Hello, I'm John David Eert and welcome to my series of discussions on uh Georgio Gambin's book Homoacre. Um I think the correct pron pronunciation of homo sacre is actually homo satcher. Uh but I find that harder to say.
So I'm going to stick with the pronunciation as homo sacre, which I've heard other people say. Uh it's just rolls easier off the tongue for me. So I'm going to stick with that pronunciation whether it's correct or not.
Um and um this is a book uh that came out in 1995 and has since become one of the great political uh classics of uh the postmodern epoch, the epoch of contemporary theory. Uh now note that when we're talking about contemporary theory that that comes out of Italy, it's almost all concerned with political theory. Whether we think of Agaman or uh Giani Vatimo or Antonio Negri or Bifo, whoever it is that we have in mind that's coming out of Italy in the postmodern epoch is almost invariably concerned with politics with political theory.
Why that should be the case, I'm not entirely certain. Uh but I do think that it's interesting that um if we compare let's say a gambin and his obsession with political ideas with somebody like Cornelius Castoriatis who was a Greek uh who was displaced to France but was nevertheless um as his name indicates Greek. Um the concerns between the two of them uh Castoriatus was concerned with metaphysics uh and with cultural theory more so than with political theory and a gambin more with political political thought than than cultural thought.
Um, it's a little bit like a replay of the the distinction between the Greeks and the Romans. The Greeks were more metaphysically inclined and concerned. The Romans were, of course, famous for their political ideas and political history and theory.
So, it is interesting the way that thinkers very often are have the ghosts behind them of their own traditions. The traditions that they come out of invisibly shape their thinking. uh if we think of German contemporary theory whether we think of uh Slaughterdike or Jurg Jurgen Habermas let's say or Nicholas Lumman it's generally a kind of uh German equivalent of media studies that we're talking about uh as postmodern theory and in between uh Germany and Italy we have of course France French theory is theory par excalance theory with a capital T uh which is abstractly inclined theoretically inclined and inclined to the construction of metaphysical thought systems or deconstruction of them.
But in either case, whether you're deconstructing with dered a metaphysical system or constructing with you a new one, the concerns are still both equally metaphysical. So um that's what I that's what I want to say just at the start here. And uh what I want to do then is to look at Agamb's book Homo Sacre um which is subtitled sovereign power and bare life.
And to in today's lecture I just want to discuss the introduction. Now if we turn to the introduction and I'm using this the this classic edition here. If we turn to the introduction um Agame begins by making a linguistic distin distinction.
Uh and notice that Amed's background uh is in the philosophy of language. Uh so he's concerned with linguistics and he begins by making a linguistic point where he says that the Greeks uh had two different words for life, Zoe and bios. So he starts off by making this famous distinction.
Notice that this distinction Zoe bios comes from the Greek language mainly from Aristotle. Uh whereas homoacre is a Latin term. It comes out of Roman uh it's an obscure figure as we'll get to of archaic Roman uh thought.
Uh so note watch what he's doing with with these uh distinctions. Now the distinction between Zoe and Bios is absolutely fundamental to get. uh it's one of the most important points of the whole book since a gambin will argue that essentially what is happening is that in one respect I think the book is a sort of response to Alan Baiu's book ethics which had come out two years before it in 1993 in which Baju attacked uh the sort of global international world order um backed by the UN and the IMF and the world bank and all of that and its various humanitarian interventions as essentially hypocritical um but had said in that book ethics that the global world order which is mostly just a cover for American uni unilateral acts around the world and these acts are always uh touted as humanitarian interventions into atrocities um has the it's hypocritical on the one hand because uh the American order says we'll respect your differences so long as you're like us the more like us you are if you have democracy and free trade agreements and you've got loans from the World Bank uh and you're not practicing uh barbaric things like clitorctomies and putting veils over your women's faces then we'll we'll talk about respecting your your differences.
So there's a basic hypocrisy there as well as and this is what I think Agambin is responding to the idea that uh these sort of heroic interventions tend to reduce these third world countries uh which tend to be though not always the places where these humanitarian atrocities take place to the status of victims and tends to dehumanize them and reduce them to an kind of animalistic status where they can't help themselves and they require the superhero uh landing in his Blackhawk helicopter to help them uh from predation by one or another uh totalitarian regime or dictator or group. Uh ISIS is the most recent manifestation of this uh to save them. And so there's a reduction in onological status of the people that the Americans or the let's call it the UN if we want to intervene and help to save.
There's a anological reduction to the status of victims and a kind of animalization or bestialization of them in that process. And I think that's what Agambin is responding to here. That animalization process that Budu speaks of in ethics becomes here the discussion of Zoey.
When you think of Zoey, you should immediately think zoological because that's what it means. The Greek word for life in general uh is Zoey which means essentially zoological animal life. Whereas bios is the word for uh the human life in the polus politically represented.
Now women, children and old men are in the mode of Zoey because they don't have representation in the polosphere in the political realm. Uh so they and the domestic sphere is the realm of Zoe as well in addition to the world of barnyard animals and domestic animals and sheep and goats and so forth. All that is Zoey bare naked life as Aambin translates it in this text.
But in the political sphere sphere we have uh the bios which means that uh the biospoliticos the the properly human mode of existence that differentiates and extracts the human from out of the animalistic background uh and dignifies him by conferring upon him language. Um now makes this distinction between voice and language. Animals have voices that can register pleasure and pain but they don't have language.
Only the human being has language and the language uh is what as Aristotle says enables the individual to define what is just and unjust within the political sphere the bios politicos which is not the same thing as fukose biopolitical as we'll get to in a moment that's a very different idea but now uh what a gambin is going to track is the eruption and intervention of the zoological into the bios the bio politicos the properly human political order the two are becoming intermixed and in disccernible in today's modernity in which uh a gang essentially is going to accuse and say that I mean but you essentially in ethics uh in his book ethics criticizes the democratic uh nation state as presenting itself to the victimized third world populations that it's forever helping um as essentially democratic but is going to go a step further and say guess what these uh apparent democracies are actually not democracies. They are totalitarian states in the guise of democracies. And we can figure this out by looking at the eruption of the biological the zoological into their politics where you are treated as an individual uh not as a subject of power which is proper to a democracy in essence as a proper democracy.
Whereas in a totalitarian state, you are the object of power. But more and more with the biopolitical, you are treated as an object like an animal basically. And so uh that's basically what's happening in democratic nation states.
You have rights only in so far as you are allowed to have them, but they can be withdrawn from you at a moment's notice. And so it isn't really a democracy. It is totalitarianism in disguise.
Those rights that you have can be withdrawn from you at a moment's notice and you can be carted off to Guantanamo Bay where you are in the state of Zoey bare naked life and anything can be done to you. You can be tortured or killed with impunity without trial. All of those things can happen and take place.
Uh and so is going to accuse in this book these democratic uh modern states as themselves actually not democratic anymore at all. In essence, uh their substance has undergone a transsubstantiation process. Notice this uh in the Catholic right of the transubstantiation process, you get the blood and the wine.
When the priest utters the logos that comes down and transforms them visibly, they look the same bread and wine. But now, after he's pronounced the magic of the right, ontologically, they've been transubstantiated and their substance is no longer the same. They are the body and blood now of Christ.
Although they look the same. In a similar way, I think a government is saying that the democratic nation state is like that. It it looks like a democracy that's still there, but its ontological status has changed.
It has undergone a transubstantiation process whereby internally essentially it's a totalitarian state uh that grants you rights only in so far as it sees fit to do so and can suspend those rights at a moment's notice whenever it wants to. uh so it's we're really no longer living in democratic states as far as a government is concerned and I think this is a a really excoriating analysis of the state uh of uh the modern nation state. So he begins with this distinction between Zoe and Bios.
Zoe is the zoological. Bios is like uh the biographical or the the realm of uh not the biological, it's more related to the biographical, the realm of inscriptions where you're inscribed into the jeritical political machinery of the state through uh representation. Your name is there.
You're inscribed into the machine. You have political rights. You have representation.
All of that is part of the process of bios, of being inscribed into the political order, into the machinery of the state that began with the Greeks. Uh, and it's a process of excluding Zoey, but Zoey in a in a certain way is also included precisely by means of its exclusion. By excluding it, you're also taking recognition of it.
So, you're also including it through the very process of excluding it. So, it's an exclusive inclusion. This idea of excluding Zoe.
Um and he's going to say uh as the text uh develops as he moves through the introduction here that um he's going to uncover this obscure figure of Roman legal thought homo sacre. The homosaker is the man who can be killed with impunity that but he's sacred. And so therein lies the paradox.
The homo sacre is an is is the individual who is sacred. But the sacred for a gambin is that which has been removed from the social order. that which is outside the state that which is in a different sphere.
So in that sense homoacre has been removed from the biosporter from the political sphere and reduced to the status of Zoey bare naked life. Like an animal he can be killed with impunity. Although homoacre is not just the same thing as Zoey.
uh Zoey is baron naked life but homo sacre is the man from whom uh bios has been withdrawn and he's been reduced to the status of Zoey so it's a devolutionary idea whereas the individual in the state uh is Zoey the animal who has been enobbled and uplifted into bios who has been elevated so there's an evolutionary aspect to inscription within the bios order the the bios politicos order uh the order of democracy but let's proper, the political order proper, the polist proper. But homosac is the one that can be killed with impunity. Anyone can kill him with impunity, which means not only can they not be tried in a court of law, they are also not stained with taboo or sacrilege.
Um, if you kill somebody who's sacred, you would normally think if they're sacred and you kill them, you've offended the gods in some way. But the homo sacre is one who is sacred and yet can be killed by anyone. And so that'll be a sort of undecidable term, a paradox that a Gambinan will eventually work his way toward to resolve that paradox.
And and we'll see what that means, what the status of the one who can be killed with impunity and yet at the same time as sacred. What what that means. But he's basically going to say that homosacre is the individual in the concentration camp.
But the concentration camp is no longer, as he says, the state of exception. It's the rule. We're living in a sort of gigantic concentration camp.
And we don't even know it. uh since any one of us uh can have our rights revoked at any time and then can be killed with impunity. Uh we just don't realize it but it can happen especially after 911.
This book interestingly was written before 911 and became even more precient and topical after 911 took place. Uh so there's very interesting stuff going on here with a one of the great political uh treatises, one of the great works of political philosophy of the latter half of the 20th century. And so as we get more into it, what we'll see is is u he'll begin with a discussion of Carl Schmidt's political theology where Schmidt um elucidates the idea of the state of exception uh in the first section and then the first section will end with a discussion of Walter Benjamin's critique of violence which I want to get to.
Um and then the second section we'll move into the concept of homosacre proper where he'll resolve the antnomian undecidability about homoacre not by saying that he's not an undecidable uh homoaker is in essence undecidable that'll be part of the whole point of what he's making. So we'll leave it there for the introduction uh just as the sort of initial warm-up the initial approach to a gambin's uh masterpiece here.
