Aciksoz

There is nothing sacred about the sacred man, he suggests, because homo sacer is a product of “an originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane.”28 In order to bolster this argument, Agamben goes to great lengths to debunk anthropological notions of sacrifice and the sacred as misunderstandings and myths that have nothing to offer for our understanding of sovereign violence. In so doing, his theory leaves no room for grasping sovereignty’s dependence on sacrifice in the production of homo sacer.  Sacrificial Limbs makes two interventions into Agamben’s homo sacer paradigm. First, it places sacrifice at the center of understanding sovereign power. Especially in times of political violence and crisis, struggles over the meaning of violence and violently altered bodies become a key component of claims to sovereignty, which involve contestations not only over the monopoly of violence, but also over the “monopoly of sacrifice—that is, control over sacralized, transcendental loss.”29 Sovereignty claims embody presumptions about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of violent loss, assertions about whether violent loss has a transcendental dimension, and pronouncements about whether injured or dead bodies have some sort of worldly or otherworldly political and symbolic value beyond their immediate materiality. Sovereignty is the alchemy of making bodies sacred through the logic of sacrifice, as illustrated by the ways in which the socially abjected bodies of disabled veterans were officially rendered sacred in Turkey. And here we arrive at my second intervention into Agamben’s antisacrificial theory of sovereignty: The production of some bodies as homo sacer always depends on the sacralization of others in the name of whom the former can be rendered killable.

Salih Can Aciksoz