Hey, hey everyone. Back again. Today I'm going to talk about Giorgio Agambin's idea or notion of homo sacre.
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Let's talk about homo sacre, which is a complicated term, and I want to be quite upfront. I'm not going to be able to discuss every single part of this, especially the history of the term that that Agambin is drawing from. You really have to read the entire book, Homo Sacker or Saker, whatever, for for that.
I'm just going to give you kind of a barebones understanding of it to to get your uh feet off the ground essentially and open up some possible criticisms I have of it and some of the ways that it informs perhaps fucodian notions of biopolitics or works against them to some extent as well. So let's let's jump into it. Now, at the core of the term homosacre is a kind of ambivalence.
And the reason that there's an ambivalence is because sacre quite literally can refer to sacred. And when we think of sacred, we probably think someone who's exalted. Maybe they're held in high esteem.
But the tradition and the language etmologically that a gambin is drawing from actually paints the notion of sacredness or sacre in this way in a kind of negative light as well where someone who was considered to be sacred or sacre was someone that could also be seen as being like dirty like someone you weren't supposed to come in contact with someone that could actually be like ostracized from the political order. Now the reason he's digging into this this question of sacredness is because and he's really speaking to uh Walter Benjamin here and the kind of question that Walter Benjamin opens about uh the sacredness of life in relation to divine law and what divine law would might mean and I've done an episode on uh Benjamin's text the critique of violence which you can find and and check out on here if you want but Agamin is really curious about this because there's been a kind of naive assumption that sacre sacredness is referring to something that is held in in high esteem something that is seen as being something to protect. Now a gambin shows because it is also associated with this kind of notion of being dirty this image of dirtiness that they are someone who has to be excluded.
Now, that serves a very instrumental function for a Gambin in constituting a political order, but we're going to we're going to get there in a minute. We're going to we're going to build here and arrive to that point. But that is essentially the end goal that Gambin wants to arrive at.
So, a homoser is a person is a human who is both beneath the law and outside of the law. That is they are someone whose life can't be used to protiate which is a fancy word for saying that cannot feed or cannot be sacrificed is someone whose life can't mean anything really for those people in authority for the dominant social order. So for example, they are so beneath life, they are so beneath citizenship, let's say, especially as we're referring to this in relation to the Roman tradition that he's really uh picking up on here and the Greeks as well.
Homo sacre is someone who is beneath citizenship and so their life means nothing in terms of a sacrificial order. So you cannot sacrifice a homo sacre with the hope of getting something from the gods like have your crops grow or something like that. They are seen as being less than that.
At the same time they are also someone whose life means nothing even if they're killed. So if you were to kill one of these people or if they were they were to be killed, what that would mean was that nothing would befall you because it was like you weren't even killing a human. So their lives couldn't be sacrificed to the gods and their lives meant like nothing within the political order which is very strange considering our perhaps immediate understanding of what a sacred person is.
But historically as a gin shows they are someone whose life could neither be used to particiate the gods nor could be seen as being something worth defending or punishing if if they were to be uh killed by someone else. So they person who killed them couldn't be punished. Now the emergence of this kind of figure, this person that can be killed with impunity essentially where nothing bad will happen can only come about in a certain phase, certain stage, a certain kind of uh mode of social organization.
One that a Gambin attributes specifically to the emergence of sovereign power because it is the sovereign who has the capacity to kill. without that killing being in the service of anything so-called meaningful in terms of uh a sacrificial order or the killing being something that could then be uh retribution can be paid for it in the form of disciplinary measures or whatever. So the sovereign is the person who is given the potential given the I guess authority to kill without committing homicide and to in that same act of killing do it without it meaning anything in a sacrificial way because in the case of like a sacrifice that person would hardly the executioner would hardly be someone considered to have committed a homicide because it is part of that social order as being something that is approved allowed for.
Now in this phase because or this this kind of mode of social organization in this social sphere people are viewed as being less than these these specific people are viewed as being less than worthy to sacrifice and so they can be killed with impunity. Now at this point they are reduced to what it Agambin calls and what he draws from etmologically. They are reduced to a kind of bare life where all they are is a living being.
And because they are only a living being, they're just flesh essentially, they don't actually have any real meaning. And so they can be killed with absolutely no consequence. And so even though something a person is held as being sacred and we know now that that sacredness is not something to really be excited about, it serves a pretty instrumental function in that it is a necessary part of the establishment of sovereign power.
So in that sense it is kind of sacred. It's a necessary component and something we must strive for if we want to establish this kind of social organization which is obviously not a great one. But these people are held in a kind of strange inverse exaltation where they are seen as being a necessary component of this system precisely because they can be taken out of that system via killing without any kind of repercussions.
Now this is how a GMAN establishes his own form of biopolitics where like people are reduced to a kind of life only and it is in that moment that they can then be killed without any kind of repercussions occurring. Now this is both similar and different from the kind of biopolitics we get in Fuko because Fuko doesn't pay quite as much attention to this possibility of death coming from this focus on life. In fact, he considers more about what the proliferation of life means in terms of power.
Whereas a Gambin is saying this proliferation of life, this acknowledgement of things as life has pretty negative consequences because then it strips people of anything beyond their flesh because it strips them of anything beyond their Zoey being the term he he draws upon here. Anything other than their just their lieness. they don't have any kind of uh meaning beyond that and that's a very scary moment because it reduces people to that just their biology which houses no meaning in itself.
Now he uses the example of the holocaust to also illustrate this where the Jewish people among other people uh at the time were reduced to this kind of bare life. They had their their rights taken, citizenship taken, everything like that and reduced to only life. And he calls this a form of biopolitics in that way.
And he says that obviously opened the door for this thing called the Holocaust for that that event that is very still still very much um unimaginable that yet that still occurred. Now there's an issue that I have with this uh just to give my own input in that he reduces the Holocaust to like a kind of teological inevitability to this thing called sovereign power and bare life. And while that may be true in that we have certainly set the conditions for these types of events to occur and they have occurred all across the world in terms of as a result of this kind of sovereign power that he sketches.
I think that he is too quick not to see the specificity of an event like the Holocaust as representing something more than just a kind of teological consequence of this form of sovereign power in that there were so many other historical situations that played a part like the you know historical treatment of Jewish people certainly contributed to this. It wasn't just any people and we can't lose sight of that fact. Like the treatment of the Jewish people all throughout the world for thousands of years contributed to this as well.
This is not just the demonstration of a kind of sovereign power that did this because it could. It was a sovereign power that also had these other bakedin prejudices. And I think that a gambin downplays that to some extent.
And that is really it. There's, you know, to give you kind of basic introduction, there's not really much more to add than that. Um, but of course, you get a lot more if you actually read the text.
But yeah, if anyone, you know, you listen this far, I'd love to hear what anyone else had to say, what you think might be worth adding. If anyone puts a comment in that's that's really good, uh, I love pinning them, you know, so that everyone can see anything that should be added or if I mischaracterized anything, I'd love to hear about it. But um yeah, if you like what I did here, leave five stars, like, share, you know, review and uh catch you next time.
