Weekly seminary: Homo Sacer & Giorgio Agamben

This week we have another meeting in order to discuss about the book by Agamben, Homo Sacer. Although the reunion will be this wednesday, in this case we want to talk about it before because in the next post (Thursday), we will announce an important new from POBICS and from part of our big group, STS-b. 

For this reading, we will propose some of this points as key elements to discuss:

• The concept of Ban (Sovereign Ban)
• What is Homo Sacer?
• What are the difference between the biopolitical concept by Foucault and by Agamben?
• The state of exception and the present

In the first place, the ban is the key concept that allows to creating the notion of state of exception. Thus, the ban consists on stablish a relation with that is outside the relationship. In this vein, due to the ban, life can be linked to law thoughout an un-binding, including only by an exclusion. The state of exception in the current days, within the vision of Agamben can be seen practically in each action of our daily life: this zone of indifference and transit between life and zoè, nature and culture; has been imposed and widespread. The current preparedness and biosurveillance logic makes that our zoè emerge where we see a new about Ebola, when we think about vaccinate agains the flu, or when we interact with a new app that alerts us about where is a new outbreak.

The ban is an important and quite interesting concept because it allows to explain several event and situtations in some other fields. For instance, to our current researches, we can talk about the ban relationship between life and biosurveillance: life only would be understood within the exclusion stablished by protocols, laws and the biomedical knowledge. In this vein, the dog Excalibur (the dog that was given death due to the contact with her owner, Teresa Romero) cannot be seen as a murder, but as a bare (or sacred) life. 

About Homo Sacer, the central concept of the book, understood as the person that people have tried for a crime, but it is not lawful for sacrifice. But if someone would kill him, the latter would not be convicted of murder, is the "condition sine qua non" to understand the biopolitical project by Agamben. This concept is quite related with the concept of ban, and it lets us to "generalize" to other species this feature of give death without a punishment of law nor the bad vision of people. The Excalibur dog example is a good illustration about it. Here, we can also bring the thanatopolitics concept by Rose in order to understand better this "skip" from the ethical or political trial. 

Finally, the biopolitical project by Agamben points out that all of our contemporary  political moment is biopolitics: the politics has been substituted by biopolitics, understood as this attempt to reduce life to zoè. Furthermore, the biopolitics tries to make the shift from a state to the state of exception, a permanent situation where the normative law is suspended and the state of exception is become the rule. However, for Foucault, the biopolitics is an "older" concept in the sense that is not "refreshed" with the last events of this decades, and it is explained within the states and their births in the XIX Century. Foucault uses the biopolitics as a control tool, linked to the policy and statistics, and less to law and the classical law.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Thierry Ehrmann