Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life ,
is divided mainly in two parts. In the first deals with the sovereign, who decides over life and death of its subjects; and the second deals with the homo sacer, the “sacred man”, who can be killed and not sacrificed;. Giorgio Agamben analyses the western political tradition by using as main concept the homo sacer and reinterpreting the concept of sovereignty.Inspired by Aristotelian theories about the zoi and bios and the roman paradigm of homo sacer, he will try to explain the differences between outside ans inside, public and private, law and power, human being and citizen. Agamben claims that the world in which we live in our days functions basically under a totalitarian regime, that the state of exception becomes the rule and the camp has been since the 20th century a political space. Agamben’s understanding is influenced by Schmitt’s ideas , who claims that sovereign is someone that decides in the state of exception and can deal with the laws in such a way to protect the political order. Like in the case of a war, the sovereign can ignore the laws in order to protect the state. For Agambern there is a connection between the sovereign power and the bare life. Thus the biopolitics of Foucault will be a key to speak about the western politics.
Homo sacer in the Roman criminal law was a guilty person who cannot be sacrificed but if someone would kill me, this wouldn’t be a homicide.T In other words Homo sacer is alive but someone can kill him without to have legal consequences, a kind of living corpse, a living representation of the bare life. And what the sovereign does is to decide who is a homo sacer. He references also Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the “Right to have rights” regarding the origins of Totalitarianism. She points out who is excluded from the political sphere, like the refugee and the Jew in Europe, have no rights.These people are the new models of a bare life–the state of just being alive. They live in the detention camps, placed outside the political life of the nation-state.