Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

A very frightening book when you understand the concept. Reading about how the old monarchies and oppressive regimes actually had strict limits on their power, in that they had very limited legal claims on your life and property, and how modern governments actually lay claim to your very existence is far more scary than any horror movie populated by the undead (at least to me). Being a subject to a king who could banish me seems much better than a republic that could kill me at it's leisure. Granted, all systems of government go through a legal process (even the Nazis had due process before sending Jews and Gypsies to the camps), but the defining concept of this book is how modern governments (particularly republics) establish a legal claim to everything. To put it a simple way: no government (warre) means anyone can kill anyone with no repercussions mandated. Old governments would have you fulfill a criteria before you were an outlaw (outside the protection of the law) and could be killed without repercussion (think a Wanted: Dead poster). Now governments can place you outside the law (or inside the death camp/inside Guantanamo Bay) merely by changing or creating the law, because the body politic thinks they have a total claim on you. The actual text is very technical (possibly due to the translation and concepts contained therein), but certainly a must read for those who want to truly understand the barbarities of our current civilization.

Easily described as an extension, or 'elastication', of Foucault's critique of biopower, the life-giving, sustaining power of the contemporary state, and how it has grown up, from its very roots, as the primary term of sovereignty (the power of "auctoritas," to command authority and originate the law) in the West, finally to take on its present project of attempting to stretch itself over all of life and cement the control society. The book stands well alongside comtemporary criticism of global capitalism, including the work of Slavoj Zizek and Negri & Hardt. But on another level, this is much more than a gloss on Foucault's analysis of power. Agamben's perspective is different from Foucault's, he's uninterested in lengthy, sweeping archaeologies, although he does delve into the history of language and the law in some detail. Subsequent parts in the Homo Sacer series and the book "State of Exception" give even more depth to the work, and connect it to the enormous tightening up of government and legal controls since 9/11.

A seminal work of critical migration studies, although Agamben leaves little room to analyze the political or the social in the context of "the camp as nomos" his concept of homines sacri is particularly poignant in the age of mass migration and refugeeism.

I've been looking for this book for a while. What a great price!

Avant-Garde Politician: Leaders for a New EpochThis is an important book making striking points, though it is dominated by an exaggerated view of "biopolitics." Also, the validity of important insight does not prove the complex theses on the foundational significance of homo sacer, as bare life under a "ban," who "can be killed but not sacrificed" (p. 113). Thus, there is no shred of evidence for statements such as "Not simple natural life, but life expose to death (bare life or sacred life) is the original political elements" (p. 88). The main ideas making this book significant do not depend on the theory of "homo sacer" and may well be clearer without it.Leaving aside the discussion of "state of exception," which Agamben develops in another book to be reviewed separately, the strong points of the Homo Sacer book include, inter alias, the following:1. Emphasis on ontology of potential, with the valid conclusion that "Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality...has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality ... a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable" (page 44).2. Pinpointing weaknesses of democracy, such as "The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract ...condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to confront the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy constitutionally incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from the form of the State" (p. 109). This may well provide a key to understanding and coping with increasingly fateful global issues on which organizations based on states are quite impotent. As succinctly put, "...every time refugees represent...a mass phenomenon, both [international organizations] and individual states prove themselves, despite their solemn invocation of the `sacred and inalienable' rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of confronting it adequately" (p. 133). This is validated by recent developments, such as Syrian refugees, and is sure to become worse - such as when climate change results in masses of refugees.3. A sharp distinction between the rights of citizen and human rights, with dire consequences for human welfare. Indeed "The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen" (p.133).4. A profound discussion, in chapter 7, of "The Camp as the `Nomos' of the Modern" (p. 166), with the "camps being a "hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable" (emphasis in original) and in which "everything [bad] is possible" (p. 170). However, it is a gross exaggeration to regard "the camp...as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity" (p. 123).The most problematic frame of the book is biopolitics, with claims such as "in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of State politics (which now becomes, in Foucault's terms, biopolitics) (p. 111). But the author, while largely wrong on the contemporary situation, shows premonition. Human enhancement and other science and technology innovations will indeed put a radical form of biopolitics at the center of global concerns, with issues related to human enhancement becoming central on political agenda. They are likely to lead to quite some revaluations, such as on science and technology freedom, leading through harsh crises to a new global regime and a novel genre of political leaders (as discussed in my recent book).Indeed, humanity is moving towards "risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe", as stated in the concluding sentence of the book (p.188), with "the sovereign ... entering into an even more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest" (p. 122). Statements such as "In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such" (p. 142) and "politics ...giving form to the life of a people" (pp. 144ff) are likely to fit the future, making this book more into a high-quality longer-term prognosis than a valid diagnosis of the present time.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusal

Excellent condition

Although this is one of the more important books on sovereignty & biopolitics to come out in the last 30 years, Agamben's writing is needlessly incomprehensible. It's not fun and he doesn't seem to care if the reader will be understand or not. D&G, so much fun to read. Foucault, dry, but so concerned that readers will get it. Agamben, dry, boring--except for his occasional apocalyptic hysterics--and unclear.Be prepared to look up random Latin phrases. Be prepared to go back and read Hiedegger, Schmitt, Benjamin, Deleuze, Foucault, Freud, Nancy, Kant, Derrida. He gives short mentions (one might say reductive, judging from the ones I'm a little more familiar with) to works by those kids, draws out complex concepts from them without explaining them thoroughly.I don't know if he is actually a hack or if his writing just needs more patience than I have given it. Either way, if you try to trudge through it, it'll make you work your brain, which is never a bad thing.

An important book to understand the idea of state, sovereignty and power

Arrived on time. It was like described.

Great product.

thanksxxx

thank you