Giorgio Agamben: HOMO SACER. Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Chapters>
- The paradox of sovereignty.
- Nomos Basileus
Relative information.
The Paradox of Sovereignty
- Sovereignty> has a core meaning, supreme authority within a territory. It is a modern notion of political authority. Historical variants can be understood along three dimensions — the holder of sovereignty, the absoluteness of sovereignty, and the internal and external dimensions of sovereignty. The state is the political institution in which sovereignty is embodied. An assemblage of states forms a sovereign states system.
source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty/
- Wikipedia>Homo sacer (Latin for “the sacred man” or “the accursed man”) is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual.
The meaning of the term sacer in Ancient Roman religion is not fully congruent with the meaning it took after Christianization, and which was adopted into English as sacred. In early Roman religion sacer, much like Hebrew קֹדֶשׁ qōdeš, means anything “set apart” from common society, which equally covers the meanings of “hallowed” and “cursed”. The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person expunged from society and deprived of all rights and all functions in civil religion. Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as someone who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; and a person who cannot be sacrificed. The sacred human may thus be understood as someone outside the law, or beyond it. In the case of certain monarchs in western legal traditions, the sovereign and the Homo Sacer have conflated.
- Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the War on Terror.
We already dealt with the case of the prisoners of Guatanamo. Slavoj Zizek underlines how the prisoners are regarded as expendable biological creatures: “The inmates at Guántanamo were those that were missed by the bombs.” Nevertheless, important questions can be raised with respect to this hasty connection between the concept of homo sacer and the prisioners in Guántanamo.
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish starts with a striking depiction of sovereign punishment on the body of Damien, a prisoner who offended the law.Foucault follows this vivid story of sovereign violence with a detailed outline of punishment procedures in the modernprison a century later than Damien’s torture. By examining these very different modes of punishment, Foucault seeks to illustrate two different modes of power occurring in different eras: archaic sovereignty and modern disciplinary power.
- Detailed and nuanced regulations found in the unclassified Standard Operating Procedures for Guántanamo:
Detainees will receive two twenty minute recreation periods a week.
. . . Detainees will receive two five minute showers a week. . . . The
exception to this policy will be detainees being interrogated. . . .
The detainee will receive a water bottle when his reward level is
changed to a one or he has completed his discipline for destroying
or damaging a water bottle. . . . At times, personnel will give out special rewards outside of the normal reward system. For the special reward of a roll of toilet paper, the following procedure will apply: give
the detainee the roll of paper, if the detainee tries to force the roll
into the toilet or passes it out to other detainees, confiscate the roll
of toilet paper. . . . If medical says they must be at the appointment,
they cannot refuse. If medical says [treatment] can wait another day,
allow the detainee to refuse; however; they will be disciplined for
failure to obey.
Notes about the chapter.
From this chapter I choosed the sentences/concepts that helps to make an understanding of Agamben’s theory.
The paradox of the sovereignty.
- The law is, at the same time outside and inside the law.
- The law is outside itself.
- I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law.
- Sovereignty marks the limit of the juridical order
- Schmitt> The order must be established for juridical order to make sense.Sovereign is who decides if a regular situation is effective.He has the monopoly over the final decision.All law is “situational law”
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were thus able to write, “Sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing”
- Exeption> it refers to the work of a theologian. e”The exception explains the general and itself.If someone want s to study the general has to look for a real exception. Th exception thinks the general with intense passion.
- For what is at issue in the sovereign exception is, according to Schmitt, the very condition of possibility of juridical rule and, along with it, the very meaning of State authority. Through the state of exception, the sovereign “creates and guarantees the situation” that the law needs for its own validity
- The exception is a kind of exclusion. What is excluded from the general rule is an individual case. But the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule. On the contrary, what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension.
- The situation created in the exception has the peculiar characteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two. It is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule.
- Order> nomos
- Chaos> no rules. Included in the state of exception.
- localization (Ortung) and ordering (Ordnung) constitutive of the “nomos of the earth
- n our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule. When our age tried to grant the unrealizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp.
- Camp>the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos.. The juridical constellation guides to the camp. It is topologically different from a simple space of confinement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link between localization and ordering is definitively broken, that has determined the crisis of the old “nomos of the earth.”
- Only the sovereign decision on the state of exception opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in which determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories
- .Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself. Speak=“speak the law,”
- Exception and example:
Exeption: serves to include what is excluded (inclusive exclusion)
Example:The example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is “shown beside,” and a class can contain everything except its own paradigm
exception and example are correlative concepts that are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined. In every logical system, just as in every social system, the relation between outside and inside, strangeness and intimacy, is this complicated.
- His reference to Schmitt is functional to explaining the paradox of sovereignty that lies in the notion of Ausnahme: ‘Sovereign is whoever decides on the state of exception’. According to this, exception is granted the highest status for the formulation of positive right, expressing at once the limit of sovereign power and its legitimation. Only in so far as the value of positive right can be suspended in a state of exception, it is able to define normality as its realm of validity.
- According to Schmitt then, the sovereign does not establish what is legal and illegal, but rather the originary implication of the living within the sphere of right, or, in his words, the ‘normal structuration of life relations’, which the law needs. The decision relates neither to a quaestio facti nor to a quaestio iuris, but to the relation itself between fact and right.
http://www.generation-online.org/p/pagamben.htm
- membership and inclusion.
Badiou has membership correspond to presentation, and inclusion correspond to representation (re-presentation). One then says that a term is a member of a situation. And one says that a term is included in a situation if it is represented in the metastructure (the State) in which the structure of the situation is counted as one term.
Badiou defines a term as normal when it is both presented and represented (that is, when it both is a member and is included), as excrescent when it is represented but not presented (that is, when it is included in a situation without being a member of that situation), and as singular when it is presented but not represented (a term that is a member without being included).
The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included.
Exception, in other words, embodies a kind of membership without inclusion.
According to Badiou, the relation between membership and inclusion is also marked by a fundamental lack of correspondence, such that inclusion always exceeds membership (theorem of the point of excess).
- Guilt refers not to transgression, that is, to the determination of the licit and the illicit, but to the pure force of the law, to the law’s simple reference to something.
- There is a limit-figure of life, a threshold in which life is both inside and outside the juridical order, and this threshold is the place of sovereignty.
- “The rule lives off the exception alone”
- The sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law. Its decision is the position of an undecidable.
- Schmitt clearly distinguishes between character and guilt (“the concept of guilt,” he writes, “has to do with an operari, and not with an esse”
- sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it
- BAN:ban (from the old Germanic term that designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign). The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. (This is why in Romance languages, to be “banned” originally means both to be “at the mercy of” and “at one’s own will, freely,” to be “excluded” and also “open to all, free.”)
- The ban is the pure form of reference to something in general, which is to say, the simple positing of relation with the nonrelational. In this sense, the ban is identical with the limit form of relation.
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Nomos Basileus
- The nomos, sovereign of all,
Of mortals and immortals,
Leads with the strongest hand,
Justifying the most violent.
I judge this from the works of Hercules.
The poet defines the sovereignty of the nomos by means of a justification of violence.Unification of the two essentially antithetical principles that the Greeks called Bia and Dikē, violence and justice. Nomos is the power that, “with the strongest hand,” achieves the paradoxical union of these opposites.
- In Hesiod the nomos is still the power that divides violence from law and, with it, the world of beasts from the world of men, and while in Solon the “connection” of Bia and Dikē contains neither ambiguity nor irony.
- in Pindar – and this is the knot that he bequeaths to Western political thought and that makes him, in a certain sense, the first great thinker of sovereignty – the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction
- The sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.
- If for the Sophists the anteriority of physis ultimately justifies the violence of the strongest, for Hobbes it is this very identity of the state of nature and violence (homo hominis lupus) that justifies the absolute power of the sovereign. In both cases, even if in an apparently opposed fashion, the physis/nomos antinomy constitutes the presupposition that legitimates the principle of sovereignty, the indistinction of law and violence
- Insofar as it is sovereign, the nomos is necessarily connected with both the state of nature and the state of exception. The state of exception (with its necessary indistinction of Bia and Dikē) is not external to the nomos but rather, even in its clear delimitation, included in the nomos as a moment that is in every sense fundamental.
BOOK REVIEW BY Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/substance/v029/29.3nikolopoulou.pdf
“…Agamben traces the history of Western politics as the history of the production of homines sacri. To do so, Agamben balances the philosophical and speculative tone of his writing with an abundance of concrete historical instances which describe the transformation of human life into sacred, hence perishable, life. The refugee, the comatose, and the death row inmate are some of the present-day examples of homines sacri, of lives that meet in the wasteland between exile and belonging, between life and death. Such examples do not simply illustrate Agamben’s theoretical assumptions. In fact, the example of sacred life is elevated here to the level of a theoretical concept and of a heuristic device. This is not a coincidence, since early on in the book Agamben finds in the example the structure that opposes the logic of the exception, which for him is equivalent to the logic of sovereignty (22). The dialectic of example and exception plays itself throughout the book, which concludes by establishing the camps as the ultimate paradigm of the state of exception. In the brief conclusions — all entitled “Threshold”–following each of the three thematic divisions of the book, Agamben draws a continuum in the history of biopolitics by exposing ways in which the earlier instances ofhomo sacer anticipate the totalitarian nature of the modern camps. The figure of homo sacer, from its Roman exiles to the prisoners of Auschwitz proves to be an exemplary figure of the state of exception, a diachronic case study of Western politics.”