In the last video, we talked about the book The Coming Community by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Today, we are going to talk about another one of his works, the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. If you're interested in the topic, click like, subscribe, and if you've found our content interesting, consider supporting us via Pix.
I'll leave my key in the description, and let's get started. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, released in 1995. In this work, Giorgio Agamben traces the historical relationship between sovereign power and bare life, and how it reflects into modern times.
First, let's analyze how the author thinks about the concept of sovereign power. In his theorization, sovereign power occurs in the creation of an exception to the law. Compliance with established law is a formal rule.
Sovereignty, however, happens in the exception. It is through the power to create the exception that sovereignty happens. One way to think about sovereignty is to refer to historical figures who were above the law, like absolute monarchs or omnipotent tyrants.
From dictators to kings, sovereignty exists in the power to create exceptions. This even happens in social groups smaller than nations. For example, the sovereignty of a village or town leader who creates concepts of rules.
and exceptions. The concept of bare life is associated with that of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is an element of Roman law, a figure stripped of their rights who cannot enjoy any qualification of life.
Furthermore, there is a fundamental element in the homo sacer. They can be killed without it being considered homicide. Or, as the author puts it, life that is unsacrificeable, but killable.
Let's try to delve deeper into this idea of bare life. One way Agamben presents it to us is through the use of the Greek terms zoe and bios . Zoe is biological life in and of itself.
The living being that eats, breathes, and moves. Bios, on the other hand, is life with qualifications, or political life. Let's imagine in our current society, a Brazilian person exercising their citizenship has the right to their freedom.
They can come and go wherever they please. In the summer, people travel to the beach or look for other ways to cool off. They can go to the market, friends 'houses, leisure events, or churches.
They have the right and freedom to study, can work and choose their jobs, have the right to medical care if sick, and retirement when elderly. In other words , in this example of our contemporary life, we can see that human beings go beyond their mere biological life. Life is composed of a series of qualifiers, and bare life is the opposite of that.
It is a life that possesses nothing, stripped of rights and the political world. Agamben speaks of the sovereignty of the "band," and that from the word "band" there is an etymological unfolding of other terms, like bandit, banished, and abandoned. All of these are examples of bare life.
The bandit who disobeys the laws is deprived of rights, capable of being killed or imprisoned. The banished also suffer from the same ill. One case is the leper of antiquity, who was expelled from their community to not contaminate the others, and the abandoned, like the case of people with mental disorders locked in asylums.
Thus, bare life is a consequence of sovereign power that strips a being of their political life and transforms them into an outcast. There is a huge paradox in this relationship. If on one hand sovereign power excludes bare life from political life, nothing is more political than bare life.
Let's take a famous case of bare life, Malala, excluded from the right to study for being a woman; it was a clear case of bare life. However, this exclusion of hers is an extremely political act, so much so that her fight for the right to study turned her into a symbol of resistance. Or, in Brazil, the figure of Austregésilo Carrano, who was interned in an asylum in his youth under terrible living conditions and became the greatest Brazilian icon of the anti-asylum movement.
Countless other cases can be remembered. Nelson Mandela, the end of Apartheid, Jews who fought against Nazism, those exiled by dictatorships, like those who fled communist regimes. A photo of a refugee child found dead on a beach in Turkey in 2015 drew much attention in the world to the plight of refugees.
Again, we have a case of bare life, that of a child and their family, who, stripped of rights in their country and liable to be killed, fled at any cost. They were politically annulled, but the child's death created a huge political impact. In the creation of bare life, there is a huge political act, paradoxical to intentions.
With all that said, let us move on to the next point. How sovereign power and bare life meet. Agamben here bases himself on the thought of Michel Foucault to continue his ideas with the use of a fundamental term of the French philosopher, biopolitics.
Biopolitics is disciplinary power over life itself. Starting school at age 5, finishing high school at 15, getting all the vaccines, retiring in old age. All of this shows us the existence of a disciplinary power that influences life , exerting power over the biological cycle itself.
Agamben then presents how sovereign power enters bare life through biopolitics. The main example he provides is Nazism. Through a sovereign power capable of creating exception and exclusion, millions of Jews were turned into*homo sacer*, who could be killed without it being considered homicide.
With biopolitics, the Nazi scientific military machine used Jews as guinea pigs for experiments of an extreme level of inhumanity. Placing human beings into freezing water, into decompression chambers where they died of asphyxiation, inoculating them with diseases, among many other atrocities. This is a very strong example of the encounter of sovereign power with bare life, a power of exception that, through the disciplining of bodies, strips the human being of everything that makes them human, that qualifies them as human.
Yes, with this historical and philosophical investigation, Agamben places us before a political perspective of humanity. A sovereignty that, through exception, manages to detach the human being from their rights and everything that qualifies them as such to make them an outcast, someone inferior whose life can be eliminated without it being considered murder, a perspective that, in Brazil and around the world, remains quite strong in current times.
