Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoē, and that it is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoē.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=13&selection=50,72,60,75|p.13]]) It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=17&selection=2,4,4,20|p.17]]) The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=17&selection=30,5,32,81|p.17]]) This means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: “the law is outside itself,” or: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law”

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=20&selection=17,76,29,57|HomoSacer, p.20]]) n exactly the same way, only language as the pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concrete instance of speech, divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and allows for the opening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to certain denotations. 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. The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=71&selection=87,5,93,16|p.71]]) Karl Löwith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a “politicization of life” and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism:

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=72&selection=71,0,75,102|p.72]]) The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=73&selection=77,0,99,39|HomoSacer, p.73]]) “We command that you have before us to show, at Westminster, that body X, by whatsoever name he may be called therein, which is held in your custody, as it is said, as well as the cause of the arrest and the detention.” Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. And democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of this “body”: habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have a body to show.”

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=74&selection=64,0,68,13|HomoSacer, p.74]]) The great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the bodies of individuals, must be read in this light. The absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West.

([[HomoSacer.pdf#page=98&selection=17,104,27,88|HomoSacer, p.98]]) The judge, the civil servant, or whoever else has to reckon with such a notion no longer orients himself according to a rule or a situation of fact. Binding himself solely to his own community of race with the German people and the Führer, such a person moves in a zone in which the distinction between life and politics, between questions of fact and questions of law, has literally no more meaning.