IORGIO /\OAMBEN

1972 / G'
Th camp is the fourth and inseparable el
phoseds.h ebroken up the old trinity of nation (bienl1ent that L
to on os . h d rt 1) rtu
. f this perspective t al we nee to see th • state s be
It 1s rom · . e re · a,,d e11
. form that is. in a certrun sense, even more extr apPeara tetr Qdd
tnh a r Yuooslavia.• What is happening there 1. erne in th llce of'toti l'IJ
t e ,ormer " - d I d fi s not et c ··
estf~d obs·ervers rushed. to d ec are,. a .reI e nition of t heat Iall , as ettit~vt 1~lli11., ,
. to new ethnic an terntona arrangem o d h . sotti .~1or
accord mg I . d. ents th i-o1•Ii e,n
. .
eutton o f the processes that cu mmate
h . m the con Shtur at is , as·cal 8)•s1ler•
. '
. states Rather we note t ere an irreparable ton of th 'ttipJ e~
na t ion- . · ' f I . dh ruptu e t et
as well as a dislocation o popu at1ons an uman lives re of the llto ep.
new ,lines of flight. That is why the camps of ethnic according old ,,!ea1 1
. portant If the Nazis never thought of carrying 0 rhape are 0lo en/ 0i
1m · . h . b Ut t e «e s lte/
impregnating Jewish women, t at 1s ecause the p . . 11na1 1crllti 1i
. fl'r . h d rtnc1p) Salli' a1,
ensured the inscdption
. . o uehm t he or . er of then at'ion-ste of b·tt1h ton··1. u1
way still functt0nmg, even t oug 1t was-profound I ate, \\las 1.' '''hie(
rinciple is now adrift: it has ·entered a process of d. 1Y transfor.,_ ns0tti
P . I . 'bl ts ocar ·•,ed "' e
functioning is becoming patent y 1mposs1 e and in wh·IC h wton .in \\>h:I h this
only new .camps but aIso aIways new
r . h . an d more deli nous n , Xpett its
. e cane c
tions of the inscription of Uie m t e city. The camp h· orrnativ no1
. t· · I ' w •ch · e defi
settled inside it , is t he new b10po 1t1ca nomos of the pIanet. is no,vfi rillly ni.

From Homo Sacer: .Sovereign .Power and B

. . ~re Life1
From Part Three: The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm oifth
: . . e Modern
§l THE POLITICIZATION
t
.OF, LIFE
I.

I.I. In the last vears

- of his life, while he was working on the h'1story 0f
ality and·unmasking the deployments of power at work within it M· sexu.
cau 1t2 began to direct
· h1s
· mqumes
· · · wit· h nicreasing
· insistenc, 1chelrdFou-
study of what he defined as biopolitics, that is, the growing inclues·ion
towaf
o manth:
natural life in the mec_hanisms an d ca_lculations of power. At the end of th;
first volume of The History of Sexuality,3 Foucault, as we have see
marizes th~•process b~ whic_h_ life;, at the _begin~ing of the modern age~~;~:
to be what 1s at stake m poltt1cs: For m1llenma, man remained what he 11~5
for Aristotle: a living animal with the·additional capacity for political exis·
tence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as aIii··
ing being into question." 4 Until the very end, however, Foucault continued
to investigate the "processes of subjectivization" that,' in the passage from
the ancient to the modern world, bring the individual to objectify his own
self, constituting himself as a subject and, at the same time, binding him·
1984
2. French historian and philosopher 11926· '
4. As part of the ethnic cleansing undertaken by
Serbs to drive out or kill Bosnian Muslims and see above).
3. A 3-volume work (1979-8 4), 1 1
.,;w
Croats after Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991 , mass
executions and systematic rapes occurred in con·
h
4. History of Sexuality, vol. _I, An 1'."" ";980i
1
trans. Robert Hurley (New ' 'ork: ~ ~ •::,·110nr
centration camps. p. 143. For the Greek phr 1osop e
I. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen , who occa·
(384-322 o.c.E.), see above.
sionally retains Agamben's Italian in square
brackets.
 HO i\lO S ACE R· S
· O VE R E IGN POW E R AND BAR E LIFE
/
19
73

self to a power of external control. Despite what one might have legitimately
e,xpected, Fo~cault never brought his insights to bear on what could well
have appeare to be the exemplary place of modern biopolitics: the politics
of
the great totalitarian stat
.
f h • I · ·
es o t e twentieth century. T 1e inquiry t at
h
began with a reconstruction of th e gran d enJennement'
,,. -m
· · hosp1ta
· Is an d pns-
·
on s did not end with an anal· ys1s· of t·h e concentratton
· camp.
th 0th
If, on e er hand , the pertinent studies that Ha nnah Arendt 6 dedi-
cated to ~he st ructure of totalitarian states in the postwar period have a limit,
it is precisely t_he absence of any biopolitical perspective. Arendt very clearly
discerns_ the lmk bet,~ een totalitarian rule and the particular condition of
life that is the camp: The supreme goal of all totalitarian states," she writes,
in a plan_for research .~n the concentration camps, which , unfortu~ately, was
not earned through , is not only the freely admitted, long-ranging ambiti~~
to global rul~, bu_t also the never admitted and immediately realized attempt
at total dommation. The concentration camps are the laboratories in the
experimen~ of total domination , for human nature being what it is, this goal
can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human made hell"
(Essays, P· 240). Yet what escapes Arendt is that the process is in a certain
sense the inverse of what she takes it to be, and tha't precisely the radical
transformation of politics into the realm of bare life7 (that is , into a camp)
legitimated and necessitated total domination. Only because politics in our
age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for poli-
tics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown.
The fact that the two thinkers who may well have reflected most deeply
on the political problem of our age were unable to link together their own
insights is certainly an index of the difficulty of this problem. The concept
of "bare life" or "sacred life" is the focal lens through which we shall try to
make their points of view converge. In the i;iotion of bare life the interlacing
of politics and life has become so tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. Until
we hecome aware of the political nature of bare life and its modern avatars
(biological life, sexuality, etc.), we will not succeed in clarifying the opac-
ity at their center. Conversel y, once modern politics enters into an intimate
symbiosis with bare life, it loses the intelligibility that still seems to us to
characterize the juridico-political foundation of classical politics.

1.2. Karl Lowith 8 was the first to defin e the fundamental character of total-
itarian states as a '.'politicization of life" and, at the same time, to note the
curious contiguity between democrac y and totalitarianism:
Since the emancipation of the third estate ,9 the form ation of bourgeois
democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the
neutralization of politically relevant differences and postponement" of a
decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its
opposite: a total politici zation [tot.ale Politisierung] of everything, even

5. Grand (or ma ss) confine m e nt (Fre nc h).
6. Ge rm a n-bo rn A me r ica n politica l th eo ri s t
(1906-19 75: see a bo ve). Aga mbe n quot es fr o m
her Essa)'s i11 Understanding, /93 0- 1954: Fo n11a-
tiou, Exile, and Totalitarianism , ed. Jero me Ko hn
(New York: Sc ho c ke n, 2005).
7. Also "'naked life," a key te rm fo r Aga mbe n : th e
minimal exist ence of a human being, apa rt from
a ny a ttribut es, ac co mpli s hm e nt s, or rights th a t
a tt e nd recogni zed membe rship in a politica l or
socia l co mmunit y.
8 . German philosophe r a nd intellectua l hi sto rian
(1 897- 1973).
9. T hat is, the commons.
1974 / G1011GIO AGAMBEN

. utral domains of· life. Thus in Marxist R

of seeming1y ne .. . . I Ussia h
te that was more mtens1ve y state•o . t er
emerged a worke r•Sta . r1ented e
any absolute monarchy"; in fascist Italy, a corporate, stat thari
tively regulating not only natio~al wo~k, but al~o '.'after-work" [D:orrna.
all spiritual life; and, m National Socialist Gerrnan Polc,v.
oro I an d f . II Y, a wh
integrated state, which, by me~ns O
racia a~s and so forth, ~lly
ci 7,es even the life that had until then been private. (Der okku _Politi.
1 sro»e//
Dezionismm, p. 33 ) e
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states
d f . . . ' neverth
less, does not have the form of a su d en trans_ orn:iat1on (as Lowith e-
following in Schmitt's 2 footsteps, seems to mamtam); before im ' here
. f b' 1·. h . petuousl
coming to light in our century, I ie river o iopo ltlcs t at gave homos' y3
I
his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is aim C1cer
. . d .. 1• . . I . . ost as if
starting from a certam pomtd, e,h,ery_ el c1s1ve pob ,1_1cad' e_vdentlwere double-sided'.
the spaces the liberties an t e ng its won Y111 1v1 ua s in their o, ·
' ' . I d ,. . con111c1
with central powers always_ s1mul~ai~eous y prepare a tacit but increasi s
inscription of individuals' lives w1thm the state order, thus offering ~g
• c h · a new
and more dreadful foundation wr t every sovereign power from which h
wanted to liberate themse Ives. "Th e 'ng . h t ' to 1•r " . Foucault .explt .ey
.ue,
. ,writes
. a1n-
ing the importance assume db y sex as a po I1t1ca 1 issue, to one's bod
11 ,

. , h .c . f d d b . .d I Y, to
health , to happiness, tot e sat1siactt0n o nee s ~n , eyon a I the oppres-
sions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one c
be, this 'right'-which the classical juridic~! system was utterly incapable:~
comprehending-was the political response t9 a,!I these new procedures of
power" (La volonte, p. 191). 4 The fact is that one and the same ~ffirmation
of bare life leads, in bourgeois demo~racy, to a pri~acy of the private over
the public and of individual liberties over co!)ective obligations and yet
~ecomes, in totalitarian states, the deci~ive political crit~rion and the exem-
plary realm of sovereign decisions. 1nd only because biological life and its
needs 'had become the politically decisive ,fact is it possible to und~rstand
the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with wh_ich_twentieth-century par-
liamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with
which this century's totalitarian states were able to
be converted, a'Imost
without interruption, into parliamenta~y democracies. In b~th cases, these
transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some ti!'lle
politics had already turned into biopoli'tics, and'in which the only rea! ques-
tion to be decided was which form of organization \\'O~ld be best suited to
the task of assuring the care, control, and ~se of bare life. Once their fun-
damental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such
as those between Right and Left, liberalism and t0talitarianism, private and
public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinc-
tion. The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme

I. Lowith, Der okkasionelle Deziouismus ,,ou
Carl Schmitt [The Opportunistic Decisionism of
Carl Schmitt], in his Siimtliche Scl,riften, ed. Klaus
Stichweh and Marc B. de Launey, vol. 8 (Stull-
gart: Metzler, 1984).
2. Carl Sch mill (1888-1985), German jurist and
Roman law a man who is banned and thereford
can be kill;d with impunity because he is plaJ°
outside the law, but who could not be offere as
a sacrifice in religious rites. . Wil/ lO
4. Foucault, La volonte ,le sat•oir [Tl,.• . . 1 I
th
Knowledge[ (Paris: Gallimard, 1976): 's "' ·
0

political theorist who openly supported Nazism . of History of Sexuality.

3. Sacred/accursed man (Latin); in ancient
 Ho~IO SACE R: Sov .
EHE IG N PowER AND B A R E LIFE / 1975
.5111 (as in the Serbian program f" . .
111011 forms of fascism in °
Europe 1 e th nic cleansing'')' and the rebirth of
11e a so 11ave th · h
Along with the emergence of bio .. eir roots ere.
01
·d radual expansion beyond th ~ _ittcs, we can observe a displacement
an gof exception, . . which sov e .1nnitsofthed ec1s1on
m · · on bare 1·c ,re, m• t he
st31
dc rn state marking the point erteigh~tyl consi st ed. If there is a line in every
n,o
. eon death. and biopolitics a w 1c 1 the · · on 1·c
. de c,s,on ire becomes a d ec,-·
1
51~ er appears today as a stabl;~:r~urn _n~o . thanatopolitics, 6 this line no
lo g . .

0 [ pohtica
7~f . . er div1d1ng two clearly distinct zones.
This l~~e 1I w m mo_tion :.',d gradually moving into areas other than that
b~• a_reas m ~• ic~ the sovereign is entering into an eve r more
intimate sym iostis nodt ohn Y wi th the jurist but also with the doctor the sci-
.st. the exper an t e · st. I '
enli h . ' hpne n the pages that follow we shall try to
ho"· t at certain events t at are fund Ir h ' f
s . ( h th d I amenta ,or t e political history o
modernity sue as e . ec aration of rights), as well as others that seem
. tead to represent an mcompreh 'bl • .
,ns . h .. ens, e mtrus,on of biologico-scientific
· ciples mto t e po 11t1cal order (s I1 N · . . .
pnn . . f ,, -~ th . uc as at1onal Soc,ahst eugenics and
its climmat,on ° h e_ at •s unworthy of being lived," or the contemporary
debate on t_he normative determination of death criteria), acquire their true
th
sense only ,f ey are ~rought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopo-
litical) context to whic~ they belong. From this perspective, the camp-as
the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded
the st ate of except_ion )-wi11 appear as the hidden paradigm of
7
solely
the political space of m~dermty, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will
have to lea rn to recognize. .

I.3. The first recording of bare life as the new political subject is already
implicit in the document that is generally placed at the foundation of mod-
ern democracy: the 1679 writ of habeas corpus. 8 Whatever the origin of this
formula, used as early as the eighteenth century to assure the physical pres-
ence of a person before a court of justice, it is significant that at its center
is neither the old subject of feudal relations and liberties nor the future
citoyen, but rather a pure and simple corpus. 9 When John the Landless con-
ceded Magna Carta to his subjects in 1215, 1 he turne_d his attention to the
"archbishops, bishops, abbots, counts, barons, viscounts, provosts, officials
and bailiffs," to the "cities, towns, villages," and, more generally, to the "free
men of our kingdom," so that they might enjoy "their ancient liberties and
free customs'' as well as the ones he now specifically recognized. Article 29,
whose task was to guarantee the physical freedom of the subjects, reads: "No
free man [homo liber] may be arrested, imprisoned, dispossessed of his goods,
or placed outside the law [utlagetur] or molested in any way; we will not place
our hands on him nor will have others place their hands on him [nee super

i The Serbian attempt during the Bosnian \,Var
11992 -9 5) to dril'c out or kill all Muslims and
Croats in Bosnia.
6. A politics of dea th (in Greek. t/,a11atos) . the
"""" of a politics of life (l,ios).
7. The suspension of the law under what a re
deemed extraordin ary circumstances , thereby
allowing the state to depril'e people of all right s.
8. You should hal'e the bodv (Latin). the first
11
ords of a writ directing the Production in court
of a person bein g detained. Although it was in use
in England in the Middle Ages, many procedures
were formalized in the Habeas Corpus Ac t of
1679.
9. Body (Latin ), as contrasted to a citi ze n (cit oyen.
Frenc h).
I. The "Great Cha rter," issued to his barons by
England's King john (1167-1216), is often seen as
the first legal statement of rights gra nt ed lo citi-
zens by a sovereign.
l97ti / G10HGIO AGAMIIEN

eum ibimis, nee super eum mittemusl, e~cept afaer a legal jud
eers according to the law of the realm. Analogously, an ancient }lllen1 by h·13
P
preceded the lrnbeas corpus an d was un derSroo d to assure th . Writ th
the accused in a trial bears t he ttt· Ic de homine ·· rep legiando
· ( e Presenc at
. 1· h . h or rep; /·1 ' of
Consider instead the fo~~1Ula 0 _ c writ t at the _act of 1679 .; a11do).I
and makes into law: Praec1p11nus t1b1 quod Corpus X, in custod· g neraJi,.
. . td . . ia vest~ d '-'I
t:mn, ut dicitur, una cum causa captionis e etentwnis, quodcum a eten.
idem. X censeatur in eadem, habeas coram nol1is, apud Westminste;ue 110111;,ie
eiidum , "We command that you have • beforeI us .to show ,_adsu~i~.,.
. ' at We strninst
body X, by whatsoever name he may be cal ed therem, which is he! ~r, that
111
custody, as it is said, as well as the cause of the arrest and th d d Your
·ft: b e etenr
Nothing allows one ro measure t he dI erence etween ancient d ion.'
freedom and the freedom at the basis of mode.rn democracy be:tn l11hedieva1
. ertanh·
formula. It is not the free man an dh 1s statutes and prerogaliv t is
. h b' f e~ nore
simply /wino , but rather cor-pus t hat 1s t e new su 1ect o politics. A d Ven
· d · n dern
racy is born precisely as the assertion an presentation of this "bodv''. 1 Oc-
corpus ad su~jicieiidwn, "you will have to have a body to show.'' · · iabeas
The fact that, of the all the various jurisdictional regulations
. . . 'd I 1· d . h b concern d
with the protection of md1v1 ua Tee . om, 1t was a eas corpus that assuflltd e
the form of law and thus became. mseparable from I . . the history of W estern
democracy is sure Iy due to mere circumstance. t 1s Just as certain • however
that nascent European democracy t here by placed at the center of its b 1•
against absolutis~ not bi~s, the qualified.life of the citi.zen, but
bare. anonymous hfe that 1s as such taken mto the sovereign ban ("the bod
zoe~:~:
of being taken ... ," as one still reads in one modern formulation of thew/11
"by whatsoever name he may be called therein''). 3 •
What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once
again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say. bare life. This is modern
democracy's strength and, at the same time. its inner contradiction: mod-
ern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and dissemi-
nates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political
conflict. And the root of modern democracy's secret biopolitical calling lit'!
here: he who will appear later as the bearer of rights and, according to a
curious oxymoron , as the new sovereign subject (s ubiectus s11pera11e11s, in
other words, what is below and, at the sanJe time, most elevated) can only
be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and
the isolation of corpus, bare l.ife, in himself. If it is true that law needs a
body in order to be in force, and .if one can speak, in this sense, of "law's
desire to have a body," democracy responds to this desire by compelling law
to assume the care of this body. This ambiguous (or polar) characier of
democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers
the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure
the presence of the accused al the trial and. therefore, to keep the accused
nd
from avoidi.ngjudgmenl , turns-in its new and definitive form-into grou s
for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused . Corpus is atu1r

• aleSistt'.O('t'!
1.. For replevy ing n mun : i.e. , for rdensing o pris• "naked life") is phys ic ul life. o~r antm J,oo<i
oner upon buil. l,ios is •our social or political hf~.. th e ~ i<III
3. Both :o<l and bios mea n "life" in Greek. but we creale (our bio~ruphyl through uur ,nt
AJ.!amben finds in A risto1 le's PoliJics wdistinction with other.;.
hetwcc n tht• term s. Zoe (A~ambcn's "ba re life" or
 ll o \11> S , c 1 n : S o, 1.· 1111
• c,. N 1, o wr n AN P II A n ll L1r1
I 1(J 7i

· ,,
icftl I"''"•"' '
1/,r be<1 rer boil, o f sul1 · · I · • 1· 1 /
1 · 1ec110 11 lo SOl'c rr i~ 11 im11•t·r '"" n.f 1111 111 r •
f. 1i/Jl' r1ies.
,,11f1 hi~ 1w•11, ccntrnlit
· . . "b1)c·I•,," 11111e
v· or. thl' · I sp Iierc of· polit..u.:o-_1ur1c
· · 11c11
· I term•··
loi?.Y1hus cmncidcs_'~1th .1he more gcnl'ral process hy which co1p11s is given
110ch a pril'i lc!?cd posit ion in tll(' philosophv and sl'il'nCl' of I h C' ll11roquc age .

; ~~ l)csca rtcs 10_Newt.on. 1:rom_ Leihni z.10 Spinoz:1. 4 And yc•I in poliri cn l
111
flecrion cor,ms ,ilwa ys maintain s a close ti c lo frnre lifC'. C'VC ll when ii
~cennies 1~e central m~laphor ~r the politica l communit y. ns in Le11intl11111
or f ire Socrnl Co'.'':ncl. 1-lohh? s use or I he term is pnrt icul nrl~• in struct ive
in this re!?a r~ - If 11 _•~ lruc that 111 De l1.0 111i11e0 he di stin ~ui shcs man's naturnl
bodYfr?".1 h'.s ~olit,ca l h_ody (lwmo e11im 11011 modo c.: m·r,11s 11nt.11 rale est., sed
ftim" c,11,tnlts. ,d eSI , 111 ,ta loq 11~r, corporis ·politici pars, "Ma n is not only a
natural hody. ~ml a lso a _b ody of the c~t y. drnt is. of the so-called politicnl
p r, .. [De /,om.m e. P· 11), 111 the ~ e c i ve ' it is ]>reci:sely the body's ca pnc!t y to_
3
killed that fo und s both lhe natu ra l equ al11·v of men and the necess ity of
IJC II" '
,he --c ommonwea t l :
If wc look at adult men a nd con sider the fragilit y of the unit y of' the
human body (whose ruin marh the end of every strength. vigo r, a nd
fo rce) and the ease with which the wcakes l man ca n kill the strongesl
111 3
n. there is no reason fo r someone to tru st in hi s strength and think
him sc lr superior to 0 1 hers by natu re . T hose 1d10 ca n do I he sa me things
to each other arc equa ls. And those who ca n do the supreme I hing- that
is, kill- are by nature equ al a mong themselves. (De cive, p. 93)
The great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is fo rmed out of a ll the
bodies of individu als, mu st be read in this light. The absolute capacity of
the subjects' bodies to be killed fo rms the new poli tical body of the West:

FROM §2 BI OPOLITI CS AN D T H E RI G HTS OF MAN

8
2.1. Hannah Arendt entitled the fifth chapte r of her book on imperia li sm,
1
rhich is dedicated to the problem of refu gees, "The Decline of the Nation-
State and the End of the Rights of Ma n." Linking together the fa tes of the
riohts
,, of man and of the nation-state, her striking fo rmulation seems to imply
the idea of an intim ate and necessa ry connection between the two, though
the author herself leaves the question open. T he paradox from which Arendt
departs is th at the ve ry fi gure who should have embodied the rights of man
par excellence-the refu gee-s ignals instea d the con cept's radica l cri sis.
"The conception of human rights," she states, "based upon the ass umed exis-
tence of a huma n being as such, broke dow n at the ve ry moment when
those who profe ssed to believe in it we re for t he fi rst time confro nted with

4. BARUC II SPI NOZA ( 1632- 16 77), Jewi sh-bo rn a ll it s mcm bt~rs .

6. C o 11 cer11int J\lm 1 ( 165 8) . ,\ gamlwn cp 1o t t':-, tht:
Dutch philosopher. Bene Dcscarlcs (1596- J 6;0).
Lati n tex t fro m T hom as I lohhl'S, Op<'rn pfiilo·
FH·nch philosopher. Isaac Newto n ( 1642 - 172 7).
sopli ica q uae la tiue sc ripsit 0111J1 ia i11 111111111 cnr•
English scientist an d ma th c nwt ic ia n. G ott fr ied
Leib niz (1646- 17 16), Ge rm a n phil osophe r a nd
pus. ed. W illiam Mo les wort h. vol. 2 \ Lo ndon :
mathe matic ian.
J. Bohn . 198 3).
7. Cnnce ntin# th e Citi:c11 ( 1642); A gnm ben
5.A class ic of polit ica l philosophv ( 1762 ) hy the
qu otes fro m Dr c i1·e: T l, c Latin Versio n. ed . How•
>wiss-horn r- rc 11c h philoso phe r Jean-Jacq ues
a rd Wa rre nde r (O xfo rd : C larend o n Press . l98JI.
Rousseau 117 17- 1778). Leviatlum (l6'il ), a wo rk
8 . '' lmp(•ria lism" is th e titl e of part 2 of Art· nclt 's
I" th e Engli sh politica l phil oso phe r T ho mas
Orif,!iH S of Tota lit ari ani sm ( 19 5 1; repri nt. Nl' \\
1-lobhes 11 588 - 1679); it wa s the first to suggest
York: Ha rco urt Brace j ol'anm·ic h. 19 79) .
tha1go\'C•rn me nt ori ~in atr s in a soc ia l cont rac t of
pcopll· who had indeed lost ull other ,, (Oqunlities
.. and. .spedfic re I·at,.0
cxcq)t that thev wen· still human • rtguis, P· 299). In th, nshi
. I d d d . J' bl . h e syste Ps,
nut ion-st11te, the so-ca le sacre en . ma iena c rig ts of man · Ill bf th
sclws to IRck every protection end reality at the moment in whi ·h sh0w tb-. '
' .. f C th <:fl).
lon~er take the form of ri~ hts I,e Iongmg to citizens o a state. If 0. ey ca 0
the matter. this is in fact implicit in the ambiguity of the very title O considet'to
Declaration of the Ri~hts of Man and Citizen, of 1789. In the ph the Pren r~
?
' d . . . . I. . rase L d ell
mtion des drm~s de l honune el u c1to}'tm, it is n~lt c eur _whether the t " ec/,,.
homme and c1toyen name two autonomous. bemgs d or 111stead torrn IIWo lerrns
system in which the first is always_ aJrea dY111~ 1u ed in the second. A ll~itar~
latter is the case, the kind of relation that exists between hon-une , nd if the
nd
still remains unclear. From this perspective, Burke's houtade9 ~ c..~toye,,,
which he preferred his "Rights of an Englishman" to the inalieaccboltcling to
. cl' na e . h
of man acquires an unsuspecte d pro f un 1ty. · r,g 18
Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints concern• I·h
between the r,ohts· of man an cl t he nation-state,
· and her st,g •ng . e I'1tik
" . . gest, 0 h
therefore. not been followed u~. In the p~nod after the Second Wor1/ _as
both the mstrumental emphasis on the rights of man and the rapid War,
of declarations and agreements on the part of international organi~:twth
1
have ultimately made any authentic understanding of the historical ". ~~s
cance of the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop re s~g;_rfi.
declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical' valu!s ~- rng
ing the legislator (in fact, without much success) to respect eternal ethr_ti<l-
. . Ies, an d to begm
prmc1p · to cons1'cl er lhem accor' cl·mg to t heir real histor·real
1 1
function in the modern nation-state. Declarations of rights represent t~a
originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political ord c
of the nation-state. The same bare life that in the ancien regime 2 was poli~'.
cally neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world
was (at least apparently) clearly distinguished as zoe from political life (bios)
now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly
foundation of the state's legitimacy and sovereignty.
A simple examination of the text of the Declaration of 1789 shows that it
is precisely bare natural life-which is to say, the pure fact of birth- that
appears here as the source and bearer· of ri~hts. "Men," the first article
declares, "are born and remain free and equal in rights" (from this perspec-
tive, the strictest formulation of i!II is to be found in La Fayette's 3 project
elaborated in July 1789: "Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasi-
ble rights"). At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugu-
rating the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order
vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are "preserved" (accord-
ing to the second article: "The goal of every political association is the pres·
ervation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man"). And the Declaration
can attribute sovereignty lo the "nation" (according to the third article: ''The

9. Ou11Jurs1 , sully (French). The English philoso- before 1hc revolution of 1789. __ • HI ,.ho
pher and s1a1csma11 WM UN D nun• E (1729- 1797) 3. The 11uir4uis ,le Lafayc ll <' ( Ji, ,- IH · •.111
assa iled 1he French 13cvolution and , spec ificall y, aflcr ligl11ing ngain st I he llril ish i~ 1hr An"'.'.';j 11 •
•r'1nC ('S ftl,
ils declaration of ril(hls in Hejlec1io11s 0 11 1/ie Rev- llevolution became a mcm her 11 I l ' • • I· l"fi9 1
tionary Nat ional Asscmhly, IO which J"r' . his
111
0/111/011 iu Fra,, ce (1790). . I f f 1 .. J.. n 1inn" "~
I. Ou1sid~ or IJcyond the rea lm of law cslablished he prescntc d his c. ra t o a '- u .., '. )
hy governmental au1hori1y. (wf ill cn wilh the aid of Thoma s )<'lfcrson ·
2. Old regime (French); specificalli•, Fra nce
 Ho~JO SACEH : SovEHEIGN
1 p OW E- H AND
B AH li L,,-- E· / 1979

inciple of all _sove~eignty ':sides essentially in the nation'') precisely because

~\1as already ms~nbed ~his element of birth in the very heart of the politi-
• 1cornrnu nitv,. l he nat10n-the t erm d enves
11 · etymologicallv from nascere
c~ b born)-thus closes the open circle of man's b' th '
(IO e tr .

Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which

2 2·
,he passag~ from d'•v~ne
· IY aut horized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty <

. accomplished. This passage assures the exceptio 4 of life in the new state
,sder that will succeed the collapse of the ancien regime. The fact that in
or h " b' " · h
,his process t. e su 1e~t •~, as as been noted, transformed into a "citizen"
th
means that bir -which ts to say, bare natural life as such-here for the
first time becomes (th an~s ~o a transformation whose biopolitical conse-
quences we are on~y ~egmnmg _t~ discern today) the immediate bearer of
sovereignty. Th~ pnncipl~ of n_a~1v1ty and the principle of sovereignty, which
were separated '.n the ancien ~eg1me (where birth marked only the emergence
fa 51,jet., a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the "sovereign
:ubject'' so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted. It
is not possible to understand the "national " and biopolitical development
and vocation of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious
political subject but, abov~ all, ma~:s bare life, the simple birth that as .such 1is,
in the passage from subject to c1ttzen, invested with the principle of sover-
eignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation
such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two
terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent
that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to
light as such) of the citizen.
Only if we understand this essential historical function of the doctrine of
rights can we grasp the development and metamorphosis of declarations of
rights in our century. When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and
nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe's
geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and
fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural
life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision. We are used to condens-
ing the essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm "blood and
soil" (Blut und Boden). When Alfred Rosenberg; wanted to express his par-
ty's vision of the world, it is precisely to this hendiadys 6 that he turned. "The
National Socialist vision of the world ," he writes, "springs from the convic-
tion that soil and blood constitute what is essential about Germanness, and
that it is therefore in reference to these two givens that .a cultural and state
politics must be directed'' (Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often been
forgotten that this formula, which is so highly determined politically, has,
in truth, an innocuous juridical origin. The formula is nothing other than
the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served
to identify citizenship (that is, the primary inscription of life in the state

4. Exception (Latin), Speeclies and Articles, 1919- /9331 (Munich: F

5. German Nazi ideologist (1893- 1946), hanged
as a war criminal a her the war. Agamb c n quotes
from his Blut 1111d Elrre, Ein Kampf fur deutscl, e
IViedergehurt: Reden und Aufsiitw /919 - 1933
[Blood a11d Honor, A War for German Rebirtli:
Eher, I936).
6. A figure of speech in which a single idea is
e.xpressed by two terms joined together by "and,"
rather than one lerm modified by the other.
1980 / GIORGIO AGAMBEN

order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sa11guinis (b,
zen parents).; In the a11cie11 regime. these two traditional J·u .drt_h frotri . .
. h d I n ical cit,.
had no essential meaning, smce t ey expresse on y a relatio Ctite .
. h . n of b t1a
tion. Yet with the French Rem Iutton t ey acqutre a new and d .. su fo
. I "d ·r . ec1s1v . &a.
tance. Citizenship now does not s1mp YI ent, Ya generic subiu , gat,.011e lllJho t-
authoritv or a determinate svstem of Iaws , nor does it simpl lo tov I
. . d h y e111b d .a
Chalier8 maintained when he suggest~ tot e convention on Se >t O y (as
li 9~ , th~t the title of ~itizen be substttut~d ~or the_tr~ditional tdlee,~ber_23,
or s1eur9 m every pubhc act~ ~he new egalitanan pnn~1ple; citizenshi 011.s,e~,
the new status of life as ongm and ground of sovereignty and th P nallies
. L . . .'I d , erefor I
erallv identifies-to cite Jean- Dems an1uma1s s wor s to the co e, it.
/es members du s01111erai11 . "t e mem ers o t e sovereign." nvenr
. h b f' h H 10n--..
centrality (and the ambiguity) of the notion of "citizenship'' in mod ence the
cal thought, which compels Rousseau to say, ''No author in Franern Politi.
, • • ,,, H ce . h
un derstood the true meaning of tI1e term c1t1zen. 2 ence too h · · as
. ' owever h
rapid growth in the course of the French Revolutmn of regulatory r . '. t e
spec1"fying wh"1ch man was a c,tmm · · an d wh"1c h one not, an d articulP t'ovis1ons
gradually restricting the area of the im soli and the ius sanguinis. in_, an_d
time, the questions "What is French? What is German?" had constitutdti th1 s
· · problem but on Iy one theme among ot hers d'1scussed m
poht1cal · philoso e nota
h.
anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these qut _ical
now begin to become essenna · II y pot·JtJca
· I, to the pomt· that, with NatioSlions
Socialism, the answer to the question "Who and what is German?" (and ai"al
therefore, "Who and what is not German?") coincides immediately with 11°•
highest political task. Fascism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of the
relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible onlv whee
situated-no matter how paradoxical it may seem-in the biopolitic~I con~
text inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights.
Only this tie between the rights of man and the new biopolitical determi-
nation of sovereignty makes it possible to understand the striking fact, which
has often been noted by historians of the French Revolution, that at the verv
moment in which native rights were declared to be inalienable and indefe;.
sible, the rights of man in general were divided into 2ctive rights and passive
rights. In his Preliminaire de la constitution, Sieyes 3 already clearly stated:
Natural and civil rights are those rights for \1·hose preservation societyis
formed, and political rights are those rights l,y which society is formed.
For the sake of clarity, it would be best to call the first ones passive
rights, and the second ones active rights .... All inhabitants of a country
must enjoy the rights of passive citizens ... all are not active citizens.
Women, at least in the present state, children, foreigners, and also those
who would not at all contribute to the public establishment must have
no active influence on public matters. (Ecrits politiq11es, pp. 189-206)

7. Literally, the Latin phrases mea n ;,right of the
soil" and "right of blood."
8. Joseph Chalier (1 747- 1793), French revolu-
tionary.
9. Literall y, "my lord " or "lord" (F rench); in com-
mon usage, titles of address roughly equivalent to
the English "M ister" a nd "Sir."
I. French politician and jurist (1753-1827).
2. Rousseau. Social Co ntract 1.6 (R~usseau cred-
its one contemporary author, Jea n d'Alembert.
with underst a ndin g the term ). Abbi
3. Emmanuel Jose ph Siel'eS (1748-1 836), or ..
1
Sieves: French Roman Ca tholic cleric • nd po ,u-
• h' "'P rminan1IO
cal theorist. Agamben quot es 1s, ~e I J'(,jlles
the Constitution" (1789) from Ecnts po'' . ,
(Paris: Editions des Archi ves contemponun ..
1985).
 Ho~10 SACER: Sovi:nEic t>
- N OWER AND BAH E LIF E / 1981

f r defining the memhres du soi • h . . . • d

1d a tc .h h · iverain, t e passage of Lan1uma1s cite
r\1 ntinues wit t ese words· "Th h' •
bo\'C cothose con d emne d to a puni · h us c• hilclren, the insane, minors, f
.,...en, b · .ng d'1sgrace [ . · · s ment
,1 v '" . . e1t er restricting personal ree-
d0!Tl or nngi d punrtion affi,ctive ou inftanunantel will not
•iizens" (quote in Sewell, ''Le citoven "4 p. IOS) ···
be ci d Of viewing these cl' t' · · ' . · .
1ns1ea . • . _•s mctions as a simple restriction of the demo-
. and egahtanan. prmc1ple ' in flagrant contra cl'1ctwn
uc • to t he spmt
· · an d
era f the declarations we ought fi t t h · · 1· · I
letter o . ' . rs .o grasp t e1r coherent bwpo 1t1ca
0 th
Jlleaning: One ~ e ess~ntial characteristics of modern biopolitics (which
11
~11 continue ~o mcrea~e '.n ou_r century) is its constant need to redefine the
threshold in hfe ~hat di st mgmshes and separates what is inside from what
. outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos 5 and penetrates more
15
nd more dee~ly into the city, the foundation of sovereignty-nonpolitical
:ife-is immedi~~e!y transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn.
once zoe is poh_ticize~ by de~larations of rights, the distinctions and thresh-
olds that make_ it ~ossible t? isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And
when natural hfe is wholly included in the polis-and this much has, by now,
already happened-:-the~e thresholds pass, as we will see, beyond the dark
boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead
man, a new sacred man.

2.3. If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the
point of including _a significant part of humanity today) represent such a dis-
quieting element _m the order_ of _the modern nation-state, this is above all
because by breaking the contmmty between man and citizen, nativity and
,rationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.
Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes
the secret presupposition of the political domain-bare life-to appear for
an instant within that domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly "the man
of rights," as Arendt suggests,, the first and only real appearance of rights
outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is pre-
ciselv what makes the figure of the refugee so hard to define politically.
Si~ce the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capa-
ble of performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state, and the
two terms have begun to show themselves to be irreparably loosened from
each other. From this perspective, the immense increase of refugees and
stateless persons in Europe (in a short span of time 1,500,000 White Rus-
sians, 700,000 Armenians, 500,000 Bulgarians, 1,000,000 Greeks, and hun-
dreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians, and Rumanians were displaced
from their countries) is one of the two most significant phenomena. The
other is the contemporaneous institution by many European states of jurid-
ical measures allowing for the mass denaturalization and denationalization
of large portions of their own populations. The first introduction of such
rules into the juridical order took place in France in 1915 with respect to
naturalized citizens of "enemy" origin; in 1922, Belgium followed the

4· W. H. Sewell, "Le citoyen/La citoyenne: Activ- Colin (Oxford: Pergamon, I 988).

lly,. Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of ;, Household (G reek), a term used by Aristotle in
C,t,1.enship," in The French Revoluti,m and tlie his Politics lo designate the nonpolitical domestic
Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Lucas sphere.
1982 / GIORGIO f\GAMBEN

French example and revoked the naturalization of citizens who had

mitted ''antinational" acts during the war; in 1926 , the fascist regime i corn.
an analogous law with respect to citizens who had s~own themselves st1~d
st
"unworthy of Italian citizenship"; in I93~: '.t _was A~ ~ia's turn: ?n~ so it : 0 e
6
tinued until the Nuremberg laws on citizenship in the Reich ' and n.
" b . h h' th
"protection of German blood and honor roug t t is process to the
· d · h · ,· I ITlos1
e
extreme point of its development, intro ucing t e princip e accordi 10
· f h· h
which citizenship was something o w ic one a
h· d t O ng
prove oneself w h
and which could therefore always be called into question. And one o~rthy
few rules to which the Nazis constantly adhered during the_ course of :he
"Final Solution"; was that Jews could be sent to the extermination ca e
only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the resi~~~
citizenship left to them after the Nuremberg laws).
These two phenomena-which are, after all, absolutely correlative-sh
that the birth-nation link, on which _the declar?tion· of ·1789 had found::
national sovereigntv. , had already lost its mechanicalh force and power of se If.
regulation by the time of the First World War. Ont e one hand, the nati .
states become greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating withi~n11
between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political valu
(Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehen~ible if they are brought bac~
to this context.) On the other hand, the very nghts of man that once mad

J
sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressivet
separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake
the supposed representation and protection of a bare life that is more and
more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be recodified
into a new national identity.. The contradictory character of these processes
is certainly one of the reasons for the failure of the attempts of the various
committees and organizations by which states, the League of Nations, and,
later, the United Nations confronted the ,problem of refugees and the protec-
8
tion of human rights, from the BureamNansen (I 922) to the contemporary
High Commission for Refugees (1951), whose actions, according to statute,
are to have not a political but rather a "solely humanitarian and social" mis-
sion. What is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual
cases but-as happens more and more often today-a mass phenomenon,
both these organizations and individual states prove themselves, despite
their solemn invocations of the ''sacred and inalirnahlc'' rights of man,
absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of confronting it
adequately.

2.4. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are expe-
riencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man
from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian
organizations-which today are more and more supported by international
commissions-can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life,

6. Laws p~sscd in a 193; convention in Nornberg
that deprl\'ed Jews of German citizenship and
banned se.'\:ual relations between Jews and those
of "German or kindred blood."
7. That is, to the "Jewish question'': the solution
adopted in 1942, was to send all Jews wit.hi~
German-controlled territories 10 labor and ex1rr-
mination camps.
8. The office, led by the Norwegian explorer and
humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. that issued uarrl
documents lo refugees following World War I.
 GLORIA ANZ A LDUA / 1983

,,nd therefore. despite th emselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very
' ,,,ers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity cam-
nd
~igns to gat~er fu s _for refugees from Rwanda 9 to realize that here human
Pf • exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this)
h e ,s ·f h. h . t·
as sa
cred h e-wI Jc h is. to. say,das . 1fe that can be killed but not sacrificed-
d that on Y as sue is it ma e mto the object of aid and protection. The
1111P
loring eyes"
h ...of the Rwandan
b . child, whose photograph is shown to obtain
0
ey but w o 1s now ecommg more and more difficult to find alive'' may
1::1~be the most telling contemporary cipher of the hare life that humani~arian
' anizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarian-
org separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred
isro b · f . d h
life at the as1s_ o sove~e1gn_t~, an t e ~amp-which is to say, the pure space
of exception-is the b1opolit1cal paradigm that it cannot master.
The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that this concept repre-
nts) must be resolutely separated from the concept of the rights of man,
sc d we must seriously consider Arendt's claim that the fates of human rights
d the nation-state are b ound together such that .the decline . and crisis o f
a~e one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be con-
t ·dered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically-calls
~~to question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birtb-
ation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear
;he way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics
in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state
order or in the figure of human rights.

* * *
1995

9_Following the genocidal viol e nc e in the AFrican nation of Rwanda in 1994. during which as ma ny
as 2 million Rwandans fled the country .