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.

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.

The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.

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”

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: