The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  Hobbes’s use of the term is particularly instructive in this regard. If it is true that

  in De homine he distinguishes man’s natural body from his political body ( homo enim non modo corpus naturale est, sed etiam civitatis, id est, ut ita loquar, corporis politici pars, “Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called political part” [ De homine, p. 1]), in the De cive it is precisely the body’s capacity to be killed that founds both the natural equality of men and the

  necessity of the “Commonwealth”:

  If we look at adult men and consider the fragility of the unity of the human

  body (whose ruin marks the end of every strength, vigor, and force) and the ease

  with which the weakest man can kill the strongest man, there is no reason for

  someone to trust in his strength and think himself superior to others by nature.

  Those who can do the same things to each other are equals. And those who can

  do the supreme thing—that is, kill—are by nature equal among themselves.

  ( De cive, p. 93)

  The great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the

  bodies of individuals, must be read in this light. The absolute capacity of the sub-

  jects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West.

  2

  Biopolitics

  and the Rights of Man

  2.1. Hannah Arendt entitled the fifth chapter of her book on imperial-

  ism, which is dedicated to the problem of refugees, “The Decline of

  the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Linking together the fates

  of the rights of man and of the nation-state, her striking formulation seems to

  imply the idea of an intimate and necessary connection between the two, though

  the author herself leaves the question open. The paradox from which Arendt

  departs is that the very figure who should have embodied the rights of man

  par excellence—the refugee—signals instead the concept’s radical crisis. “The

  conception of human rights,” she states, “based upon the assumed existence of

  a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who pro-

  fessed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had in-

  deed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still

  human” ( Origins, p. 299). In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging

  to citizens of a state. If one considers the matter, this is in fact implicit in the

  ambiguity of the very tide of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and

  Citizen, of 1789. In the phrase La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen,

  it is not clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings or instead form a unitary system in which the first is always already included in the second. And if the latter is the case, the kind of relation that exists

  between homme and citoyen still remains unclear. From this perspective, Burke’s boutade according to which he preferred his “Rights of an Englishman” to the

  inalienable rights of man acquires an unsuspected profundity.

  Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints concerning the link

  between the rights of man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has therefore

  not been followed up. In the period after the Second World War, both the in-

  strumental emphasis on the rights of man and the rapid growth of declarations

  and agreements on the part of international organizations have ultimately made

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  any authentic understanding of the historical significance of the phenomenon

  almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proc-

  lamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without

  much success) to respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider

  them according to their real historical function in the modern nation-state.

  Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural

  life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state. The same bare life that in

  the ancien régime was politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life

  and in the classical world was (at least apparently) dearly distinguished as zoē

  from political life ( bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty.

  A simple examination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it is

  precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears

  here as the source and bearer of rights. “Men,” the first article declares, “are

  born and remain free and equal in rights” (from this perspective, the strictest

  formulation of all is to be found in La Fayette’s project elaborated in July 1789:

  “Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights”). At the same time,

  however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is

  placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in

  whom rights are “preserved” (according to the second article: “The goal of every

  political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of

  man”). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the “nation” (according

  to the third article: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the na-

  tion’’) precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the very

  heart of the political community. The nation—the term derives etymologically

  from nascere (to be born)—thus closes the open circle of man’s birth.

  2.2. Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which

  the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty

  is accomplished. This passage assures the exceptio of life in the new state order that will succeed the collapse of the ancien régime. The fact that in this process the “subject” is, as has been noted, transformed into a “citizen” means that

  birth—which is to say, bare natural life as such—here for the first time becomes

  (thanks to a transformation whose biopolitical consequences we are only be-

  ginning to discern today) the immediate bearer of sovereignty. The principle

  of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien

  régime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the “sovereign subject” so that the foundation

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  of the new nation-state may be constituted. It is not possible to understand the

  “national” and biopolitical development and vocation of the modern state in

  the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at its basis is

  not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life,

  the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested

  with the principle of sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth imme-

  diately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [ scarto]

  between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely

  to the ext
ent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never

  come to light as such) of the citizen.

  Only if we understand this essential historical function of the doctrine

  of rights can we grasp the development and metamorphosis of declarations of

  rights in our century. When the hidden difference [ scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe’s geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fas-

  cism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life

  the exemplary place of the sovereign decision. We are used to condensing the

  essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm “blood and soil” ( Blut

  und Boden) . When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to express his party’s vision of the world, it is precisely to this hendiadys that he turned. “The National Socialist

  vision of the world,” he writes, “springs from the conviction that soil and blood

  constitute what is essential about Germanness, and that it is therefore in ref-

  erence to these two givens that a cultural and state politics must be directed”

  ( Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often been forgotten that this formula, which is so highly determined politically, has, in truth, an innocuous juridical

  origin. The formula is nothing other than the concise expression of the two

  criteria that, already in Roman law, served to identify citizenship (that is, the

  primary inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents). In the ancien régime, these two traditional juridical criteria had no essential meaning, since they expressed

  only a relation of subjugation. Yet with the French Revolution they acquire a

  new and decisive importance. Citizenship now does not simply identify a ge-

  neric subjugation to royal authority or a determinate system of laws, nor does

  it simply embody (as Chalier maintained when he suggested to the convention

  on September 23, 1792, that the tide of citizen be substituted for the tradi-

  tional tide monsieur or sieur in every public act) the new egalitarian principle; citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty

  and, therefore, literally identifies—to cite Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’s words to the

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  convention— les membres du souverain, “the members of the sovereign.” Hence the centrality (and the ambiguity) of the notion of “citizenship” in modern

  political thought, which compels Rousseau to say, “No author in France . . .

  has understood the true meaning of the term ‘citizen.’” Hence too, however,

  the rapid growth in the course of the French Revolution of regulatory provi-

  sions specifying which man was a citizen and which one not, and articulating and gradually restricting the area of the ius soli and the ius sanguinis. Until this time, the questions “What is French? What is German?” had constituted not

  a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in philosophi-

  cal anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these questions

  now begin to become essentially political, to the point that, with National

  Socialism, the answer to the question “Who and what is German?” (and also,

  therefore, “Who and what is not German?”) coincides immediately with the

  highest political task. Fascism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of the

  relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when

  situated—no matter how paradoxical it may seem—in the biopolitical context

  inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights.

  Only this tie between the rights of man and the new biopolitical determi-

  nation of sovereignty makes it possible to understand the striking fact, which

  has often been noted by historians of the French Revolution, that at the very

  moment in which native rights were declared to be inalienable and indefeasible,

  the rights of man in general were divided into active rights and passive rights.

  In his Préliminaires de la constitution, Sieyès already clearly stated:

  Natural and civil rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society is formed. For the sake of clarity, it would be best to call the first ones passive rights, and the second ones

  active rights. . . . All inhabitants of a country must enjoy the rights of passive

  citizens . . . all are not active citizens. Women, at least in the present state, chil-

  dren, foreigners, and also those who would not at all contribute to the public

  establishment must have no active influence on public matters. ( Écrits politiques,

  pp. 189–206)

  And after defining the membres du souverain, the passage of Lanjuinais cited above continues with these words: “Thus children, the insane, minors, women,

  those condemned to a punishment either restricting personal freedom or bring-

  ing disgrace [ punition afflictive ou inflammante] . . . will not be citizens” (quoted in Sewell, “Le citoyen,” p. 105).

  Instead of viewing these distinctions as a simple restriction of the democratic

  and egalitarian principle, in flagrant contradiction to the spirit and letter of the

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  declarations, we ought first to grasp their coherent biopolitical meaning. One

  of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to

  increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that

  distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses

  over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty—nonpolitical life—is immediately transformed into

  a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zoē is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life

  must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis—

  and this much has, by now, already happened—these thresholds pass, as we will

  see, beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a

  new living dead man, a new sacred man.

  2.3. If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to

  the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such a

  disquiet ing element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all be-

  cause by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain—bare life—to appear for an instant within

  that domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly “the man of rights,” as Arendt

  suggests, the first and only real appearance of rights outside the fiction of the

  citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure

  of the refugee so hard to define politically.

  Since the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capable

  of performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state, and the two

  terms have begun to show themselves to be irreparably loosened from each

  other. From this perspective, the immense increase of refugees and stateless

  persons in Europe (in a short span of time 1,5oo,ooo White Russians, 70o,ooo

  Arm
enians, 500,000 Bulgarians, 1,ooo,ooo Greeks, and hundreds of thousands

  of Germans, Hungarians, and Rumanians were displaced from their countries)

  is one of the two most significant phenomena. The other is the contempora-

  neous institution by many European states of juridical measures allowing for

  the mass denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of their own

  populations. The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took

  place in France in 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of “enemy” origin;

  in 1922, Belgium followed the French example and revoked the naturalization

  of citizens who had committed “antinational” acts during the war; in 1926, the

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  fascist regime issued an analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown

  themselves to be “unworthy of Italian citizenship”; in 1933, it was Austria’s turn;

  and so it continued until the Nuremberg laws on “citizenship in the Reich’

  and the “protection of German blood and honor” brought this process to the

  most extreme point of its development, introducing the principle according

  to which citizenship was something of which one had to prove oneself worthy

  and which could therefore always be called into question. And 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).

  These two phenomena—which are, after all, absolutely correla tive—show

  that the birth-nation link, on which the declaration of 1789 had founded national

  sovereignty, had already lost its mechanical force and power of self- regulation

  by the time of the First World War. On the one hand, the nation-states become

  greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak

  authentic life and a life lacking every political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics

  are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other