Zoē and Bios
Those who are captured in the sovereign ban and stripped of all legal status, find themselves, by the same act, banned from the political community. In this way, the sovereign decides which lives will be recognised as belonging to the community of political beings and which will be classified only in terms of biological fact. The basis of this distinction is addressed by Agamben with recourse to the two terms used by the Greeks to distinguish between forms of life: zoē, ‘natural reproductive life’ confined to the private sphere, and bios, ‘a qualified form of life’, political life (ibid: 1).
Those who are banned from the domain of political beings are reduced by the sovereign to life defined only in terms of zoē (ibid: 183), recognised by the sovereign only as biological beings.
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).
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