PART TWO: Homo Sacer
§ 1 Homo Sacer
§ 2 The Ambivalence of the Sacred
§ 3 Sacred Life
§ 4 ‘Vitae Necisque Potestas’
§ 5 Sovereign Body and Sacred Body
§ 6 The Ban and the Wolf
Threshold
§1
Homo Sacer:
- Figure of archaic Roman law: HOMO SACER
Festus: “The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred”
- The oldest punishment of Roman criminal law
Sacratio:
- who consider it as:residue of an archaic phase in which religious law was not yet distinguished from penal law and the death sentence appeared as a sacrifice to the gods. Unable to explain the ban on sacrifice
- who consider it to bear the traces of an archetypal figure of the sacred – consecration to the gods of the underworld – which is analogous to the ethnological notion of taboo: august and damned, worthy of veneration and provoking horror.
homo sacer from sebastian a. stoelzl on Vimeo.
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§2
Taboos: correspond to rules of holiness, protecting the inviolability of idols and sanctuaries, priests and chiefs, and generally of all persons and things pertaining to the gods and their worship. (Smith)
Taboos in Semitic field: uncleanness. The person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary as well as from contact with men.
Ban: is a form of devotion to the deity, and so the verb “to ban” is sometimes rendered “consecrate….Ban is a taboo, enforced by the fear of supernatural penalties (1 Kings 16: 34) and, as with taboo, the danger arising from it is contagious (Smith)
Ambiguity of the ban-ambiguity of sacred.
“Sacer esto is in fact a curse; and homo sacer on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous. . . . Originally the word may have meant simply taboo, i.e. removed out of the region of the profanum, without any special reference to a deity, but ‘holy’ or accursed according to the circumstances” (Fowler)
“Sacer designates the person or the thing that one cannot touch without dirtying oneself or without dirtying; hence the double meaning of ‘sacred’ or ‘accursed’ (approximately). A guilty person whom one consecrates to the gods of the underworld is sacred (Alfred Ernout-Meillet)
§ 3
- Structure of sacratio: the unpunishability of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice.A
- Ancient forms of capital punishment:purification rites and not death penalties in the modern sense.
- In the case of homo sacer a person is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law.
- The fact that the killing was permitted implied that the violence done to homo sacer did not constitute sacrilege. Then sacratio takes the form of a double exception both from the sphere of the profane and from that of the religious.
- Status of homo sacer: both exclusions from profane and from religious;the violence in which he is exposed, is not classified neither as sacrifice nor as homicide. This violence belongs neither in the sphere of sacrum facere nor in the sphere of profane . This sphere is that of the sovereign decision, which suspends law in the state of exception and thus implicates bare life within it. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life – that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed – is the life that has been captured in this sphere.
- sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.
§4
- The first time we encounter the expression “right over life and death” in the history of law is in the formula vitae necisque potestas, which designates not sovereign power but rather the unconditional authority [potestà] of the pater over his sons.
- Life originally appears in Roman law merely as the counterpart of a power threatening death.
- necare: death without the shedding of blood.
- This power follows immediately and solely from the father-son relation.
- “father of the people,” : is reserved in every age to the leaders invested with sovereign authority.
- Every male citizen (who can as such participate in public life) immediately finds himself in a state of virtually being able to be killed, and is in some way sacer with respect to his father.
- The sovereign tie is more originary than the tie of the positive rule or the tie of the social pact, but the sovereign tie is in truth only an untying. And what this untying implies and produces – bare life, which dwells in the no-man’s-land between home and the city – is, from the point of view of sovereignty, the originary political element.
§5
- Funeral by image. Imaginary funeral functions as a vicarious fulfillment of the consecration that gives the individual back to normal life;
- For long time the figure of Homo sacer was approximated to that of devotus who who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger. Both are in some way consecrated to death and belong to the gods.
- Colossus>In the complex system regulating the relation between the living and the dead in the classical world, the colossus represents instead – analogously to the corpse, but in a more immediate and general way – that part of the person that is consecrated to death and that, insofar as it occupies the threshold between the two worlds, must be separated from the normal context of the living. Colossus represents the very consecrated life that was,at the moment of the ritual by which he became a devotus, virtually separated from him.
- From the beginning this sacred life of homo sacer has an eminently political character and exhibits an essential link with the terrain on which sovereign power is founded.
§6
Rodolphe Jhering> homo sacer :
- wargus, the wolf-man
- Friedlos> the “man without peace” of ancient Germanic law
- The medieval ban also presents analogous traits: the bandit could be killed.
- ‘To ban’ someone is to say that anyone may harm him”
- The Germanic and Anglo-Saxons defining him as a wolf-man>What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city – the werewolf – is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city.
- The life of the bandit is the life of the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast.
- A man who is transformed into a wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man – in other words, a bandit, a homo sacer.
- Sovereign violence is in truth founded not on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state.
- 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 ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something 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.
§Threshold
Bataille The Accursed Share>
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Batailles merit is to have brought to light the hidden link between bare life and sovereignty.
- Homo sacer is unsacrificeable.
The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent 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.
We are all virtually homines sacri.
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- Santiago Sierra. Performance artist , politically engaged.