Homo Sacer is both the name of the series and the first book in Agamben's detailed genealogy of the current Nightmare which casts its gloomy shadow over the globe. It is not a substance or a system, in the sense of a concrete organization or network of affiliated criminals, banksters, or elites. Rather, utilizing a Foucaultian concept, the Homo Sacer is an apparatus (dispositif), an ideological framework which only exists through use. It is precisely this threshold concept, which neither exists nor not exist, but possesses a zombie like property of a tertium quid, an unexistence. Apparently obscure, this framework is best exposited through the arcane and primordial Homo Sacer designation, which Agamben will apply to fully understand the truly modern Social Democratic state-of-exception, The Camp.
Beginning, as he is wont to do in several of his works, Agamben begins with the ancient fracture between zoe and bios, between bare-biological life and personal-characteristic life. Each of these referred to distinct zones of living, between the home (oikos) and the city (polis), between the economic and the political. The conflation and indetermined confusion marks out the dawn of Modernity, and its potential horrors:
"the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis - the politicization of bare life as such - constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political philosophical categories of classical thought." (4)
It is this indistinction between one and the other, defined and defining through their use, which signals this new bio-political order, which politicizes precisely through its apoliticizing (for it is only a political decision which determine what is, indeed, outside of its bounds). In contemporary times, it is precisely the a-political nature of pandemic emergency governing (i.e. "A virus isn't politics! We must act for Humanity!") that marks out this form of hyper-politics, obscuring its own enthronement precisely through its self-effacement. It's precisely in this sense that Agamben will argue the bio-political is the enthronement of total domination:
"the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond [...] between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii" (6)
It is this prolegomenon that justifies Agamben's examination, with double vision, of ancient philosophy and modern politics, of Roman law and Nazi jurisprudence. Hence the need to examine the Homo Sacer: the sacred man who "may be killed and yet not sacrificed" (8), who neither belongs to the profane world of men or the realm of the gods. He is both divine and yet not, both human and not. He cannot be murdered or sacrificed, but snuffed out. It is in this sense that the law, which constitutes the body of the violator, defines through its pronouncement who, as criminal, is worthy of death. By designating a citizen as the judged, the law's application exposes this state-of-exception, of the one who belongs yet no longer belongs. In this way the law, the arbiter of justice (equalization within the city) is also the arbiter of violence. It's dual identity that ancients, as far back as the theologian-poet Hesiod, designated:
O Perseus, keep these things in mind and
forget violence [Biaia] when you attend to justice [Dike].
To men, Zeus gave this nomos:
what is proper to the fish, the wild beasts, and the winged birds
is to devour each other, since there is no Dike between them.
But to men Zeus gave Dike, which is must better. (Works and Days in pp.31)
While justice strictly separates man from the violence of beasts, both are contained in the law (nomos) of Zeus to govern the world. Thus it is in the excepting of violence (to the world of beast) it is also included, since the Law must define what pertains properly to each. And it the Law, which operates sovereignly (the living voice of Zeus; an important concept to appear later) threatens the possibility of indistinction, since law and violence are held together by a tenuous bond (between what marks out the beasts from men). It is this bond, and the passage between both distinctions, which marks out Law as "made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio" (27).
The Law, preserved in most Human history, maintained these distinctions, even through the threat of its incoherence. But it's precisely the incoherence, where the exception appears, where the Law exercises its true power. It is the exercise of violence, the suspension of justice, in which the Law carries out its preservative functions. This analysis is not unlike Girard's scape-goat, which in the same moment that barbarous savagery is carried out against the bearer of the community's sin is the community restored. It is the Augustinian critique that Rome's civilized foundation depended on original violence, that the justice of Rome depended on the murder of Remus. Yet while this blending helped to preserve distinctions, it is Modernity which has seen the normalization of this ordered anarchy.
The first major theorist of this blurred unexistence was the Monster of Malmesbury. Rather than the ancient philosophy of Plato, which ascribed justice to nature (the original sense of laws ruling over men) and closed the gap between law and nature, Hobbes pulled them apart to inscribe them into the Leviathan. Justice belongs not to nature, but to nature's suspension. The law of "all against all" is only overcome through the sovereign, which takes into itself the absolute indistinction between justice and violence as a living law. Therefore the modern definition of sovereignty:
"presents itself as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence. The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos but rather contains its virtuality" (35)
The violence of the beasts is not kept out through the Sovereign exclusion through the constitution of the commonwealth. Quite to the contrary, it becomes the very heart and seat of rule. Per Carl Schmitt's expert analysis, the rule only lives through the exception. The State has right and legitimacy to exercise justice precisely when it kills. As Benjamin would put it, "there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism". Yet the sovereign may also not kill, which again reinscribes the potency through impotency. Hence Agamben focuses on the bifurcation intrinsic within Aristotle's distinction between act and potentiality. For potency is clear enough in the act, but potentiality manifest simultaneously at the moment of action (the potential is a given) and inaction (since one may refrain from acting, yet retain the ability). Hence Hobbesian Leviathan smacks of a kind of voluntarism, which marked out many of the problems of early modern monarchic absolutism. For the prince's restraint, as much as his exercise of the exception, reveals again sovereign capture of both civilization and barbarity, justice and violence, in the Law.
Thus far the Sovereign is a question between man and beast. What of the divine? It's precisely this apparatus which suspends mankind from ever itself being man, even as Humanity is precisely the object of the law. But again, it's the exclusion in which the power of the Law, and its bestial violence, is unleashed. After dispatching the emptiness of much western anthropology, and its neat structural categorizations of the "sacred". For as much as the sacred pertains to a world beyond the world of men, it is itself defined in the very same Law. For as Hesiod said, the Law was from Zeus, yet it was for the justice of men. The arcane concept of Homo Sacer (which bedeviled even Republican Roman lawyers) was an example of the Law's potency through its hazy coincidence. Unlike the religious rites of Rome, in which consecratio moved an object or person outside of Human law into the custody of the gods, Homo Sacer never fully made the transition. He was not able to be murdered (since he was no longer under man's law), but he was also not fit for sacrifice (not under divine law). And thus the double-movement of the Law (a removal from its jurisdiction and its placement in another) fails at the critical juncture, losing the legal person through the excepting power. The Homo Sacer can be killed, but neither murdered nor sacrificed. Thus it is as this juncture that the original purpose of sacrality appears, for it is the life that can only be destroyed which is truly set apart. The Homo Sacer is a revelation of Sovereignty's origin:
"homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. 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" (83)
Thus it is at the moment in which Sovereign Law constitutes and is constituted that it gains dominion over bare life, basic biological functions, which it defines, governs, and can disappear. The Sovereign not only decides the exception, but in so doing decides its jurisdiction. But the Law can only do this straddling between its own jurisdiction and the supposed, and negated, world outside its authority (the war of all against all). Thus the Sovereign, as Law-Giver, must be both in and out, itself the exception which allows it to except. For in the Hobbesian state of nature, it is primarily the threat of death, in the killing and being killed, which is the pretext for the founding of the commonwealth. Yet if the Sovereign has this power to kill, excepting one from justice as an enemy (to kill without murder), the Sovereign is itself not unlike those who may be killed and kill without murder or sacrifice. The arcana imperii is that the Sovereign is the Enemy of Mankind, the Pirate, the Werewolf, hidden at the source of power. The Sovereign is the excepted precisely in its ability to except, making it that "mortal god" which Hobbes so reverently defined. The primordial fact of exception as constitutive, rather than some positive mutuality, is what defines the modern state. Thus Agamben condemns modern mass democracy:
"The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologize in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to conform the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy incapable of truly think a politics freed from the form of the State.
The relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. 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 non relational. 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, at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured." (109-110)
The sacred controls the profane through its own self-exclusion. The political control the economic through its own self-exclusion. The public controls the private through its own self exclusion. Thus the modern state, in this entire collapse, is only defined precisely through its total domination of the profane, economic, and private. That's all that matters and marks out, through Sovereignty's self-effacement, the modern deposits of the sacred, political and public. Democracy is thus trapped to always replicate, and intensify, this relationship as it is replicated again and again and again. And it is thus no surprise that only in Weimar Germany, a modern social democratic state in crisis, out of which Hitler and NSDAP biopolitics emerged.
Modern Democracy intensifies, rather than erase, the distinctions (and their undetermined coincidence) through diffusion. Unlike ancient or medieval polities (even Hobbes' absolutist monarchism), Democracy infuses the sacrality of Sovereignty into the body of single citizen. When the nation was in the single body of the king, continuity depended on the bifurcation of the king's body. For as he lay moldering in the ground, he remained. The king is dead, long live the king. But mass democracy has not abolished this concept, but extended it to all in the individual "sovereign subject", which again bifurcates into the corporaeal citizen and his congealed form as The People, the Sovereign. Therefore, just as medieval politics often revolved around maintenance of the body of the king, so too does Democracy:
"If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of law's desire to have a body,' democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body." (124-125)
Thus the indeterminate space in royal politics (egthe bedroom as the source of diplomacy) becomes universalized, but precisely as the moment that the private becomes public, so too does the public efface before the private. Thus humanitarian discourse is not concerned with citizens as much as humanity. The prescriptions of law in the nation-state increasingly decrease before efforts to improve efforts at human life. The confusion intensifies, for how can the Law, which deals with citizenship and the rights thereof, take aim at things explicitly outside of its juridical purview? Through the increasing normalization of the state of exception. Human Rights is the discursive move in this direction, in a way not unsimilar to a Constitution fixated with pirates and refugees. The logic creates a zone of constant confusion, for as nation-states continue to push non-citizens to the brink within their own societies (the smiley liberals welcoming refugees into camps, slums, and "overflow facilities" as the Biden regime has termed border jails) so too do humanitarians aid this effort through intensifying the crisis. The indeterminacy becomes the point; the bug is a feature:
"On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed representation and protection of a bare-life that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be rectified into a new national identity" (132-133)
On this point, Agamben has often been misunderstood to support a UN NGO liberal global state. Many who've cited Homo Sacer (or State of Exception) for their graduate work believed this amounted to a rejection of the racism in the War on Terror. It was quite mainstream for academics to rattle their sabers against Bush II's regime of rendition and torture. And so Agamben rejected this perversion, where a certain body (over which the state was sovereign) was exempted from protection. "Terrorist" became a zone of exception between the political Citizen and sacral Soldier. For a war zone was both a place of lawlessness and law, for its abnormality (a return to the state-of-nature) was itself included in the regulations of Law. Thus there are military tribunals, war crimes, etc. Yet this zone is outside the laws of nations proper, taking on certain elements of the sacred in their self-constitution. It is precisely at the moment of excepting, moving the human-citizen into the sacred-soldier, where the terrorist drops off. He never makes it into the next category and effectively becomes a Homo Sacer, killable, but neither murdered or executed (a sacrifice for Ares). True enough.
But the focus primarily biological, not the cultural appendage. It is not a question of applying a biopolitical solution to a radicalized bigotry (the average liberal misstep), but radicalizing as a means of executing the biopolitical apparatus. NSDAP policies of eugenics, euthanasia, racial extermination (of Jews or Slavs) flowed not from some primeval German (or Christian) hatred of Jews. It's not race that drives biopolitics, but the opposite. Nazi geneticists were already quite clear that race, defined strictly in terms of genetics, was impossibly confused among the intermixing of peoples. Rather, policy derived not from politics but policing. It was necessity of preserving and sanitizing the body-politic (in the most literal sense) which drove these policies. It was about preservation of human bodies as such from contamination and contagion. Thus the Jews, whom Hitler considered lice (filth, not as Holocaust theologians imagine it, a perverse human sacrifice), were simply to be cleansed. The logic of biopolitics results in this determination of life, its quality and protection, which operated through racial miscegenation and cultural influence. It was, in the end, a police question for the common good.
Not grasping this point, moron academics were "shocked" at Agamben's consistent stand against Rona Reich. As apparent in the same kind of discourse, the Unvaccinated (through their actions and politics) had made themselves unfit for life. They were excepted, targeted as citizens and as human bodies, since these two had coincided without clarity. What were the rights of the citizen if these were increasing abstract rights of human biological subsistence? And what was human biological subsistence if it was not a phenomenon to defined legally? Thus Life Itself is now the question of sovereignty: "In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the non value of life as such" (142). Thus the need for a sovereign definition of life in medical jurisprudence. The use of technology to artificially sustain breathing, heart-pumping, and all bodily functions allows the body to survive brain death. The "neomort" (defined as "warm, pulsating, and urinating") could be held as a source of future transplants. With a legal declaration that brain-death is death, a body could be sustained for future used. An undead body, killable without murder or execution, demarcates the pinnacle of this logic:
"in modern democracies it is possible to state in public what the Nazi biopolicians did not dare to say" (165)
The Unvaxxed, deprived of livelihood and dignity in Agamben's native Italy (fined, harassed, supervised, and increasingly limited to basics of nutritive life), were unworthy of Life. They were excepted, as a matter of policy and police, from the vagueries of Social Democracy. And this decision came from something quite similar to the Fuhrer principle which empowered Hitler to act. He had no constitutional power to act as he did, but as representative of The People, his word was a living law. In a state of emergency, where constitutional provisions allow a gaping hole of exceptional action (as seen in Canada, with Trudeau's use of emergency power to ruin the livelihoods of protestors), the legality of the law is in its very issuance. Exception becomes the norm, norming and normed simultaneously, a groundless being calling itself into existence. And spatialized, the application of this state of exception is The Camp. It is a zone that is neither under constitutional law nor outside of it, created by it to be outside of it. Despite the insane propaganda to glamorize, Australia's unvaccinated camps were an exercise of this logic. And yet this zone is not on the fringe of the city, or clear in any predictable pattern. As many across CANZUK and the North Atlantic experienced, the home can suddenly turn into a camp, with police showing up to make sure one was not threatening the body-politics. Bare life in the insufficiently healthy (proven through legal decree, printed on an ID card, shifting as to how many jabs made you sufficiently life-as-such) was condemned to containment. As Agamben concludes:
"The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city's interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet" (176)
This is the supreme political crisis of our age, which has been building for over a century. The Corona madness has been its latest, and most widespread, manifestation. To be frank: if you thought it was simply a health measure, that those who refused were "selfish" or "ignorant", that this is not political but medical, you are absolutely, unequivocally, a blind fool.
However, there is still a hope on the horizon. But it is not in simply rolling things back:
"Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body - a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body - in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own Zoe." (188)
In other words, the hope is neither to retreat back into the past to restore a traditional way nor in a future development of man out of this problem. There is no possibility of return and there is no future which will save us from the new Nomos of the Earth. The only way out is in the here and now, in these vessels of clay, dependent and weak as they are. Though explicated in later works in a fare more substantial way, Agamben offers crumbs of the coming politics of the Messiah. He quotes a curious thought from Franz Kafka's notebook:
"The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day" (57)
Derrida (and Baudrillard for that matter) interpreted this as the nihilistic non-event of an event (the resurrection, but into the bestial zombie, life too late, the happening of nothing). In contrast, Agamben argues Kafka saw the Messiah's an non-eventful event. No one will notice, no one will see, and yet the world will change in the twinkle of an eye. The Messiah will neither restore Eden nor bring about The Kingdom, but suspended between the two, Law is deactivated. The Kingdom of Heaven is nothing more than the reign of Justice without Law ("not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of heart"), where the Nomos is made inoperative through its fulfillment. In its place, in the place of the sovereign state, righteous love will reign as the thrones of men cast down their crowns before the Lamb's throne. Let there be hope against hope, and may Agamben's deeply Christian vision steel us for the times ahead.
Let thy kingdom come
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