Agamben's theory of the 'Homo Sacer'

This chapter argues that, despite its defeat, humanity in McCarthy’s novel is buried alive as a resilience of ethics. Filipovic explores McCarthy’s vision of a humanity backed up against its limit. In a colourless landscape of the novel where all distinctions have been burnt to cinders that cover the Earth as the ubiquitous remainder of their absolute destruction, the topography of what makes us human can yet be traced in the ethical intrigue that, in spite of it all, flickers in the ashes and powers the novel. For McCarthy, Filipovic argues, the call of goodness is the gravity of being whose pull, in the end, remains stronger than its fear of death.

S'interroger sur les sens que la notion de sacré acquiert chez Camus revient à sonder la question de la liberté, qui ne se sépare pas de celle, chère à la phéno-ménologie, de l'origine des valeurs, et notamment de la valeur de ce que, dans Le Premier Homme, l'écrivain français appelait cette « vie, mystérieuse et éclatante, [qui] suffisait à le remplir tout entier » (OC IV, 842). Le sacré chez Camus a partie liée avec le mystère de la vie humaine, comme l'écrivain lui-même l'avoue dans une déclaration rendue au lendemain du Nobel, et rapportée par le Figaro littéraire du 21 décembre 1957 : En descendant du train, un journaliste m'a demandé si j'allais me convertir. J'ai répondu : Non. Rien que ce mot : non… J'ai conscience du sacré, du mystère qu'il y a en l'homme, et je ne vois pas pourquoi je n'avouerais pas l'émotion que je ressens devant le Christ et son enseignement. Je crains malheureusement que, dans certains milieux, en Europe particulièrement, l'aveu d'une ignorance ou l'aveu d'une limite à la connaissance de l'homme, le respect du sacré, n'apparaissent comme des faiblesses. Si ce sont des faiblesses, je les assume avec force 1 … En associant la conscience du sacré à une profession d'ignorance socra-tique (gr., agnoia), Camus refuse nettement toute (re)fondation du « sacré » dans une vérité métaphysico-politique ou théologico-politique, dont Le Mythe de Sisyphe marque justement l'inaccessibilité. Ce qu'il endosse avec force est, plutôt, une dimension du sacré que nous pouvons définir comme existentielle, puisqu'elle relève de l'expérience de la liberté humaine en tant que capacité d'auto-1. Cité par Roger Quilliot dans Camus Albert, Essais, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », 1965, p. 1615.

The main aim of this paper is to connect the role of bodily practices with collective memory, collective myths and trauma, as well as with the post-revolutionary ideas in Ivan Mažuranić’s eponymous epic poem Smail-aga Čengić’s Death (Smrt Smail-age Čengića, 1846). This canonical text marked not only the Croatian 19th century literature and culture, but also redefined various long-lasting national metaphors such as Antemurale Christianitatis (Bulwark of Christianity) that labeled a frontier defense of Christian Europe from the Ottoman Empire.
If we analyze Mažuranić’s poem in the framework of the post-revolutionary ideological practices which presume the idea of political freedom as universal right and the final purpose of every society and each governmental system, various direct or indirect references to the French Revolution will be found in the text, and most notably the geopolitical importance of the peripheral “small” nations in the European cultural and ideological landscape.
As an allegory, Smail-aga Čengić’s Death reverberates the modernist idea that historical progress inevitably throws down any despotism and shows that fuit tyrannos signifies a diametrical reposition in the roles of a sovereign as a figure who stands above the law. To that end Aga changes his position: from a sovereign he becomes homo sacer (according to G. Agamben), the one whoremains outside the law/society/community. In Mažuranić’s poem, tormented, colossal body of the voiceless nation is transformed into a strong agent of history, and the former sovereign, as a torturer – a colossal voice with no body (E. Scarry) – becomes “a marvelous marvel,” merely a puppet of history, an amusing thing.

This paper examines Agamben's claims, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and State of Exception, that the opposition of  the simple fact of living, zōē, to politically qualified life, bios, is canonical for the political tradition of the West, and that the limiting case of this opposition is the state of exception, which privileges the violence of the state over other forms of violence and involves the creation of and exclusion of homo sacer.  Agamben further asserts that the state of exception rests upon “a fictio iuris par excellence which claims to maintain the law in its very suspension”1, the result of which is that the state can claim to be acting with a type of legal violence, but this form of legalized violence has “shed any relation to the law”2. A careful examination and analysis of the events of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in 1865 and the subsequent legal arguments concerning the legality of martial law and the execution of George William Gordon reveals that although Agamben's theoretical structures help us to understand the events in Morant Bay, there are aspects of the case that do not conform to Agamben's theory. Furthermore, Agamben's approach can at best offer only a partial understanding of what happened at Morant Bay and in the subsequent legal events in London, and that other, more familiar ways of thinking about power are more fruitful. Some suggestions are made about about how a recognition of the internal tensions within liberal political theory may serve to elucidate the events of Morant Bay.

"Las Muertas de Juárez" es un término que denomina a centenares de mujeres asesinadas con pasmosa ferocidad, en Ciudad Juárez, en el estado de Chihuahua, México. El número de asesinatos varía entre las cifras oficiales y las acusadas por diversas organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG). Amnistía Internacional (AI) denunció que entre 1993 y 2003 habían sido asesinadas 370 mujeres; varias ONGs mexicanas denuncian 400, mientras que las cifras oficiales únicamente contabilizan a 70 desaparecidas (Khan, 2003). Es así como trataremos de enlazar estas actitudes y prejuicios patriarcales con la situación del Homo Sacer descrita por Giorgio Agamben (2003), en tanto figura primitiva y primordial, casi arquetípica, de la soberanía y del poder político de la modernidad y la posmodernidad.

This essay examines how Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series develops potentialities of Stoic thought toward a “new, possible use.” for critiquing present political conditions. In Homo Sacer Agamben turns to Stoicism to theorize the suspension of sovereign power, economic governmentality, and biopolitical domination. A new, common use of Stoicism, Agamben suggests, may be essential to conceiving redemptive political projects in the present.
Taking Agamben’s analyses of Stoic texts as paradigmatic for this common use, I discuss three relevant chapters from Homo Sacer. “The Providential Machine” (Agamben, 2011) invokes a paraphrase of Chrysippus (SVF 2.336) to conceptualize the “Stoic providence-fate apparatus.” Founded upon a distinction between primary causes by which providence unfolds and its secondary effects, this apparatus establishes a “functional correlation” through which general and particular, primary and the consequent, and ends and means come into a “zone of indifference,” a condition for the possibility of modern governmentality. “A Genealogy of Office” (Agamben, 2013) argues that Cicero’s translation of the Stoic term for duties, kathēkonta, with the Latin officia obscured a distinction between kathēkonta, actions appropriate to one’s social position, and katorthōma, action taken in agreement with the absolute good. Officium thus designates “the distinctively human capacity to govern one’s own life and those of others,” transforming kathēkonta into an effective apparatus, through which bare life, independent of social, legal, and moral considerations, becomes subject to obligations to act and to be acted upon. Finally, “Use- of-Oneself” (Agamben, 2016) relies upon another fragment of Chrysippus (SVF 7.85) and Seneca’s Ep. 121 to hypothesize that the doctrine of oikeiosis, “appropriation,” must be understood as “use-of-oneself,” so that living beings by their nature always already “make use” of their bodies, environment, and fated outcomes. This last teaching provides theoretical support for actions by which bare life may appropriate the apparatuses definitive of contemporary biopolitics by constituting their common use.
Having reviewed Agamben’s use of Stoicism, I demonstrate how his conclusions may be developed through a reading of Seneca’s Consolation to Polybius. Addressed to the imperial freedman Polybius from exile imposed by Claudius in 41 CE, this therapeutic discourse can be read as a political text (cf. Atkinson, 1985; Fantham, 2007), in which Seneca presents providence, fate, and fortune as a “Stoic providence-fate apparatus.” By joining this apparatus to more obviously political apparatuses (the senate which sentenced him to death, the emperor whose intervention overrides that decision, and the network of freedmen subject to emperor’s commands), Seneca makes use of his position within these apparatuses as both convict and recipient of the emperor’s clemency. Assigning himself duties as Polybius’ consoler and as Claudius’ medium for delivering consolation, the philosopher exploits the emperor’s voice to present Claudius, not fate or fortune, as the primary cause within the providence-fate apparatus, and providence, fate, and fortune as so many secondary effects. I conclude that, just as the Stoics illuminate Agamben’s project, so too can Agamben’s genealogical analyses elucidate virtual dimensions of Stoic texts, so that they may be appropriated for common use in present political struggles.