Until we become aware of

  the political nature of bare life and its modern avatars (biological life, sexuality,

  etc.), we will not succeed in clarifying the opacity at their center. Conversely,

  once modern politics enters into an intimate symbiosis with bare life, it loses the

  intelligibility that still seems to us to characterize the juridico-political founda-

  tion of classical politics.

  1.2. Karl Löwith was the first to define the fundamental charac ter of totali-

  tarian states as a “politicization of life” and, at the same time, to note the curious

  contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism:

  Since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy

  and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of

  politically relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has

  developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization [ totale

  Politisierung] of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life. Thus in Marxist Russia there emerged a worker-state that was “more intensively state-oriented than any absolute monarchy’’; in fascist Italy, a corporate state norma-

  tively regulating not only national work, but also “after-work’’ [ Dopolavoro] and all spiritual life; and, in National Socialist Germany, a wholly integrated state,

  which, by means of racial laws and so forth, politicizes even the life that had until

  then been private. ( Der okkasionelle Dezionismus, p. 33)

  The contiguity between mas
s democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless,

  does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Löwith, here following in

  Schmitt’s footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in

  our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point,

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  every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the

  rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simulta-

  neously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the

  state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sover-

  eign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. “The ‘right’ to life,”

  writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue,

  “to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond

  all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that

  one can be, this ‘right’—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapa-

  ble of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of

  power” ( La volonté, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and

  of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian

  states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign deci-

  sions. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically

  decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapid-

  ity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn

  into totalitarian states and with which this century’s totalitarian states were able

  to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies.

  In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for

  quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the

  only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best

  suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their

  fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as

  those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public)

  lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction. The

  ex-communist ruling classes’ unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as

  in the Serbian program of “ethnic cleansing”) and the rebirth of new forms of

  fascism in Europe also have their roots here.

  Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and

  gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state

  of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern

  state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on

  death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears

  today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in

  motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas

  in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not

  only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the

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  priest. In the pages that follow, we shall try to show that certain events that are

  fundamental for the political history of modernity (such as the declaration of

  rights), as well as others that seem instead to represent an incomprehensible in-

  trusion of biologico- scientific principles into the political order (such as National

  Socialist eugenics and its elimination of “life that is unworthy of being lived,”

  or the contemporary debate on the normative determination of death criteria),

  acquire their true sense only if they are brought back to the common biopolitical

  (or thanatopolitical) context to which they belong. From this perspective, the

  camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is

  founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm

  of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will

  have to learn to recognize.

  1.3. The first recording of bare life as the new political subject is already

  implicit in the document that is generally placed at the foundation of modern

  democracy: the 1679 writ of habeas corpus. Whatever the origin of this formula,

  used as early as the eighteenth century to assure the physical presence of a person

  before a court of justice, it is significant that at its center is neither the old sub-

  ject of feudal relations and liberties nor the future citoyen, but rather a pure and simple corpus. When John the Landless conceded Magna Carta to his subjects

  in 1215, he turned his attention to the “archbishops, bishops, abbots, counts,

  barons, viscounts, provosts, officials and bailiffs,” to the “cities, towns, villages,”

  and, more generally, to the “free men of our kingdom,” so that they might enjoy

  “their ancient liberties and free customs” as well as the ones he now specifically

  recognized. Article 29, whose task was to guarantee the physical freedom of the

  subjects, reads: “No free man [ homo liber] may be arrested, imprisoned, dispossessed of his goods, or placed outside the law [ utlagetur] or molested in any way; we will not place our hands on him nor will have others place their hands on

  him [ nec super eum ibimis, nec super eum mittimusi], except after a legal judgment by his peers according to the law of the realm.” Analogously, an ancient

  writ that preceded the habeas corpus and was understood to assure the presence

  of the accused in a trial bears the title de homine replegiando (or repigliando) .

  Consider instead the formula of the writ that the act of 1679 generalizes

  and makes into law: Praecipimus tibi quod Corpus X, in custodia vestra detentum,

  ut dicitur, una cum causa captionis et detentionis, quodcumque nomine idem X

  censeatur in eadem, habeas coram nobis, apud Westminster, ad subjiciendum, “We command that you have before us to show, at Westminster, that body X, by

  whatsoever name he may be called therein, which is held in your custody, as it is

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  said, as well as the cause of the arrest and the detention.” Nothing allows one to

  measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom

  at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man

  and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. And democracy is born precisely as the assertion

  and presentation of this “body”: habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have a body to show.”

  The fact that, of all the various jurisdictional regulations concerned with the

  protection of individual freedom, it was habeas corpus that assumed the form of

  law and thus became inseparable from the history of Western democracy is surely

  due to mere circumstance. It is just as certain, however, that nascent European de-

  mocracy thereby place
d at the center of its battle against absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zoē—the bare, anonymous life that is as such taken into the sovereign ban (“the body of being taken . . . ,” as one still reads in one

  modern formulation of the writ, “by whatsoever name he may be called therein”).

  What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again,

  the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern democracy’s strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does

  not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every indi-

  vidual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. And the root

  of modern democracy’s secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will appear

  later as the bearer of rights and, according to a curious oxymoron, as the new

  sovereign subject ( subiectus superaneus, in other words, what is below and, at the same time, most elevated) can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself.

  If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak,

  in this sense, of “law’s desire to have a body,” democracy responds to this desire

  by compelling law to assume the care of this body. This ambiguous (or polar)

  character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one

  considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to

  assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused

  from avoiding judgment, turns—in its new and definitive form—into grounds

  for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused. Corpus is a two-faced

  being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties.

  This new centrality of the “body” in the sphere of politico -juridical terminol-

  ogy thus coincides with the more general process by which corpus is given such

  a privileged position in the philosophy and science of the Baroque age, from

  Descartes to Newton, from Leibniz to Spinoza. And yet in political reflection

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  corpus always maintains a close tie to bare life, even when it becomes the central metaphor of the political community, as in Leviathan or The Social Contract.