Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (review)

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. 199.

At a time when criticism indulges in reading current cultural phenomena at their most detailed and microcosmic level, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer takes an altogether different route to the problematic relationship between politics and thought. Agamben’s is a book whose scope and implications are deliberately overarching, as is the core of its subject matter, namely, the relation of human life to political power. The novelty of his approach lies in his conviction that there are still phenomena in our present that have been untouched by the many epistemological shifts recently declared, and that demand a serious examination of the past in which they remain deeply rooted. Consequently, in investigating the current relation between human life and state power, Homo Sacer finds many of its answers in remotest antiquity, in the political writings of Aristotle and the legal theory of ancient Rome.