Homo Sacer

Introduction

The first volume of a project Agamben pursued for two decades, up to The Use of Bodies (2014); it appeared in Italian in 1995. The title comes from archaic Roman law: the homo sacer was a person whom anyone could kill without committing murder, but who could not be sacrificed. Agamben takes him as the figure of “bare life” (nuda vita), which sovereign power includes by excluding it. Combining Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and the state of exception with Foucault’s biopolitics and with Arendt, he argues that the concentration camp, not the city, is the hidden paradigm of Western politics. The thesis has been widely debated, especially since the “war on terror” after 2001.

Connections

Builds on

• Politicsc. 335 BCE · Aristotle
• Political Theology1922 · Carl Schmitt
• The Human Condition1958 · Hannah Arendt
• The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)1976 · Michel Foucault

Taken up in

• Necropolitics2003 · Achille Mbembe