Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

The first volume of Agamben's long Homo Sacer project, joining Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty with Michel Foucault's biopolitics and Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Part One analyses the logic of sovereignty. Following Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception, and so stands both inside and outside the law. Part Two takes its title from an obscure figure of archaic Roman law: the homo sacer, a person who could be killed by anyone without it counting as murder, yet who could not be sacrificed. Agamben argues that this bare life, life exposed to death and stripped of political status, is the hidden foundation of sovereign power, and he contrasts the Greek terms zoē, simple living, and bios, a qualified way of life. Part Three claims that the concentration camp, not the city, is the hidden paradigm of modern politics. Critics argue that he flattens important historical and legal differences between regimes.

Its ideas of bare life and the state of exception are widely used to discuss refugees, detention camps, emergency powers and the politics of life and death.