Much of Agamben's work since the 1980s can be viewed as leading up to the so-called
Homo Sacer project, which properly begins with the book
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this series of works, Agamben responds to
Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. Since 1995, he has been best known for this ongoing project, the volumes of which have been published out of order, and which include: •
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) •
State of Exception. Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003) •
Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Homo Sacer II, 2 (2015) •
The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II, 3 (2008) •
The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Homo Sacer II, 4 (2007) •
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (1998). •
The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Forms-of-Life. Homo Sacer IV, 1 (2013) •
The Use of Bodies. Homo Sacer IV, 2 (2016) In 2017, these works were collected and published as
The Omnibus Homo Sacer. In the final volume of the series, Agamben intends to address "the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles." "What I call a form-of-life," he explains, "is a life which can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something like bare life. […] [H]ere too the concept of privacy comes in to play." The reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of a
homo sacer, reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept of the
homo sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between "bare life" (
la vita nuda or
zoê ; Gk. ζωή
zoê) and "a particular mode of life" or "qualified life" (
bios , ; Gk. βίος
bios). In Part III, section 7 of
Homo Sacer, "The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern", he evokes the
concentration camps of World War II. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule." Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The conditions in the camps were "
conditio inhumana," and the incarcerated were somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the exception laws of
Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct. In the process of creating a state of exception, these effects can compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his/her voice and represent themselves. The individual can not only be deprived of their citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. "Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life." Within the state of exception, the distinction between
bios (the life of the citizen) and
zoê (the life of
homo sacer) is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue that
Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9/11. "The situation of the prisoners in Guantanamo is legally speaking really comparable with the Nazi camps. The Guantanamo detainees do not have the status of prisoners of war; they have no legal status at all. They are subject to mere factual domination, and have no legal existence". Agamben mentions that basic universal
human rights of Taliban individuals, while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2001, were negated by US laws. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on
hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside the law, he or she is, according to Agamben, reduced to "bare life" in the eyes of the judicial powers. Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has deprived the individual of power and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. "The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious." Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one's humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception, as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison, also operate outside the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding, not allowing them to die. During the
hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February 2006,
The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC, voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breach of the government's power and was against the rights of the prisoners.
The Coming Community (1993) In
The Coming Community, published in 1990 and translated by longtime admirer
Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of "whatever singularity" as that which has an "inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence". It is important to note his understanding of "whatever" not as being indifference but based on the Latin
quodlibet ens translated as "being such that it always matters". Agamben starts off by describing the "lovable": Similarly, Agamben discusses "ease" as the “place” of love, or more precisely, love as the encounter with a unique moment (“love as the experience of taking-place in a whatever singularity"), which resonates with his utilization of the concept of "use" in his later writings. Following the same trend, he employs, among others, the following to describe the "watershed of whatever": • Example – particular and universal • Limbo – blessed and damned • Homonym – concept and idea • Halo – potentiality and actuality • Face – common and proper, genus and individual • Threshold – inside and outside • Coming community – state and non-state (humanity) Other themes addressed in
The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic. Unlike other continental philosophers, he does not reject the dichotomies of subject/object and potentiality/actuality outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable. The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors, he nonetheless shows a concrete example of
whatever singularity acting politically:
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) In his main work
"Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of
Roman law that poses fundamental questions about the nature of law and
power in general. Under the laws of the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society, and all of his rights as a
citizen were revoked. He thus became a
"homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody, while his life, on the other hand, was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony. Although Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a
Homo sacer, they remained "under the spell" of law. This means that "human life" is "included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)".
Homo sacer was therefore both
excluded from law
and included at the same time. This paradoxical figure of
homo sacer is the exact mirror image of the
sovereign (
basileus) – a king, emperor, or president – who stands, on the one hand,
within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and
outside the law (since as a
body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time). Agamben draws on
Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the
state of exception (or
justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated. Agamben argues that laws have always assumed the authority to define "bare life" –
zoe, as opposed to
bios, or 'qualified life' – by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from
Antiquity to
Modernity – literally from
Aristotle to
Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (Gk. ζῆν,
zen), but existing with regard to the
good life (εὖ ζῆν,
eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord with its
bios) by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception) of what is to remain outside the political body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition (
zoe). According to Agamben,
biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of
ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.
State of Exception (2005) In this book, Agamben traces the concept of "
state of exception" (
Ausnahmezustand) used by Carl Schmitt to Roman
justitium and
auctoritas. This leads him to a response to Carl Schmitt's definition of
sovereignty as the power to proclaim the exception. Agamben's text
State of Exception investigates the increase of power by governments which they employ in supposed times of crisis. Within a
state of emergency, Agamben refers to the states of exception, where constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government. The state of exception invests one person or government with the power and voice of authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the past. "In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which
logic and
praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without
logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" (Agamben, pg 40). Agamben refers to a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler's rule. "The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system" (Agamben, p. 2). The political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government—or one form or branch of government—as all-powerful, operating outside the laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall be privileged and accepted as true, and certain voices shall be heard as valued, while, of course, many others are not. This oppressive distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge and suppressing certain knowledge is a violent act within a time of crisis. Agamben's
State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President
George W. Bush on 13 November 2001, Agamben writes, "What is new about President Bush's order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW's (prisoner of war) as defined by the
Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws" (Agamben, pg 3). Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan were held at
Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed "
enemy combatants." Until 7 July 2006, these individuals had been treated outside the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration.
Auctoritas, "charisma" and Führertum doctrine Agamben shows that
auctoritas and
potestas are clearly distinct – although they form together a
binary system". He quotes
Mommsen, who explains that
auctoritas is "less than an
order and more than an advice". While
potestas derives from social function,
auctoritas "immediately derives from the
patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to
Max Weber's concept of
charisma. This is why the tradition ordered, at the king's death, the creation of the sovereign's wax-double in the
funus imaginarium, as
Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated in ''
The King's Two Bodies (1957). Hence, it is necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure the continuity of dignitas
(term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas
). Moreover, in the person detaining auctoritas
—the sovereign—public life and private life have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas
as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae'', had opened up his house to public eyes. In his theorization of thanatopolitics (the politics of death), Agamben uses the English and Roman examples to show how the sovereign justifies authority by his claimed ability to control or manage his own death. Agamben writes that the rituals of two deaths by the sovereign (as an ordinary human and then as effigy) demonstrate that death rituals show the people that the sovereign is in control of both lives.}} Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "
biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in
Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of "ex-ception", which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt. Agamben concludes his chapter on "
Auctoritas and
potestas" writing: {{quotation|It is significative that modern specialists were so inclined to admit that
auctoritas was inherent to the living person of the
pater or the
princeps. What was evidently an ideology or a
fictio aiming to be the groundwork of
auctoritas' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to
potestas thus became a figure of right's {"droit"}
immanence to life. ... Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate itself each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"
dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} – the state of exception,
justitium, the
auctoritas principis, the
Führertum -, put in use in more or less different circumstances, in the 1930s – overall, but not only – in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of
auctoritas and elaborated in a
Führertum doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In 1933, in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the
Führung principle (sic!) by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage".{"
identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"}}} Agamben's thoughts on the state of emergency lead him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is incredibly thin, perhaps even ontologically non-existent, as
rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance. Agamben often reminds us that
Hitler never
abrogated the
Weimar Constitution: he
suspended it for the duration of the
Third Reich with the
Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933. Indefinite suspension of the law is what characterizes the state of exception.
The Highest Poverty (2011) The English edition was translated by Adam Kotsko. In this study of medieval monastic rules, Agamben offers a genealogical approach to several concepts that
Ludwig Wittgenstein established in his late philosophy, primarily the
Philosophical Investigations:
rule-following,
form of life, and the central importance of 'use' (for Wittgenstein: 'the meaning of a word is its use in language', and he uses 'language' not just to speak of word-language but any understandable behaviour). Agamben traces earlier versions of the term 'form-of-life' throughout the development of monastic life, beginning with the establishment of a genre of written rules in the fourth century. The aim of the book is to differentiate between 'law' and a particular use of a rule that is opposite to the implementation of law. In order to sketch out the potential of this concept, we would need 'a theory of use – of which Western philosophy lacks even the most elementary principles'.
Personal views Criticism of US response to 9/11 Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to
11 September 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "
state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the
USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installation of
martial law and
emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the
US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his
biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (
zoe) and was akin to the
tattooing that the
Nazis did during World War II. However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "
war on terror". As he argues in
State of Exception (2005),
rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been generalised and abused since then. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when
Francis Galton and
Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "
anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and
surveillance: "The political body thus has become a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the
Jews deportation in
France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from
identity cards. Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical
critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he argues is intrinsically related to the state of exception.
Statements on COVID-19 Agamben, in an article published by
Il Manifesto on 26 February 2020, quoted the NRC in saying that there was no
COVID-19 pandemic: "In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which 'there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.' and 'the infection, according to the epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) in 80–90% of cases. In 10–15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but it also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy. Agamben argued that “the health emergency was being exaggerated” to create a state of exception. Agamben's views were strongly criticised by
Sergio Benvenuto,
Roberto Esposito,
Divya Dwivedi,
Shaj Mohan,
Jean-Luc Nancy,
Benjamin H. Bratton, and others. ==Bibliography==