List Of Books Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I)
| Title | : | Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I) |
| Author | : | Giorgio Agamben |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 208 pages |
| Published | : | April 1st 1998 by Stanford University Press (first published 1994) |
| Categories | : | Philosophy. Nonfiction. Theory. Politics |
Giorgio Agamben
Paperback | Pages: 208 pages Rating: 4.03 | 4021 Users | 125 Reviews
Commentary Concering Books Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I)
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.
Present Books Toward Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I)
| Original Title: | Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita |
| ISBN: | 0804732183 (ISBN13: 9780804732185) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Homo Sacer #I |
Rating Of Books Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I)
Ratings: 4.03 From 4021 Users | 125 ReviewsJudge Of Books Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer #I)
Agamben argues that the "bare life" of man under modernity is inherently politicized; it is this notion that allows for the concept of the "rights of man," though these rights are theoretical rather than always in effect. This is because sovereignty is based upon an exception: the sovereign is outside the law, and is always sovereign over another exception which Agamben deems the homo sacer, the life which can be killed (without legal repercussion) but not sacrificed. Homo sacer is included inBlown away
Some thoughts upon re-reading: Looking at the index, I'm struck again by how few Americans there are mentioned in Agamben's text, with two unfortunately minor exceptions: Thomas Hunt Morgan, the Nobel-laureate biologist of Drosophilia fruit-fly, and the expatriate German historian who famously refused to sign the University of California's loyalty oath (1950), Ernst H. Kantorowicz. For Agamben, "The 'body' is always already a bio political body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of
This is really an important work on sovereignty. Although he is writing for other philosophers and theorists, a serious weakness is his constant name-dropping of obscure classical and medieval thought. This really isn't an approachable book, and it takes some time of close reading to get the point.
I set as goal for myself this year to read the entire Homo Sacer series by Giorgio Agamben (there are seven books in the series so far), either by myself or with others. Homo Sacer, the series, set out to define the foundational/ontological problems of the west and give the investigation a foundation in this book. There is what Agamben refers to as the originary problem of the "sovereign ban", which constitutes law and state power in the west through the sovereign's ability to bring into being
Many interesting insights, but I'm a bit frustrated by methodology: it often feels like he's working on the wrong level of abstraction for the points he's trying to make. There are a lot things I don't understand about this book, some of which are probably the result of mere ignorance (and the fact that I'm only half way through) and some of which seem very hard to imagine an adequate understanding of in any case (for example: an ontology in which potentiality is freed from Being? how would that
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