Notes to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

PART THREE: The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern
§ 1 The Politicization of Life
§ 2 Biopolitics and the Rights of Man
§ 3 Life That Does Not Deserve to Live
§ 4 ‘Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People
§ 5 VP
§ 6 Politicizing Death
§ 7 The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern
Threshold

§1

• Michel Foucault> Biopolitics>politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.
• Concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human made hell. Camp>the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space, paradigm of the political space of modernity.
• Contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian state.
• “The ‘right’ to life,” writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’ – which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending – was the political response to all these new procedures of power”
• Modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it.
• “law’s desire to have a body”>democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.
• “Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called political part” (De homine)
• The absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West.

§2

DECLARATION>“The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.

• Nation come from nascere (to be born).
• The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien régime are now irrevocably united in the body of the “sovereign subject” so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted.
• 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 fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision.
• “What is French? What is German?”
• 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.
• Refugees> break the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the modern sovereignty in crisis. Every time refugees represent not individual cases but – as happens more and more often today – a mass phenomenon.
• Publicity campaigns t gather funds for refugees from Rwanda> human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life – as life that can be killed but not sacrificed – > object of aid and protection.              “Imploring eyes” of the Rwandan child>contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need.

Forgotten Refugees

Sadomasochism and Sovereignty>Sadomasochism is precisely the technique of sexuality by which the bare life of a sexual partner is brought to light. Not only does Sade consciously invoke the analogy with sovereign power (“there is no man,” he writes, “who does not want to be a despot when he has an erection”), but we also find here the symmetry between homo sacer and sovereign, in the complicity that ties the masochist to the sadist, the victim to the executioner.

 

 

 

§3

Binding>

• unpunishability of suicide>suicide as the expression of man’s sovereignty over his own existence.
• The fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity in favor of euthanasia.
• “life unworthy of being lived”>applies first of all to individuals who must be considered as “incurably lost” following an illness or an accident and who, fully conscious of their condition, desire “redemption”.
• The new juridical category of “life devoid of value”corresponds to the bare life of homo sacer
• Hitler> Euthanasia>mass extermination>program was linked to economic considerations
• The concept of “life unworthy of being lived” is clearly not an ethical one
• biopolitics necessarily turns into thanatopolitics.
• In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.
• This is why the problem of euthanasia is an absolutely modern problem, which Nazism, as the first radically biopolitical state, could not fail to pose.
• integration of medicine and politics>

§4

The paradox of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task.

Eugenics: the bio social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of an population usually a human population.

Eugenic legislation: example>

“After national X-ray examination, the Führer is to be given a list of sick persons, particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich Health Law . . . these
‘ Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People’ 87
families will no longer be able to remain among the public and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer” (quoted in Arendt, Origins, p. 416).

Human heredity-human discrimination.

For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity.

Nazism determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space

 

§5

Versuchspersonen, human guinea pigs. (VP).  People, condemned to different levels of punishment according to the Law, are used as guinea pigs for experimentation.

Experiments on prisoners and persons sentenced to death had been performed several times and on a large scale in our century, in particular in the United States. The consistent practice in the United States was to have the sentenced person sign a declaration. A “voluntary consent” is simply meaningless for someone interned at Dachau, even if he or she is promised an improvement in living conditions.

Those who are sentenced to death and those who dwelt in the camps are thus in some way unconsciously assimilated to homines sacres, to a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide.

In a space of exception, subjection to experimentation can, like an expiation rite, either return the human body to life or definitively consign it to the death to which it already belongs.

 

• Debate about the medical experimentation using  human subjects:

http://debatewise.org/debates/982-prisoners-should-be-used-for-medical-experiments-without-consent/#yes3

Prisoners Should Be Used For Medical Experiments Without Consent?

 

There are people to say Yes

“They (prisoners condemned in death)  lose their right to life, and therefore, cannot be discussed in the same realm as other prisoners. While we still protect many of their rights, they are the easiest group to target for medical testing without consent because we have already decided they do not have the right to life….prisoner’s guaranteed right for protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The medical testing on prisoners is not a punishment to them in the first place. It is a way that our government gives those death-penalized prisoners a chance to pay back the society. Medical experiments on prisoners are not cruel or unusual.”

Others to say No

“The harm of violation of this principle is not only directly linked to prisoners as individuals, that they are not given their lawful protection or being maltreated, but also linked to the whole society–that this will turn the society into a ZERO torlerance society with no room of restoritive justice. Why? Because the policy is sending a strong message that it’s not only legal but also moral to infringe prisoner’s right, that it’s ok and right to treat them as guinea pigs for medical experiements, that they don’t deserve a basic right at all once they become criminal.”

 

• Lecture about the Human Guinea Pigs

 

§6

coma: loss of relational life functions (consciousness, mobility, sensibility, reflexes)

coma dépassé: a coma in which the total abolition of relational life functions corresponds to an equally total abolition of vegetative life functions”.(Mollaret and Goulon)

overcoma: the full fruit  of new life-support technology: artificial respiration, maintenance of cardiac circulation through intravenous perfusion of adrenaline, technologies of body temperature control, and so on.

systematic or somatic death: is  surprising that the champions of brain death can candidly write that brain death “inevitably leads quite quickly to death”.

“neomorts”: legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of possible future transplants

 

§7 

*Telos of the Camp : http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/152/270

Camp is not a thing of the past but a ‘hidden paradigm’ of the political space in which we live.

• CAMP:the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized.
• Campos de concentraciones : Cuba in 1896 >to suppress the popular insurrection of the colony
• “concentration camps” : English herded the Boers toward the start of the century.
• Schutzhaft : Prussian law of June 4, 1851> individuals to be “taken into custody” independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state.
• Konzentrationslager für Ausländer at Cottbus-Sielow, 1850>Eastern European refugees. Maybe  the first camp for Jews in this century.

– The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space.The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable.

– Only because the camps constitute a space of exception is everything  truly possible.

– The camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.

– The camp is the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them.

– structure of the nation-state: land, order, birth.

– Schmitt observes concepts  like “good morals,” “proper initiative,” “important motive,” “public security and order,” “state of danger,” ar “case of necessity,” in connection to the juridical rules.

– biopolitical body:  twofold appearance >as Jewish body and as German body, as life unworthy of being lived and as full life.

-Führer : , a nomos empsuchon, a living law.

-Camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens.

– The camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to – and so broken – the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land.

– Concept ‘‘people” in Western politics. It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total, state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve – court of miracles or camp – of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated.

– Bare life (people) – political existence (People),                                                                                                                                                               exclusion – inclusion,                                                                                                                                                                                                                        zoē – bios.

– Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself.

THRESHOLD

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

-Homo sacer: homo sacer, or of the bandit, the Friedlos, the aquae et igni interdictus, which are in many ways similar. He has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate in the rites of his gens, nor  can he perform any juridically valid act. Anyone can kill him without committing homicide;

-The Führer has, so to speak, a whole body that is neither private nor public and whose life is in itself supremely political. The Führers body is, in other words, situated at the point of coincidence between zoē and bios, biological body and political body. In his person, zoē and bios incessantly pass over into each other.

-The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power.

—————————————————————————————

ARTISTS political engaged

 

• Gullielmo Gomez-Penya

http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/bios.htm

• Santiago Sierra

http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php

• Waafa Yasin: performance artist who use her body as a means of political and poetic expression.

Perfromance: Aesh (Livelihood) (2008). The performance is an interpretation of two Al-Jazeera interviews: an Iraqi prisoner describing his time in jail during the 1990s, and a description of the journey by boat taken by Moroccan and Algerian immigrants to France. Her physical position evoked the prisoner, while her literal movement suggested the immigrants’ journey.

• Orwell. “Animal farm”, a novel that adresses the abuse of power. Gradually as the pigs gain more and more power they find it harder to resist temptation. A political satyr against totalitarianism.

 

 

 

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:

1. 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
2. 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.

• http://bringingbacktheglory.blogspot.gr/2009/07/laddy-smid-as-homo-sacer.html

———————————————————————-

§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 :

 

1. wargus, the wolf-man 
2. 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>

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Batailles merit is to have brought to light the hidden link between bare life and sovereignty.
5. 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.

 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

• Santiago Sierra. Performance artist , politically engaged.

Notes to: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Giorgio Agamben

Chapters:

3.Potentiality and Law

4.Form of Law

Threshold

POTENTIALITY AND LAW.

WIKIPEDIA: The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any “possibility” that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them. Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense. Aristotle describes potentiality and actuality, or potency and action, as one of several distinctions between things that exist or do not exist. In a sense, a thing that exists potentially does not exist, but the potential does exist. And this type of distinction is expressed for several different types of being within Aristotle’s categories of being.

TEXT:

• Constituted power exist only in the State.
• Constituting power, on the other hand, is situated outside the State
• Benjamin presented the relation between constituting power and constituted power as the relation between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it.
• if constituting power is, as the violence that posits law, certainly more noble than the violence that preserves it, constituting power still possesses no title that might legitimate something other than law-preserving violence and even maintains an ambiguous and ineradicable relation with constituted power.
• Schmitt considers constituting power as a “political will” capable of “making the concrete, fundamental decision on the nature and form of one’s own political existence.”Constituting power stands “before and above every constitutional legislative procedure”.
• Antonio Negri:constituting power  is the act of choice, the punctual determination that opens a horizon, the radical enacting of something that did not exist before and whose conditions of existence stipulate that the creative act cannot lose its characteristics in creating.
• The relation between constituting power and constituted power is as the relation Aristotle establishes between potentiality and actuality, dynamis and energeia;the autonomous existence of potentiality – the fact that the kithara player keeps his ability [potenza] to play even when he does not play. Aristotle:“A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential”. What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be fits adynamia.
• ( “Actuality” comes from Latin actualitas  and is a traditional translation, but its normal meaning in Latin is “anything which is currently happening”)
• an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.
• Sovereignty is always double because Being, as potentiality, suspends itself in a relation of ban (or abandonment).
• a principle of potentiality is inherent in every definition of sovereignty.

FORM OF LAW

“Everyone strives to attain the Law,” answers the man, “how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper . . . bellows in his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.” Kafka. Before the law

• “Before the Law,” Kafka. He presents the pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything – which is to say, as pure ban.

“Kafka’s parable about the law describes the way that we experience and understand law and justice even as it also playfully subverts our expectations. Insofar as the parable demonstrates both the immanence of Law and its nonarrival, it suggests that the nature of waiting in this case may not be what we think it is. Kafka’s parable invites us to think about what the law (in its ordinary “small l” sense) is when it is not connected to the Law, when it is experienced only in its banal ordinariness, its day-to-day mediocrity. What if, Kafka seems to be asking us, there were nothing behind that gate? Or perhaps more accurately, what if we knew that we were never going to get through it (something the man from the country finds out only at the very end of his life, when it is too late)? Would that change our relationship to law and to our idea of justice? Would it alter the quality of our political obedience? Would it change the nature or even the fact of our waiting?” source:http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/rofl/articles/waiting-justice-benjamin-and-derrida-on-sovereignty-and-immanence-by-james-

• What, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify?
• All societies and all cultures today have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure “Nothing of Revelation.”
• “form of law”.http://www.oycf.org/Perspectives2/5_043000/what_is_rule_of_law.htm
• To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to … a sovereign power, and to remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is, to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing. One always abandons to a law. Abandonment respects the law
• A pure form of law is only the empty form of relation. Yet the empty form of relation is no longer a law but a zone of indistinguishability between law and life, which is to say, a state of exception.

 

 

THRESHOLD

Derrida

There are two violences, two competing Gewalten: on the one side, decision (just, historical, political, and so on), justice beyond droit and the state, but without decidable knowledge [i.e., the “Jewish” divine violence]; on the other, decidable knowledge and certainty in a realm that structurally remains that of the undecidable, of the mythic droit of the state [Greek, mythic]. On the one side [Jewish] the decision without undecidable certainty, on the other [Greek] the certainty of the undecidable but without decision. (56)

Divine violence

• For Benjamin, the key difference is that mythological violence is a projection of fantasy by human beings while divine violence serves to undermine that fantasy.
• The root of the ambiguity of divine violence is perhaps to be sought in precisely this absence.
• The violence that Benjamin defines as divine is instead situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between exception and rule.
• link between violence and law (Bare life)

Sovereign violence 

• opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law.
• the state of actual exception.

Decisive as it is for the origin of Western politics, the opposition between zoē and bios, between zen and eu zēn (that is, between life in general and the qualified way of life proper to men), contains nothing to make one assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as such.

Both Benjamin and Schmitt, if differently, point to life as the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty.

 

Giorgio Agamben: HOMO SACER. Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Chapters>

1. The paradox of sovereignty. 
2. 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.

http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=4b367674-4348-4073-9675-91a5c408cc3a%40sessionmgr110&vid=2&hid=127

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.         

………………………………………………………………

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.”

Notes: Zizek. How to read Lacan.

Chapter: The perverse subject of politics: Lacan viewer of Mohammad Bouyeri

Keywords: perversion, politics, totalitarianism, responsibility, dirty job, Nazi, Others’s will, ethical, religious fundamentalism, letter, sadomasochistic, fear, truthfulness, Foucault, truth, lie, conceal, deception, appearance, feign, Zeuxis and Parrhasions, illusion, doctor’s plot.

 Toshio Saeki

THE PERVERT

 

In this last chapter Zizek confront us with the perverse attitude of symbolic authorities and totalitarian politics-from fascism to stalinistic authoritarianism and explains how this perversion is identified into the subject which makes itself an instrument that follows the orders and the will of the big Other (where Other=God, Nation, Historical Necessity); a kind  schizophrenic attitude driven by the formula: “I know well, but nevertheless…”; lack of coherence and dissociation of  actions,  feelings and rationalization. An example of this behavior is the Stalin-subject that claims that behind the cruel, dis-human action of  murder lies the sense of duty and it becomes the instrument for he dark enjoyment of  their God or leader.  The same mechanism and behavior  is noticed in the modern Greece, where  the members of the fascist party , “Golden Dawn”, claim with conviction that theis (atrocious) political (re)actions are motivated by their sense of national duty! This is supposed to justified the conversion of “Enjoy” to “Punish”, both anyway ordered bz the big Other.

The flag and the country becomes the symbolization of the big Other:

“This is a battle for the flag, the country and for no other reason” (Ilias Kassiadis).

 

This perverse logic characterize also religion fundamentalism. Zizek uses as example the case of Mohammed Bouyeri, who murdered the Dutsch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004) and stabbed into his dead body a letter threatening  Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The assassination becomes a public performance driven by Bouyeri’s political and religious convictions. In the letter, death is mentioned as the moment of the truth, the moment  “at which every  creature confronts its truth  and is isolated from all its link”. His intention was to use the letter in order to  challenge the “unbelieving extremist” (Hirsi Ali) to proof her truthfulness and at the same time to transmit her  the fear of death: a fear induced by the confrontation with the omnipotent God, the divine big Other. This brings us to Lacan’s depiction of the pervert:” the pervert displaces division onto the Other” (p.110).

The only thing that can separate truth from lie is the readiness to die for your beliefs proving like that their truthfulness.  But as Zizek writes, there is a falsity in pervert’s attitude, the fact that resides in his attachment on truth.

But where is the distinctive line between the lie and the truth? Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well gives an insight to the entanglement of truth and lie; a story, in which marriage (law), in order to be “asserted  has to be consummated in the guise of an external marital affair” (p.113) .  An affair that is not a sin  but still a sinful act that involves a “cheating”. That is linked with Lacan’s paradox proposition: “There is no sexual relationship”- where Zizek will explain that the actual sex relationship has to be sustained bz the phantasmatic supplement.

The game of feigning to feign is related to Lacan’s appearance that occurs when we feign to be something that we are not, when we put this mask that conceals the Real behind creating a convincing illusion. An example is that of the painter Parrhasion who in competition with the painter Zeuxis  who can paint the most convincing illusion, painted a curtain that symbolize the hidden truth. A strict parallel can be the fake pennis that a women wears,  an action that represents of mimicry, an attempt to imitate something that reveals  behind a hidden reality.

This bring us back to the concept of perversion, where Zizek add that  the pervert contests that has a direct access to some figure of the big Other. (like the case of Osama bin Laden and President Bush who claim to be directed by the divine will).

 

The last reference of Zizek regards the case of Sophia Karpai as an example of opposition to Other’s will. Refusing to admit any guilty in relation to the “doctor’s plot),  she contribute to be prevented another catastrophe in politics generally and to save the life of thousand of people. (http://ml-review.ca/aml/BLAND/DOCTORS_CASE_FINAL.htm)

This means that like for any rule there is an exception, also in Human history exists individuals able to resist in big Other and fight against its will.

—————————————————————————————————————–

Additional material.

– Perversion is associated to sadomasochistic behavior.

[T]he S&M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. . . . Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting. . . . It is an acting-out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure.

–Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

 

ARTISTS

• Toshio Saeki (佐伯俊男) is an illustrator from Japan, famous for his paintings and drawing focusing on erotica, violence, and perversion. It has been suggested that his highly original erotic creations have been influential on some of Japan’s most well known contemporary artists including Aida Makoto and Takashi Murakami

 

• Vladimir Nabakov Lolita.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/nabokov-the-art-the-perverse

• Martin O’ Brien

Martin O’Brien’s practice focuses on physical endurance and hardship
in relation to the fact he suffers from cystic fibrosi. He was artist in residence
at ]performance s p a c e[ London from January- June 2012 during which he realised the project ‘Regimes of Hardship’ consisting of three 12 hour performance installations, with the third a collaborative work with the legendary performance artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose.

martinobrienperformance.weebly.com

http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http://martinobrienperformance.weebly.com/uploads/2/9/3/0/2930719/7439765.jpg%3F572&imgrefurl=http://martinobrienperformance.weebly.com/about.html&h=401&w=572&sz=54&tbnid=Mu83__Q8yNk49M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=128&zoom=1&usg=__zEIx2UzfB4rcelsomyEXvH71tp8=&docid=V1-17q92Vc0ZCM&sa=X&ei=ud8EUqq5JInPOd6mgSg&ved=0CEUQ9QEwBA&dur=689

• BOB FLANAGAN.

• Mapplethorpe

By the mid-1970s, Mapplethorpe had acquired a medium format camera and began documenting New York’s gay S&M community.Mapplethorpe’s elegant prints representing portraits, nudes, flowers, and erotic and sadomasochistic subjects dominated photography in the late 20th century.

• Documentary

• Disney and perversion

<
• Film: Secretary:Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as the title character in this black comedy/drama about a mentally fragile young woman who goes to work as a secretary. Her demanding boss (James Spader) crosses the line into downright sadism, and the two begin a strange relationship that fills a need for both of them. They agree to keep their relationship secret, but it begins to influence the rest of their lives. Directed by Steven Shainberg. Categories: Comedy, Drama, Romance. Year: 2002.

• Madonna: Open your heart

Perversion and animation

ZIZEK: The pervert”s guide in cinema

LINKS
http://www.lacan.com/covers.htm

http://www.lacan.com/usepervf.htm