O'Donoghue (On Agamben)

"Stripped of legal status and expelled from the political community, homo sacer is exposed unconditionally to the potential for killing by anyone. Homo sacer ‘is in a continuous relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as he is, at every instant, exposed to an unconditional threat of death".





"The separation of zoē from bios, and the production of a bare, human life as a product of sovereign power can be said to undergo a transformation in modernity as zoē, or biological life, is repositioned inside the polis, becoming the focus of the State’s organisational power. This process, rooted in classical politics and extending into the present, indicates, for Agamben, a Western politics that has constituted itself from its beginnings as a biopolitics (ibid: 181)".





"Biopower is distinguished for Foucault from sovereign power. This new technology of power, he argues, ‘has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor’ (1990: 144). As such, biopolitics begins with the emergence of biopower in modernity. Agamben, however, offers a corrective to Foucault’s theory: sovereign power is itself already biopolitical, based on the constitution of bare life as the threshold of the political order. For Agamben, the emergence of the technology of biopower signifies, not a break in the history of Western politics, but the expansion of the existing biopolitical imperative of the State, as bare life moves from the periphery to the centre of the State’s concerns, entering in modernity into the political order as the exception increasingly becomes the rule (1998: 9). ‘Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State […] does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life’ (ibid: 6)".





"The historical concentration camp, such as those of the Spanish in Cuba or the British in South Africa, Agamben writes, were born ‘out of a state of exception and martial law’ (ibid: 167). Writing of the Nazi State, Agamben argues that a transition has occurred, that the concentration camp system of 20th century totalitarianism is now the product of a ‘willed’ state of exception. It is thus the structure in which the state of exception […] is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits himself […] to deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception. (ibid: 170; emphasis in original)

Under modern liberal democracy, the state of exception, once a temporary suspension of law, became a stable, generalised condition[3]: ‘the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government’ (2005: 14). This tendency provided the totalitarianisms which emerged in the 20th century with the framework by which rule by a permanent state of emergency was possible (ibid: 2). As the site in which the state of exception is ‘given a permanent spatial arrangement’ (1998: 169), the concentration camp is, for Agamben, the paradigmatic space of this new political arrangement. It is ‘the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (ibid: 168-9)".

Amy O'Donoghue