Prospectus

Following 1984, the Foucauldian project lay incomplete.

Whatever its auspices or designs may have been, it lay open for many students and acolytes to take up the mantle.

And so Giorgio Agamben as one such aspiring successor did.

The Homo Sacer project, spread across three decades and nine volumes, is one of the most voluminous resumptions of the research of biopolitics. A work of maximalist breadth that stamps the continental appetite for erudite, meandering prose. The Omnibus edition which compiles all entries into a single hard-bound volume is a delight to those eclectics who enjoy sheer breadth.

What follows here are deeply abbreviated notes and reflections on each volume of the project. These are not intended to be a tour de force campaign over the book's arguments, style, subject matter, or sources. Nor has there been any conscious engagement with the scholarship surrounding Agamben.

These are mere sketches from someone who has not yet decided if a more rigorous critique of Agamben is on the agenda.

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Homo Sacer I: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Life as we call it has two terms in the Greek: ζωή and βίος. The former refers to the simple fact of living common to all those we call living beings while the latter is employed by Plato and Aristotle to convey a form, a norm, something proper to way of living.

The life of the political community was a βίος until modernity entered a point at which species and individual as merely living bodies (ζωή) entered the political as part of a concerted strategy to manage all life through biopolitics.

Foucault undertook his study of the biopolitical to understand the concrete mechanisms of power at play in bodies through political techniques and technologies of the self. By abandoning the traditional mode of analysis that interpreted law, rights, and sovereignty as discursive concepts, Foucault sought to capture the true exercise of power as function, not merely as theory.

He died before capturing that key decisive event through which bare life (ζωή) entered modernity, and it is this work which carries it on by combining it with juridico-institutional models which Foucault disregarded to an unnecessary degree.

Homo Sacer is concerned with a key original figure. To be a homo sacer is to be the "sacred man" of archaic Roman law. One who may be killed without it being treated as murder, yet who could not be considered a sacrifice or execution victim. This figure is the kernel of bare life which enters the core of the political as the grounding principle of sovereign power.

To revise Foucault's thesis, it is not merely that bare life is politicized but bare life and the political order converge into a zone of indistinction via the state of exception. It is upon this that all of politics rests. In modernity, it is the bare life of the citizen that is the biopolitical body of humanity.

Agamben advances toward this thesis from several directions: (1) the sovereign, (2) the homo sacer, and (3) the concentration camp. All three point to the increasingly emergent role of the exception as the foreground rather than the background of the political. How we now inhabit a seemingly permanent state of exception.

The Sovereign

The sovereign is a paradox that exists both inside and outside the sovereign order, as Schmitt observes. The sovereign is sovereign insofar as they have the de facto ability to suspend the rule of law through the state of exception. Sovereignty provides a limit to the juridical order, and yet at the same time is the condition that makes judicial or State rule possible.

The exception is an individual case that is excluded from the general rule. It is bound to the rule in the sense that it deactivates the rule. This is something commented upon by Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Guattari, but even more so by Badiou who applies set theory and its conception of membership and inclusion to the political.

For just as the example is included in the rule but is also exclusive in the sense that it legitimates and self-justifies the rule as its example, the exception is excluded from the rule but is also included with it in that it can suspend its application.

Badiou presents these through the matrix of the normal (an included member of a set), the excrescent (a member that is not included), (a non-member outside the set), but Agamben would venture to add a fourth paradoxical figure who is an included member outside the set, i.e. the event that introduces the state of exception.

It is this exception which is the very structure of sovereignty which includes life as a member of its set but then paradoxically suspends it. The political ban is a mechanism of this suspension where an individual can be abandoned by the law, and so exists neither fully inside or outside it. The law merely holds itself indifferent to the banned exile who is exposed to any force of violence without any concomitant protection by the law.

Thus the sovereign and the ban both inhabit this state of exception both inside and outside the rule of law.

Agamben traces this to Fragment 169 of Pindar where the nomos of the sovereign is justified by violence, the paradoxical unification of violence and justice under the new force of law. Hesiod divided violence from law, Pindar brought them.

Holderlin and Schmitt argued over the reading of this fragment, but it Holderlin who ultimately understands better than Schmitt that nomos is a principle that mediates and thus grounds all law.

It is the identity of violence and the state of nature that grounds the absolute power of the sovereign. The rupturing of the state is always already present in this violence that is both the beyond the ordering and localization of space through law (i.e. the frontier) but also its very interior in the heart of the sovereign.

This paradox of sovereignty appears again most clearly in Benjamin's juxtaposition of constituting and constituted power. The constituting power is outside the state, and the constituted power within. But how can they be differentiated? This is a nearly impossible task.

Negri caught on the broader aporia of this question as a matter of ontology, particularly the operation of potentiality. To understand constituting vs. constituted power, we must rethink modality for actuality is privileged over potentiality. It must be possible for potentiality to not have to actualize, to suspend its own fruition.The potential becomes actual when it sets aside its own potentiality and becomes actual. In this way, Aristotle sets the path for Western sovereignty. Something returned to later in Homo Sacer.

Agamben circles this argument one more time through the example of Kafka's "Before the Law" but ultimately concludes this aspect of Homo Sacer by returning to Benjamin's principle of linking violence to law in any and every inquiry of sovereignty. It is this divine violence which has no criterion and operates in the zone of indistinction where exception and rule cannot be told apart.

Homo Sacer

The centerpiece of this triptych is the Homo Sacer himself. The title of this chapter, this section, this volume, this project entire is drawn from an obscure passage in Pompeius Festus who defines the sacred man as one whom it is not permitted to sacrifice but yet no one who kills this person can be deemed guilty of homicide.

How does this make the man sacred Agamben asks. Mommsen, Lange, Bennett and Strachan-Davidson argue that the sacratio is a weakened, secularized vestige of archaic law where a death sentence was identified with being sacrificed to the gods. Yet for Agamben this cannot explain why the homo sacer may not be sacrificed. At the same time, others such as Karoly Kerenyi and W. Ward Fowler argue that sacratio is an archetypal figure of honor and wonder, yet for Agamben this cannot explain why simply anyone may kill the homo sacer.

Instead, we must understand the homo sacer in its own right as its own originary structure.

To do this, Agamben first provides a cursory tour of the history of the concept of the "sacred" from Victorian anthropology through French sociology and how it could seemingly never escape the problematic ambiguity of something somehow both impure yet venerable. William Robertson Smith, Mauss, Hubert, Wundt, Durkheim, and others cannot assist here. This genealogical thread must be discarded entirely.

Agamben returns to Roman law, specifically the unpunishability of killing the homo sacer, a strange exception to the homicide law promulgated by Numa Pompilius. It cannot be understood as a consecratio because this normally reassigns something human to the divine. The sacriligization of the homo sacer merely casts the man out of both human and divine spheres in a double exception.

This double exception mirrors the sovereign decision for the distinction between inside and outside the law is suspended in the state of exception. The homo sacer is the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign base and is the first constitution of the political, that originary structure of the sacred that Walter Benjamin sought after.

Thus the sovereign and homo sacer are symmetrical figures as neither of them can simply be murdered in a legal sense, yet nor can they be sacrificial victim.

This unconditional right over life and death was first endowed in Roman law to the father (pater) of the household where the father can dispense with his son's life as he sees fit (vitae necisque potestas), the very first relation of political power, but then with the advent of the modern citizen, every male citizen is now able to be killed without being sacrificed. This is the price of participation in political life, the two spheres of the household (domus) and the city in classical politics give way in modern politics to a zone of distinction which produces bare life.

Agamben considers two further examples of this.

He first examines Kantorowicz's famous study The King's Two Bodies which pointed to the spiritual abstraction of sovereignty that lives on outside of the king's physical body. Agamben ties this to the mysterious practice of burning a wax effigy of the king alongside his physicla body during a state funeral.

Agamben ties this to the notion of a "colossus" a strange non-living yet also not-dead figure which in antiquity operated as a substitute for a corpse in cases where a body was not available. Because the sovereign and homo sacer are not possible to have a corpse to burn (even if a physical body is burned), the colossus is burned as a substitution such as in the Roman imperial apotheosis.

The two bodies of the king are thus the excess of the emperor's sacred life.

Lastly, Agamben returns to the ban which in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic law is likened to a wolf. The wolf bandit in societies are analogous to the homo sacer in that they are abandoned by the law. It is a metaphor continued in the state of nature of discourse where "man is a wolf to man" and contains this bandit in the originary structure of the political sphere. It this sense of being abandoned by the law that is the foundation of the political, even more fundamental than Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction.

The Camp

Agamben believes we see the culmination of this biopolitics of bare life in the concentration camp, something Foucault never touched upon in his trenchant analysis of modern institutions.

He returns to the notion that biopolitics is the politicization of bare life as such, a notion that first emerges in the 1679 write of habeas corpus where it is not a man or individual who is summoned to court, but the body (corpus). By ostensibly guaranteeing certain liberties and rights to the person, the law now brings the body under its care and thus control.

Modern democracy's strength but also its contradiction is that sacred life is not abolished but rather it is splintered and disseminated amongst the new sovereign: the citizen body. Every citizen as a bearer of rights is now also a subject of biopolitics.

At this point Agamben identifies several examples of the politicization of bare life in recent history.

His first touch point is the refugee. As Arendt argues, the rights of man are intrinsically bound to birth within a nation state. But as soon as one becomes a stateless refugee there is no grounding for this notion of human rights, hence the philosophical crisis generated by the age of the refugee.

No level of funding or NGO work can stitch together this rupture and void created by the dissipation of rights once the nation state can no longer back the individual. To the contrary, humanitarian organizations can only grasp human life as bare, sacred life through glossy photos of suffering that require fundraising.

Agamben contends that humanitarian organizations are existentially allied to the dictators or other forces that disenfranchise citizens and render them refugees because these organization as predicated upon having a large, perhaps growing volume of refugee bodies to take into their care.

The second is the Versuchpersonen of the twentieth century. Persons for experimentation, most infamously documented in National Socialist Germany but certainly present in the United States as well.

Agamben points to a book by Karl Binding titled Authorization for the Annihiliation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived which argues that suicide really is an unpunishable offense and that in fact it is the right of an individual to request euthanization for their life that does not deserve to live. It is this formula of "life that does not deeserve to live" that emerges under National Socialism to take the severely mentally ill under its care first for experimentation but then for euthanization. This for Agamben is a more blatant manifestation of biopolitics over bare life.

The third example is the comatose patient and the bioethical quandaries surrounding the point at which a comatose patient should be considered dead and the problematic invention of the term "brain death" to justify "pulling the plug" so that the medical establishment can harvest organs from this body reduced to bare life which serves no purpose and whose organs may be better used elsewhere. This again shows the shadowy boundary of life and death for the homo sacer in the current world.

His fourth and most critical example is the concentration camp. Just as Schmitt argues that civilization orders and localizes space as a clearing where things may be built and a society may be founded, Agamben argues the camp is an inversion of this logic.

The camp is a new zone carved out of the spaces of civilized law where a permanent state of exception is in force. The word of the Fuhrer is the rule of law. The rule of law is the sovereign decision of the Fuhrer. The two bodies of the king are thus rendered identical in the Fuhrer.

Additionally, the camp is not merely some appendage to the modern world but rather the paradigm of biopolitics. The logical conclusion of Western sovereignty is that all space should be rendered a camp and that all bodies should be rendered a homo sacer where rights, birth, and citizenship are suspended indefinitely.

Agamben points to two antidotes to this crisis: (1) the Flamen Diale of classical Rome and (2) the Muselmann of the concentration camps. The former is a figure of classical Rome who is never isolated as bare life but inhabits bios as the antithesis of the bandit. The latter is that ultimately reduced victim of the camps who is silent, non-resistant. It is a figure which biopolitics is confounded by because it is confronted by a figure who life is already reduced to bare life, and so it cannot take any more away. (The Muselmann becomes a major figure in Homo Sacer III).

The solution in the following volume will be to think a new politics by first understanding how the sciences could be so heavily constrained by this concept of bare life and what limits this may indicate those sciences have.

In Review

One must admire the ambition of the Homo Sacer project, both in the scope of its subject matter and in its method.

Continental theory has long prided itself as being a thoroughly historical tradition, but yet while doing so has often neglected the philological dimensions demanded by the task of philosophy. Heidegger and Ricoeur have embarked upon the quest for terminological precision with a historical lens, but few others have risen to the standard.

Agamben adds historical and linguistic dimensions that further color untapped dimensions of his predecessors' ideas as a synthesizer of Foucault, Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt most overtly in this volume.

It is perhaps because of the excitment of the fortuitous addition of these lenses to the equipment of theory that it is so deeply disappointing that Agamben should leverage them so lackadaisically.

Let us begin with the syntagm "homo sacer" itself.

It is a standard opening gambit of philosophical inquiry to pose an obscure problem and attempt its solution. It is the apertif of many an investigation, and Agamben employs this opening gesture rather successfully when he arrives at homo sacer.

Yet it remains dubious throughout this volume (and to be candid throughout the entire project) that the phrase homo sacer can accomplish all the work that Agamben employs it for, namely a rearticulation and redefinition of all Western political ontology, rendering it the ultimate footnote turned paradigm.

To do so would require extensive legwork and rigor that simply is not even begun in this volume and is not successfully executed in the ones that follow. For this volume specifically, we are merely offered a circuitous route on a training course before calling it a day with assured promises the real course will be run tomorrow.

Let us consider several potential gaps that problematize this exercise, if it is treated as anything more than an intellectual promenade.

The distinction between the Greek usages of ζωή and βίος is a fitting introduction to this study, particularly in tying it to the notion that there is a political notion of living life (βίος) that is distinct from things that merely live a bare life (ζωή).

But then from this ancient Greek lexical entry, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a fragmentary dictionary entry from the second century. Here we find Pompeius Festus defines sacer in this seemingly paradoxical and certainly obscure way, characteristic of vestigies of archaic law. We then learn that though separated by five or so centuries and the Adriatic Sea, they are nevertheless the same thing.

It is never quite set straight how we can so simply leap from a Greek terminological distinction which is more geared toward an ethical stance of how to live life to a blurred lexicon entry from classical Rome attempting to define a religious custom whose origins may have even been forgotten by that point in time.

This is a remarkable scope of difference, and yet Agamben somehow collapses them into a unitary cultural and linguistic phenomenon of "sacred life". Their shared grounding is never sufficiently identified unless through rather charitable interpretations of each side you find a serendipitous convergence. I am not a classicist, but I am not convinced classicist scholarship would be amenable to such a leap.

The breadth of Greek and Roman legal and religious traditions, as well as their nuances, remain unaccounted for in this thesis and are generally passed over altogether.

This is not to say they are elided entirely. Agamben does mention the Latin term vita (life) but merely to discount it as a non-technical term not as relevant for a study of archaic Roman law as for some reason its semantic counterparts in Greek. He also drops an aside on the famous law of homicide by Numa Pompilius but that is never treated directly either. If you are to ground your twelve-hundred page study on a legal figure whose death does not qualify as murder, it would seem judicious to consider what that society deems murder. Yet that is not deemed pertinent.

Fortunately the Greek tradition is not ignored entirely either. One of the sharpest moments of this volume is when he turns to a philological criticism of Pindar's Fragment 169 to adjudicate on the debate between Holderlin and Schmitt's reading of the passage. He adumbrate how Plato's clever wordplay of βίαιον τὸ δικαιότατον vs. δίκαιον τὸ βιαιότατον has gone over the heads of centuries of textual critics, leading to errors in manuscript transmission. These are moments where Agamben's wide-ranging curiosity shines best.

But these moments of epiphanic depth generally rest upon the insights or conclusions of his predecessors rather than as conclusive advocates of his own case. One cannot help but feel at times that Agamben's primary focus is to coax together disparate threads of various authors into a shoe-horned synthesis, all through the vehicle of homo sacer.

Foucault's biopolitical paradigm, Schmitt's state of exception, Benjamin's sovereignty as violence, Arendt's problematization of rights in light of the Holocaust, all seem to be shaven and shorn just to bit to fit them all on this shared Agamben canvas. Not to mention the cited (and sometimes uncited) ideas of his contemporaries such as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and others that are appendaged to align with the homo sacer paradigm.

Which brings us back to the question of homo sacer's scope. To whom does this principle belong to? If this is the originary political structure then who introduced it, if anyone?

Perhaps it originally belongs to Roman archaic law as a blurring of civic and religious. If so, and we then chalk up Agamben's Greek terminological distinction as incidental or (more precariously) part of the Greco-Roman hybrid, then why does Agamben have an excursus on Anglo-Saxon and Germanic law treating the "ban", the Friedlos, and the wolf's head?

It is difficult enough to make a case for the continuity of even the most major threads of Roman law through their medieval and ecclestiastical iterations up to modern jurisprudence. To take a footnote of an ambiguous dictionary entry from antiquity and try to tease out a juridical history of a concept through a tour de force Greco-Roman origin story up through the modern day is a fair bit more ambitious.

But then to leap laterally from the Greco-Roman tradition into medieval Germanic sources and point out similar sounding themes as identically biopolitical symptoms raises many other questions, even beyond the factuality of such connections.

Is this evil phantom of homo sacer emergent particularly in one culture whose pollutants we live downstream from today? Is Rome to blame?

Or is this a structuralist thesis whereby the homo sacer is a universal political phenomenon across all cultures? Girard's scapegoat was one such structural facet of human society, so perhaps homo sacer is as well.

Introducing Germanic sources would seem to weigh this in the direction of structuralism but then we have to deal with the total absence of non-Western sources and the recurring emphasis on sovereignty as a Western problem.

The tenuous middle ground would be that somehow each individual Western culture is primordially infected by this homo sacer germ while non-Western cultures remain immune.

But as it later turns out in the end of the Homo Sacer project (and this is alluded to already in a footnote on Negri), we come to learn that the perverted and malevolent biopolitical apparatus of the West, culminating in the Holocaust, is in fact a result of a mistake Aristotle made in his ontology. So it comes down to that.

It is food for thought to consider that the Holocaust and all biopolitics would have been averted if Aristotle had not privileged the actual over the potential.

Beyond the cultural scope of the origin of homo sacer as a Greek, Roman, Greco-Roman, Western, or universal phenomenon, there remains the question of chronology.

Agamben repeatedly affirms that the homo sacer is not chronologically prior to the state. He taps into a now more conventional form of thought that the "state of nature" is not a historical epoch but rather an allegorical precedent that is bound up in the foundation of the state. This is not unusual to claim as Bernard Williams and others have done so already.

What does not quite work so well is the attempt to marry the traditional legal analysis of rights and sovereignty with Foucauldian biopolitics, at least without accounting for the reasoning that distinguishes their method.

Foucault repudiated traditional modes of analysis for a number of reasons that would evolve over time through the distinct methodologies of archeology and genealogy. From the viewpoint of archeology, Foucault would argue that discourse on rights and other topics are always historically bound inside systems of rules. This is why only certain sets of ideas are thinkable in certain places and times. Consequently, the archeological method needs to understand what causes and conditions those rules without getting trapped in the language game of the time, so to speak. It is a downplay of the internal organic progression of ideas and emphasizing how concepts sway with the shifting foundation beneath them.

From the method of genealogy, this would change in a new way. Operating in Nietzsche's lineage, Foucault sought to identify the most concrete, functional operations and mecahisms of power, even beyond analyzing the language games of discourse. It is in these power relations that individuals are shaped, and that life is brought into its care as biopolitics.

To speak uncritically of constitutions, representatives, and human rights while individuals are shipped off to be euthanized or interred in concentration camps is to miss the second-order system of biopolitics at play.

Foucault sought to uncover the relatively novel development of these techniques as inventions and technologies in the hospital, the confessional, etc.

One cannot forget that at the same time as Foucault were intellectual historians operating very much underneath the standard rules of engagement that Foucault sought to critique, and these scholars too developed their own theories on the emergence and revolution of the theory of rights and sovereignty. Individuals such as Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss, and Quentin Skinner. They too were interested in these phenomena as distinctly modern developments.

The problem that plagues any study of modernity is exactly when it all starts and what all has changed since it has started. Do modern Western rights begin with the French Revolution, the Magna Carta, or the Investiture Controversy?

Both rights theorists and Foucault when discussing biopolitics would say that something has radically changed fairly recently in the last few centuries to demarcate the modern Western world from pre-modern or non-Western societies.

Which brings us back to Agamben who tells us that modern Western biopolitics begins with homo sacer or with Pindar, i.e. in prehistorical archaic texts.

Agamben is a true student of Foucault here in that he gives primary importance to the footnote or obscure ambiguities of history as well as how it is the discontinuity that is more core to the rule than the example.

Yet if this truly is meant to be a rigorous archeological or genealogical analysis (it is not certain which one Agamben intends for this volumes), it almost seems like he is performing a cartoonish caricature of its application by casually placing it at the beginning of recorded time in mystical prehistory.

Treating Agamben's point more carefully we see that this homo sacer bug bear he circles around is in his view always already there in Western political discourse through the form of the exile, the ban, the homo sacer.

The modern innovation is that the homo sacer becomes generalized to the populace as a whole as soon as everyone becomes sovereigns through virtue of being citizens. Agamben seems to triangulate this to Blackstone's writ of habeas corpus but to some extent as well with the French Revolution a century later.

Again this is a place where the broad strokes seem slightly too casual and sweeping to hold much historical purchase.

How from the lens of biopolitics could Blackstone's writ as a legal assessment effectively and thoroughly alter the entire landscape of sovereignty into a regime of biopolitics? Does this produce the conditions for new technologies that advance the cause of biopolitics? If so, what are these and how? Does it happen in progressive stages? Did it happen at different moments for different European societies?

It is not clear, furthermore, why this 1679 writ in particular was the culpable document that birthed modernity. Some attribute the birth of habeas corpus in the Anglo legal tradition in the Magna Carta though a greater case could be made for the Assize of Northampton in 1176. These both come centuries earlier and offer a functionally similar if not identical foundation.

The clearest indication Agamben offers is that it is specifically the term corpus and summoning the body of the individual to court that renders this biopolitical in nature, as part of what he terms the larger Baroque age obsession with the corporeal.

If the corporeal nuance is the turning point, this becomes a muddier point. Corporealism was already well underway in English technical terminology, not only in the sciences with Isaac Newton, but even in political theory with Hobbes' corpuscularism earlier that century.

The metaphor of the body can be traced back even further in English political thought to John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, and the concept of the king's two bodies to John Fortescue and Edmund Plowden well before Blackstone. This is even more surprising given Agamben's chapter on Kantorowicz's monography The King's Two Bodies focusing on this topic rather specifically, but yet Agamben distances modern biopolitics from Kantorwicz's study even as he does claim its dualism for his own notions of sovereignty and homo sacer.

If indeed the moment of modernity is the citizen as body, then this should certainly be a Hobbesian innovation, not one of Blackstone. One could pursue a similar thread with his treatement of the French Revolution.

What is decisive in determining the moment of discontinuity remains vague at best.

This may not at all matter for ultimately reaching the logical conclusion of biopolitics in the concentration camp. Perhaps we are merely meant to witness the omnious motifs by which biopoiltics and the permanent state of exception enters the foreground, but if this were so, it does not explain why Agamben makes frequent gestures at many distinct moments as "the originary structure" of homo sacer or biopolitics.

And this is perhaps an even more internally fundamental problem to Agamben's method in this first volume. In his lecture on genealogy, Foucault lambasts the obsession with origins, how so many scholars try to tease out some continuous and contiguous thread from prehistory to the present day. Like Nietzsche before him, Foucault believes the point is more to figure out how we got to where we are now, because it is often the intermediate moments rather than the origin that determine how we get here.

This seems to be lost on Agamben's analysis which reiteratively circles around the originary structure of politics via the homo sacer, rather than seeking to understand the genealogical twists and turns along the way that got us to the concentration camp. From Agamben's narrative, it seems like we have several blips in ancient and early modern times which in the end push in one direction and one direction only, toward the concetration camp.

The irony in overloading this syntagm homo sacer into some unitary structure is that such an exercise works against the grain of one of Agamben's main influences throughout the Homo Sacer project: Emile Benveniste. One of Benveniste's contributions to linguistic was his emphasis on polyvalence. Sometimes words can have different, even contradictory, senses. It may not be possible to cast all semantic usages into one iron framework that meshes together with consistency.

Agamben's refusal to let the homo sacer rest as contradiction in the semantic landscape of remote antiquity ultimately overworks the term in a desperate attempt to render it not merely operative, but hyperoperative for a whole system of philospohy. For one who will speak much on the yoke of operativity and the ideal of inoperativity, this is perhaps his strangest gesture of all. He will not kill this phrase and yet he will sacrifice it to his project.

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Much more could be said here on this volume.

How Agamben applies the concept of "sacred life" not merely ambiguously but seemingly equivocally. At one point, Agamben refers to photos of refugee children as a manipulation built upon the presupposition of the "sacredness of life". If he means here "life is sacred" in the conventional positive sense that most people use it, then he seems to be making a sarcastic remark on refugee children having a constructed, fake holy suffering to elicit pity. Yet if he is using his technical, negative sense then he is implying humanitarian work is unsanctionable violence that reduces refugees to bare life. In either reading, it is not clear what he thinks of refugee "life" but it does seem like he would prefer the abolition of refugee aid to "rethink biopolitics".

On the whole, the sacred is treated as an ominous, devilish force by Agamben even if his sources describe it neutrally, such as in the etymological chapter of "the sacred".

It is not clear why there is no mention of the positive connotations surrounding the "sacred", even if to disabuse the reader of their invalidity, merely because that terminology has a very long-lived and conventional notion as a positive force in both the Roman and Christian worlds.

Yet through the amalgamation of examples historical and literary it seems both the classical sovereign and the outcast are sacred, until modernity renders us all sacred. And yet the deeply mentally ill, the comatose, and those in the concentration camps are all homo sacer too. Are we all homo sacer now? Is there a moral superiority to those who have actualized a greater degree of sacralization, and is this manifested by suffering? Or are we all equally sacred before the law of the biopolitical?

Why in his treatment of classical and modern spheres are slaves or outsiders completely ignored? Agamben frequently contrasts ius humanum and ius divinum but the ius gentium (law of nations) was a fairly common Roman legal convention. Slavery seems readily available to a homo sacer analysis and yet is not.

Why does he commence the study with Greek terminology but then remains noticeably silent on the well-documented Greek practice of ostracism as a form of exile? Why is "life" as a concept deemed so central to this analysis and yet its Latin antecedent deemed unworthy of note?

How does Agamben pick and choose the gradations and precedence of homo sacer, particularly those examples in the close of the volume. It is not clear why the comatose in particular are granted a full chapter while other classes of historically oppressed persons are passed over in silence. The criteria for selecting candidates of homo sacer remains unclear.

What is the goal of rethinking politics through homo sacer?

There are moments where Agamben seems to blame human rights and liberties for these problems, attendant of course upon other developments. Do we abolish habeas corpus so that we may return to a pre-biopolitical paradigm? Should we all be thought of through βίος versus bare life? If we are meant to embrace a modal ontology, what would a functional apparatus of sovereign potentialities look like?

Can we attribute the Holocaust to a mistake in grammar and ontology?

What we have here in this volume is a prolegomena. To render this project effective as a work of philosophy, more work must be done. Whether or not Agamben does achieve this goal in the following volumes remains to be seen.