Theory & Event

Introduction[1]

It has to be a puzzle how Giorgio Agamben’s evocation of ‘an obscure figure of archaic Roman law’ has assumed such a purchase on recent political and philosophical thought (Agamben 1998: 8).[2] This is the enigmatic figure of ‘homo sacer (sacred man)’, a figure which for Agamben embodies ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 8). What is ‘bare’ about the life of homo sacer is that it can be taken by anyone, and that this is to be done without sacrificing that life (Agamben 1998: 71). Bare life is in this way ‘before’ the law. It can be, and indeed can only be, taken away without the law’s authority or mediation. Such an exceedingly bare life is, for Agamben, manifested in the modern period in Foucault’s notion of biopower. Bare life is the object of that power. Yet, for Agamben, Foucault has to be ‘corrected’, or at least completed, in terms that would advance what Foucault supposedly relegated — a persistent and illimitable sovereign power dealing death (Agamben 1998: 9). Indeed, this sovereignty, apart from being located by Agamben in particular places, is constituted in its power over bare life, in its producing bare life. Leaving aside the resulting conundrum of something being constituted by what it itself produces, we may simply remark that sovereignty does this by being able to resort to a boundless state of exception which displaces the legal order. Hence, this ‘life of homo sacer... whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert’ will offer up ‘the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries’ (Agamben 1998: 8).

Perhaps, then, the remarkable impact of a resurrected homo sacer has to do with this discovery of a quiddity in both modern sovereign power and its primordium of bare life. Like its exhausted predecessors, this revivified sovereignty can marvelously combine being determinate with an unconstrained efficacy. Unlike those predecessors, it can do this without recourse to a transcendental reference fusing these two contrary dimensions. Rather, this sovereign power can enclose itself yet extend indefinitely, subsist finitely yet encompass what is ever beyond it. It is little wonder, then, that Agamben’s account of this sovereign power alternates vertiginously between various stilled scenes and a hovering evanescence. Nor should it occasion much surprise that, as we shall see, his near-resolution of the divide should veer from a near-complete determination of existence to its near-complete mutation. Along with such oscillations, there are evocations of the law — of a law which, although orientated towards dissipation or ‘indistinction’, somehow still retains decisive effect and ‘form’ (Agamben 1998: 49–62, e.g. 174). It is this intriguingly irresolute law which, in my argument, underpins and provides cogency to Agamben’s account of homo sacer and sovereign power. Yet this is a treacherous support because the conditions of existence of such a law, of a law that must in modernity subsist without reference beyond it, these now inexorable conditions, deny the encompassing arrogation of a sovereign power. Of course, modern law has itself carried claims to a determinant sovereignty, but these very claims, I hope to show, are themselves incompatible with any abiding resolution. Can such an indefinite sovereignty, then, be only a vacuity (cf. Bataille 1991: vol. III)? I will conclude, in sympathy with Agamben’s effort to place sovereignty socially in the modern period, by integrating my account of the law with a socio-logics which would found or necessitate some surpassing sovereign power, even if of a different kind to the one which Agamben offers.

Before taking up that ambitious agenda, there has to be an uneasy qualification to my engagement with Agamben on sovereignty and with the archaic redoubt of homo sacer. All summary is fraught but here it is especially so. The main work in which Agamben deals with such things, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, is written in...