Homo Sacer

1. Sovereignty's Paradox: Outside and Inside the Law

the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it, since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto

Sovereign's unique position. The core paradox of sovereignty, as defined by Carl Schmitt, is that the sovereign exists simultaneously outside and inside the legal system. They are the ultimate authority who can suspend the law, placing themselves above it, yet this power is granted by the law itself. This creates a fundamental tension at the heart of any legal order.

Law's self-suspension. This paradoxical structure means the law's validity depends on its ability to suspend itself in exceptional circumstances. The sovereign's decision on the state of exception doesn't just apply the law; it creates the very situation where law can apply. It's a limit concept where law borders on life and becomes indistinguishable from it.

Beyond juridical models. Understanding sovereignty requires moving beyond purely legal or institutional definitions. It's about the concrete way power operates at its limit, where it can legally place itself outside the law it creates and upholds. This hidden point of intersection between law and life is the original nucleus of sovereign power.

2. The State of Exception: Law's Suspension and Foundation

The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.

Exclusion as inclusion. The state of exception is not chaos, but a specific situation resulting from the suspension of law. What is excluded from the rule (the exception) is included precisely through its exclusion, maintaining a relation to the rule in the form of its suspension. This is the "relation of exception."

Threshold of indistinction. The state of exception creates a paradoxical zone where fact and law become indistinguishable. It's not a factual situation, as it's created by suspending law, but it's not a purely legal case either. This threshold is where the juridico-political order establishes its space of validity.

Originary localization. The sovereign decision on the exception is the fundamental act of "localization" (Ortung). It doesn't just distinguish inside from outside, but traces the threshold (the state of exception) that makes the validity of the legal order possible. This unlocalizable zone is the hidden foundation of the "nomos of the earth."

3. Bare Life (Homo Sacer): Life That Can Be Killed But Not Sacrificed

The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert.

An archaic figure. Homo sacer is an obscure figure from archaic Roman law, defined by two seemingly contradictory traits: anyone can kill him without committing homicide (impune occidi), yet he cannot be sacrificed according to ritual forms (neque fas est eum immolari). This status is a double exception from both human and divine law.

Beyond sacred and profane. This figure cannot be explained by the traditional concept of the sacred as simply august or accursed. Homo sacer is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. His life is exposed to a violence that is neither sacrifice nor homicide, opening a sphere beyond both the religious and the profane.

Originary political element. The life of homo sacer is "sacred life" or "bare life" – life included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion, its capacity to be killed. This bare life is the hidden nucleus of sovereign power, the originary political element that is captured in the sovereign ban.

4. The Ban (Abandonment): Law's Relation to Bare Life

The relation of exception is a relation of ban.

Law's peculiar force. The ban is the pure form of law's reference to something, its capacity to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. It's the power of law to apply by not applying, to hold something in its force by abandoning it. This is the "force of law" at its most basic.

Delivered over to itself. He who is banned is not simply outside the law, but abandoned by it. They are exposed on a threshold where life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. They are delivered over to their own separateness, yet simultaneously consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons them.

Simultaneous inclusion/exclusion. The ban signifies both exclusion from the community and the sovereign's command. It's a force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together bare life and sovereign power. This ambiguous structure is the most original juridico-political relation, preceding concepts like friend/enemy or citizen/foreigner.

5. Sovereign Power's Origin: The Power Over Bare Life

Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element.

Vitae Necisque Potestas. The Roman concept of vitae necisque potestas (power over life and death), originally designating the father's absolute authority over his sons, is the first instance where "life" acquires a specific juridical sense as the counterpart of a power threatening death. This power is absolute, not a sanction, but inherent in the relationship.

Genealogy of power. This paternal power was seen as analogous to the magistrate's imperium. The idea that the magistrate's authority derived from the father's power over life and death suggests that the foundation of political life is a life that can be killed, politicized precisely through its capacity to be killed.

Bare life as political element. The male citizen, capable of participating in public life, was virtually subject to this power of death. Life enters the city only through the double exception of being killable but not sacrificable. This bare life, dwelling in the no-man's-land between the home (oikos) and the city (polis), is the originary political element from the perspective of sovereignty.

6. Sovereign and Sacred Bodies: A Hidden Symmetry

The two formulas only signify sovereign power's continuity to the extent that they express, by means of the hidden tie to life that can be killed but not sacrificed, sovereign power's absoluteness.

Beyond perpetuity. The medieval doctrine of the king's two bodies (natural and political) is often seen as ensuring the perpetuity of sovereignty ("The king never dies"). However, its connection to Roman imperial apotheosis and the use of wax effigies points to a darker origin: the representation of a "sacred life" that survives the natural body.

Excess of sacred life. The Roman rite of burning an effigy after the emperor's death suggests an excess of sacred life, like that of a devotee who survives consecration, which must be neutralized or divinized. This sacred life, killable but not sacrificable, is inherent in supreme power itself.

Symmetry with Homo Sacer. The sovereign's person, like homo sacer, is outside the normal law of homicide. Killing a sovereign is treason, not murder. Modern constitutions still reflect this in the principle that heads of state cannot undergo ordinary trials. This symmetry reveals that supreme power is, in the last analysis, the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed.

7. The Werewolf: Bare Life as a Zone of Indistinction

The life of the bandit, like that of the sacred man, is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city.

The outlaw as wolf-man. Ancient Germanic law defined the outlaw (wargus) as a "wolf-man" (wulfesheud), a figure who could be killed by anyone without penalty. This figure, like homo sacer, is not simply an animal, but a threshold being, dwelling between the forest (nature) and the city (law), belonging to neither.

Hobbesian state of nature. The Hobbesian state of nature, where "man is a wolf to men" (homo hominis lupus), echoes this figure. It's not a pre-legal state, but an exception within the city where everyone is bare life, a homo sacer for others. This zone of indistinction between human and animal, nature and law, is the constant presupposition of sovereignty.

Ban's ambiguity. The werewolf embodies the ambiguity of the ban: excluded from the city, yet existing in a state defined by the city's law (caput lupinum is a legal status). This figure reveals that the state tie, having the form of a ban, is always also non-State and pseudo-nature, and nature always appears as nomos and exception.

8. Biopolitics: The Politicization of Natural Life

modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question

Life as political stake. At the threshold of modernity, natural life (zoē) begins to be included in state power's mechanisms and calculations, transforming politics into biopolitics. Unlike classical thought, where zoē was confined to the home, modern politics makes simple living itself a central concern.

From territory to population. Foucault traced this shift from the "territorial state" to the "state of population," where the nation's health and biological life become problems for sovereign power. This leads to a "bestialization of man" through sophisticated political techniques, enabling both life protection and holocaust.

Convergence with totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt noted the rise of homo laborans and biological life to the center of the political scene. The failure to connect this to totalitarian power (which Foucault also didn't fully analyze in this context) highlights the difficulty of grasping how politics, when it takes bare life as its object, can turn into total domination.

9. Rights of Man: Bare Life as the Foundation of Modern Politics

Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state.

Birth as source of rights. Modern declarations of rights, like the French Declaration of 1789, place bare natural life (birth) at the foundation of the political order. "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." This is a radical shift from earlier forms of freedom based on status or privilege.

Man vanishes into citizen. The paradox is that the natural life grounding the order immediately vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom these rights are "preserved." Rights are attributed to man only insofar as he is the presupposition of the citizen. The nation, etymologically linked to birth, closes this circle.

Biopolitical foundation. The nation-state's biopolitical vocation stems from this: its basis is not the free political subject, but man's bare life, invested with sovereignty through the passage from subject to citizen. The fiction is that birth immediately equals nation, concealing the underlying bare life that can be discriminated against (e.g., active vs. passive rights, denationalization).

10. Life Unworthy of Being Lived: Biopolitics' Thanatopolitical Turn

In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.

Sovereignty over existence. The concept of "life unworthy of being lived" (lebensunwerten Lebens), introduced by Binding and Hoche in 1920 to justify euthanasia, posits man's sovereignty over his own existence. This sovereignty, like the state of exception, is a threshold the law cannot simply forbid or permit.

Threshold of nonvalue. From this individual sovereignty, the authors derive the possibility of killing lives that have lost their "legal good" quality. This new juridical category corresponds to bare life, a threshold beyond which life has no juridical value and can be eliminated without punishment.

Biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics. Every "politicization" of life implies a decision on the threshold where life ceases to be politically relevant and becomes "sacred life" that can be killed. Nazism, as the first radically biopolitical state, made this decision central, transforming natural heredity into a political task and identifying "life unworthy of being lived" as the target of its thanatopolitics.

11. The Camp: The Biopolitical Paradigm of Modernity

The camp -- and not the prison -- is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos.

Born of exception. Camps are not products of ordinary law or criminal law, but of the state of exception and martial law extended to civilian populations. The Nazi Lager was based on Schutzhaft (protective custody), a measure allowing detention independent of criminal behavior, grounded in the suspension of constitutional rights.

Exception becomes rule. The novelty of the Nazi camps was that Schutzhaft was separated from the temporary state of exception and made permanent. The camp is the space where the state of exception, the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereignty, is realized normally. It's a permanent spatial arrangement outside the normal order.

Space of bare life. The camp is a hybrid of law and fact where the two are indistinguishable. Inhabitants are stripped of political status, reduced to bare life. It's the most absolute biopolitical space, where power confronts pure life without mediation. The camp is the paradigm of modern political space where politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer merges with the citizen.

12. The People: Ambiguity of the Political Subject

One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.

Dual meaning. In European languages, the word "people" (popolo, peuple) simultaneously designates the collective body of citizens (the sovereign) and the lower, excluded classes (the poor, the disinherited). This linguistic ambiguity reflects a fundamental tension in modern politics.

Sovereign and excluded. The same term names both the source of political legitimacy (popular sovereignty) and those who are often marginalized or excluded from full participation. This duality was evident even during the French Revolution, where compassion for "le peuple" (the unfortunate) was central to revolutionary rhetoric.

Bare life within the body politic. This ambiguity suggests that the "people" as a political body always contains within it "the people" as bare life, the excluded. The sovereign body politic is founded on and constantly confronts this bare life, which is simultaneously included and excluded, revealing the ban's structure at the heart of democracy.

Last updated: May 7, 2025