On Giorgio Agambens Naked Life:

The State of Exception and

the Law of the Sovereign
WALTER BROGAN
Villanova University

Abstract: This article attempts to explore why it is that the state of exception is so
pivotal to Agambens analysis of sovereignty and the possibility of a coming community
beyond the sovereign state and its power machines. The essay distinguishes between
two senses of the state of exception and tries to explain their interconnection. The
zone of indistinction opens up an irreparable gap between sovereign power and
its execution and between bare life and citizenship. These are the spaces that both
drive and dismantle the apparatus of State power and permit Agamben to open the
discussion of a coming community.

n this article, I explore Agambens analysis of biopolitics as a contemporary

political condition, one that makes evident the interplay of physis and nomos,
nature and law, in the execution of sovereign power. Agamben says: A theory of
the state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation
that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law.1 I try to sort
out why it is that what Agamben calls the state of exception is so pivotal to this
analysis. And I attempt to distinguish between two different notions of exception.
The first is the notion of sovereign power outside ordinary law. Examples abound
from the former President George W. Bushs administration in the Unites States,
examples such as warrantless wiretapping, the attempt to supersede the articles
of the Geneva Convention condemning torture, and the detention of prisoners
outside the law in Guantanamo Bay.2 The second sense of exception, namely
what Agamben calls bare life (la nuda vita), is constituted at the threshold of
political life as an inclusive exclusion. An example is Primo Levis description
of the Muselmann in the Nazi concentration camp, as recounted by Agamben in

2011. Epoch, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Fall 2011). ISSN 1085-1968.

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Homo Sacer.3 But there are a plethora of other more recent examples such as the
exploding phenomenon of rape and genocide as a political weapon, the worldwide refugee problem, the increasing numbers of stateless people in the world
today such as the Palestinians, the problem of illegal aliens in the United States,
the secret, extra-legal CIA detention camps for those accused of being terrorists, and the increasingly vested interest of the State in defining the borderline
between life and death and when life has value and can be said to be subject to
political rights. My analysis focuses on the complicity between zo and bios, bare
life and culture, in the process of politicization, and devotes particular attention
to Agambens analysis of what he calls the borderline zone of indistinction or
indecision between these two senses of life. I suggest that the irreparable gap
between sovereign power and its execution and between bare life and citizenship
are the spaces in which Agamben opens the discussion of the coming community
and wonder about the connection between these two spaces that both drive and
dismantle the apparatus of State power.4
The word sovereign has a rather anachronistic tone to the American ear, in a
country that believes itself to have been founded on the overthrow of monarchy
and the absolute power of the sovereign. We sometimes argue that the birth of
modern democracy is coincident with the end of sovereignty. We live, according
to this belief, in a post-sovereign community. Giorgio Agamben argues, to the
contrary, that the modern forms of democratic government, though founded
upon a shift in the relationship between the sovereign and the subject, is not at
all a radical break but an embedded, even repressed, continuation and extension
of this structure and its relationship to law and the juridical order. Although
Agamben attempts to imagine the conditions within which a genuine postsovereign community will come, and although he offers cryptic comments on
the characteristics of such a community, his most influential and poignant work
is done in the context of the attempt to understand the current political situation
in which we live, which he defines, following Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, as
the condition of global civil war.
One way in which we might enter into this question of sovereignty is through a
discussion of the relationship between constituting power and constituted power,
that is, the relationship between the original proclamation that initiates the political event and the carrying out and execution of the law and order of the State
that is founded by this constituting power. Agamben argues, against, for example,
Antonio Negri,5 that it is impossible to separate sovereign power as constituting a
legal system from the violent and decisive act that founds the system. Sovereign
power is inherently violent; it is the violence that posits law. In positing law as
the free expression of sovereign power, the sovereign posits itself outside itself
as the law. The law is its product, its self-declaration. This foundational decision
enacts and opens up the juridical space of society. This is because politics is de-

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fined around the metaphysics of power and actualization of power that requires
a subject upon which and in terms of which the sovereign act is executed.
Agamben does not disagree with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and others
who see in the pure power of sovereignty, detached from law, the potential for a
free praxis.6 Indeed the condition for sovereignty is precisely this identification of
power and freedom. But this kind of praxis is paradoxical in that it is constituted
by transcending and holding itself apart from and thus in relation to the law that
it enacts. Were it itself entirely bound to the law, the sovereign act of founding the
state and establishing the reign of law would be impossible. Yet, were it entirely
separate from the law, the law would have no force. Thus the sovereign constituting power is captured within an ambiguous relationship to the political regime
it establishes. The sovereign neither belongs nor does not belong as a subject to
the law. This is one example of what Agamben means by a zone of indistinction,
or a state of exception. The sovereign is both inside and outside the law.
The sovereign is situated at the borderline between the normal judicial order
and the exception. The sovereign is not simply above and beyond the law. In fact,
this exceptionality of the sovereign is necessary in order for the law to function.
Agamben says: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. The particular force of law consists in
this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority.7 Juridical order
maintains a relation to the sovereign act that justifies it, but the relation is one of
excepting it from itself, privileging the power of sovereignty as the very condition
of its own legitimacy as a sovereign nation. The sovereign is included in the law
by being excluded from it. In this logic of exception, we see a zone of indistinction between the inside and the outside. In relationship to the law, the exception
is a kind of exclusion but also an inclusion in the sense that what is taken outside
establishes the closure that constitutes the State as a distinct, established order. The
exception is contained in the rule as its very interiorization, that is, as what makes
its interiority, its internal coherence, possible. The exception, literally, makes the
rule. In declaring the exception to itself, the power of rule becomes most evident.
Following Jean-Luc Nancy, Agamben calls this relation of inclusion/exclusion
a relation of the ban.8 The sovereign is banned together with the law by virtue of
its abandonment whereby the law withdraws from it, thereby establishing its own
territory and domain and normalizing its own space and location. The normalization of law is premised upon the existence of the exception to which it does not
apply. This relationship of abandonment, which Agamben at one point places in
proximity to Heideggers notion of Seinsverlassenheit in the Beitrge zur Philosophie,9 lets the State be on its own by displacing those who do not belong to it. The
relation of sovereign power to the preservation of law as well as the relationship of
those who are held outside the law and its exercise is captured in this double bind.

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Perhaps it would help at this point to examine this relationship more concretely
by looking at it in operation. The state of exception is a translation of the German
Ausnahmezustand or state of emergency, what is sometimes called martial law,
in which the normal juridical order is suspended. Obviously, Agamben is arguing
that this emergency situation has an intrinsic and necessary relationship to the
determination of the normal situation. The sovereign continues to exist, even in
democratic societies, precisely here in the decision that declares the suspension
of the law, and, even when this is not officially declared, the force of law depends
upon the preserving of this space of exception. The 2001 Patriot Act in the United
States would be an example of the suspension of normal legal rights and juridical
protections, paradoxically declared by the Law. The application of law presupposes
the case when the law does not apply, and in fact the normal situation is determined in contrast to this excess that is outside the norm. Agamben says: What is
at issue in the sovereign exception is not so much the control or neutralization of
an excess as the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridicalpolitical order can have validity.10 The state of exception is the suspension of the
law by the law that confirms the law.
But there is another side to this necessary exclusion of the sovereign that constitutes the integrity and internal borders of law. There is yet another movement
of exclusion that is implicit in the making legitimate of law within the boundaries of a nation. The creation of the normal space in which the law applies is in
effect the creation of the space of what is outside the law, and yet in relationship
to it, as that which is not included and thus can be subject to violence and even
eradication without the rights of recourse. An example Agamben offers in Homo
Sacer of this other ban is the bandit, the one who is country-less by virtue of being
exiled; one might think also of the Palestinians or the Cuban boat refugees or the
dislocated Jews from Nazi Germany, but also the estimated 62 million refugees
and displaced persons in the world today.
A symptom of the clutches and the power of the concept of the nation to determine identity and to create disowned and disenfranchised people is the plight
of those who find themselves in this position of belonging to the juridical order
as not yet or no longer incorporated members, whose identity and significance is
destroyed except inasmuch as they are defined as the outsiders. One might here
think of Zionism and the apparent belief in the need for State identity to establish
oneself as a people, or the similar claim of the Palestinians for a State of their own,
to understand the extent to which human identity has come to be defined in relationship to belonging to a State. There are many Stateless people in the world today.
But Agamben makes the point that exile is a condition of belonging to the State,
perhaps even more intensely while at the same time both calling into question and
affirming the absolute authority of the State. In the state of exception, the penalties
that would normally apply to those inside the law who violate it are suspended.

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Ironically, both the sovereign and those whom the State treats as bare life,
life determined by the law as outside the law, belong structurally to the same
state of exception. The close affinity between the sovereign and bare life is the
subject of one of Agambens most detailed analysis. As Catherine Mills writes in
her article Agambens Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy
Life: That which is excluded is not just set outside the law and made indifferent
to it, but rather abandoned by it, when to be abandoned means to be subjected to
the unremitting force of the law while the law simultaneously withdraws from its
subject.11 Later we will take a closer look at Agambens analysis of the camp, for
example the Nazi concentration camp, but also the proliferation in our times of
all sorts of camps where bare life is located, as his paradigmatic example of the
increasing attempt in our times to resolve the threat to nationhood by operating
in a perpetual state of emergency that both blurs and yet sustains the concept of
nationhood and defined limits and borders. The camp, Agamben says in means
without end, is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to
become the rule.12
Agamben claims in Homo Sacer that this original political relation of the
ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside,
exclusion and inclusion) has hardly been noticed or discussed in the literature of
political philosophy, in part because of the traditional logic of the political, which
fails to see the interconnection between the included and the excluded upon which
it is founded.13 That is, traditional logic is binary, operating in terms of either/or
and is incapable of seeing this logic that operates at the borders and threshold,
the logic of a relation that is non-relational. Attention is primarily focused on the
particular citizens who are determined by the Law and whose identity is determined by incorporation into the general will as particular exemplifications. The
act and decision that initiates and sustains this inclusion has not been adequately
analyzed. The primary focus of Agambens work is to uncover these fundamental
aporiai or stumbling blocks of all political theory, namely the relationship of the
sovereign to those who are members of the State, and of members to those in the
State but not represented by the State (foreign aliens for example), and finally the
relationship of members of a State to those who are members of other nations. All
of these threshold points of political reality are governed by a zone of indistinction concerning the relation of the inside and the outside, and Agamben believes
that the inability to resolve this aporetic and contradictory relation keeps the
operation of the state and its appropriative activities perpetually in motion. In a
striking prophesy, Agamben states: Until a new politicsthat is, a politics no
longer founded on the exception of bare lifeis at hand, every theory and every
praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day [a reference
to Aristotle] of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or
in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.14

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On one level, what Agamben is attempting to do is to develop a logic that

can account for the relationships of inclusion and exclusion that are operative in
political life, but are unable to be accounted for in the traditional schema. But his
ultimate aim is to think of a time and a space that is not about the work of the State
but about an inoperative site, to use Jean-Luc Nancys term,15 in which inclusion
and exclusion are unable to be differentiated; or at least a space, perhaps the space
of the coming community, in which this differentiation is fluid and mobile, and
not subject to identification or the bifurcated logic of identity and non-identity.
One might be tempted to say, based on his relentless pursuit of an analysis of the
structure of the modern State, that Agamben cedes the definition of the political
to the site where sovereign power and bare life interconnect and divide. At times
it is not clear whether Agamben sees any ultimate escape from the catastrophe
towards which he says we are heading in the relentless but self-defeating attempt
to incorporate all life into the sovereign order. The very movement which extends
the control of the state over life is also the movement that creates bare life as the
exceptional condition that allows it to operate and define the boundaries within
which it exercises its power. It would seem that, in Agambens view, the apparatus
of state rule perpetuates itself endlessly in its quest for global control over life. At
times, one would surmise, especially when one reads his chilling analysis of the
humanitarian efforts of human rights advocates to assist the oppressed where he
argues that they are often complicitous with the very authorities that have created
these conditions, that there is no escaping the passive compliance of bare life with
the forces that seek to determine it. For Agamben, it would seem, all efforts to
solve the problems of our times through efforts to produce a new order are bound
to succumb to the implicit failure to see the connection between the model of
productivity and the drive that organizes modern political life. But Agamben is
not a pessimist. What he is seeking is a post-political community, a community
of singular beings, where the problem of relationality, now conceived, in a positive sense, as non-relationality, is transformed. Here also we could speak of an
Agambian sense of power, beyond the political in the modern sense of power as
domination; a potentiality no longer tethered to act and no longer requiring a
subject upon which its power is enacted.16
The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life
as the originary political element and as the threshold of articulation between
nature and culture, zo and bios. The appropriation of life into the political, the
production of life, in a certain way comes to the fore in Nazi Germany. Agamben
recalls Primo Levis story of a concentration camp inhabitant who was nicknamed
the Muselmann.17 His condition is such that he can no longer distinguish between
the artificial, cold rules of the camp and the miserable physical conditions he has
to endure. He is indifferent to the distinction of life itself and the life of the camp,
to the particularity of his circumstances and the experience of life as such. The

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story has to do with the powerlessness of the guards in the face of this extreme
collapse of that distinction. In a sense the dialectic of political life both requires
the distinction between zo and bios and attempts to overcome it. Its very existence requires both the inextricability of the distinction and the collapse of the
difference. This is the double bind, the contradiction that propels the rule of law.
Primo Levis example, for Agamben, represents the extreme point of the long
process of the politicization of life, a point at which the very distinction between
politics and life collapses.
Agamben points out that the word bios in Greek means life, but life that is
in some way already particularized, a way of lifenot life in general. You can
talk of the human being as zoon logon echon, the living being that has logos, but
precisely here living is the general word for all life, and logos is what gives it its
specificity. In contrast, we speak of political life and theoretical life not as a life
that is accompanied by theory but as a life of theory, where theory is a defining
characteristic of this kind of life. The distinction in words between zo and bios
is also telling with regard to the relationship between natural life and political life.
Typically the relationship between nomos and physis, political law and nature is
analyzed as a relationship between convention and nature and debates throughout
history have pitted the one against the other. Aristotle considers political life a
higher expression of human being than natural life, though of course the political being is also a natural being. But others have argued the opposite, founding
and justifying political life on the basis of natural life. In this version, political
life is founded for the sake of protecting, preserving and enhancing natural life.
Following Aristotle, and more recently Hannah Arendt,18 with whom Agamben
is in constant dialogue, we might even conclude that the aim of political life is to
rise above and even leave behind natural life, which is reductive of full human
potential. Agamben sees Kant as the paradigmatic proponent of such a position,
arguing that the ethico-political person should live a purely rational life, unaffected
in principle by his or her natural position or inclination. But even this extreme
attempt to exclude life from the political, depends upon life. The overcoming of
ones natural being and the elimination of dependency on mere life is said to
define freedom and becomes the primary activity of the free, political person,
who then completely identifies herself with the Law. In this case, there can be no
efficacy of law except by virtue of this active exclusion.
The founding relationship between the natural and the political appears to
be modeled on genus and species. The genus is life and the species is the political. In this schema, however, the political is not just a specific expression of the
genus. It allows us to achieve an identity apart from nature; it allows us to tear
ourselves away from merely belonging to the undifferentiated class of animals
in general, being defined by our animality, and instead to achieve a distinctness
that cannot be confined to the genus-species schema. The human being, it is said,

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is born in becoming political. This phenomenon shows up clearly, as Agamben

points out, in the fact that we call the political organization to which we belong
the nation, which is from nascio, to be born.19 The political is related to animality in an antagonistic way.20 The political opposes, overcomes, and appropriates
the natural. The natural becomes the matter which is formed and transformed
by the political. The matter of life, bare life, is the necessary but insufficient
condition for the formation of political life. Thus nature cannot show up as such
in the political sphere, though necessary. It can only be present as the yet to be
determined matter of the political. It can have no being of its own in the political
sphere. Here we see the reason for the distinction between the private sphere and
the political that was especially prevalent in Greek culture, as Hannah Arendt has
argued.21 The private sphere is the sphere of necessity, the household. The citizen
leaves any identification with this sphere as such behind.
Agamben follows Aristotle in tracing such distinctions as that between the fitting and the unfitting, good and evil, and fact and right, back to this dichotomous
and hierarchical structure that founds the political a dichotomy made possible
by language inasmuch as the political being is defined by Aristotle as the animal
who has logos. With language the transition from zo to bios politicos is achieved.
Language separates and opposes the human being in relation to zo, to bare life.
Thus language is the site of the political. Naming and categorizing is the way in
which the State is founded. Agamben states: Politics therefore appears as the
truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the
threshold on which the living being and the logos is realized. In the politicization
of bare lifethe metaphysical task par excellencethe humanity of living man
is decided.22 This is why Agamben calls for a new thinking of originary language
and saying, in contrast to the language of predication.23
Agamben points out that this description of the relationship between the natural and the political is blurred in modern times, when biopolitics arises, namely
the politics of life. Modern life politics attempts to bring nature more fully into
the political sphere and the purpose of government comes to be defined as the
preserving and protection of life. Political life comes to serve natural life. Mere life
becomes sacred. The danger of this turn is that it can lead to the bestialization of
man, and to an inability to distinguish between the political mantra of the protection of life and the holocaust. Life now belongs to the political as surely as the
political belongs to life. The modern state of exception is an attempt to include
the exception itself within the juridical order by creating a zone of indistinction
in which fact and law coincide.24 Biology and the politics of technology become
inseparable. It becomes Agambens task to call this link into question.
Agamben claims that Foucault has two strands to his analysis of power that
are never reconciled. To quote Agamben again, Foucault analyzes power in terms
of the power of political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which

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the state assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into
its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self
by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his
own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power.25
The modern State has integrated techniques of subjective individualization such
as consumerism with procedures of objective totalization. The first is biopolitical
power and the second is juridico-institutional power. Agamben asks: Where is the
zone of indistinction (or at least the point of intersection) at which techniques of
individualization and totalizing [objectifying] procedures converge?26 Agamben
of course sees the two questions as inseparable and sees the need to analyze the
process of politicization as the site of this unity of the two that produces the
biopolitical body. For Agamben, what constitutes modernity is the process by
which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare lifewhich
is originally situated at the margins of the political ordergradually begins to
coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside,
bios and zo, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.27 The
process by which State power imposes its form and order on those it subjects to
its production and definition is the reversal, and therefore just the other side, of
the process, in modern democracy for example, whereby the citizen constitutes
herself as the subject of political power. The current political situation for Agamben gives much evidence of this blurring of the distinction between democratic
regimes and totalitarian ones and the ease with which we transfer from one to
the other. The biopolitical capture of life alternates between subjectivity and
objectivity, according to Agamben, because the line between these two polarities
became indistinct when bare life, the state of exception, the very matter whose
exclusion established the normal order of things, was incorporated into and
became part of that order.
It seems to me that what we discover in Agambens Homo Sacer is an extreme
formulation of the bio-politics of the modern state, with its universalizable codes
and laws that pose themselves as the all-encompassing, totalizing bearer of meaning and reality. Agamben says: Facism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of
the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when
situatedno matter how paradoxical it may seemin the biopolitical context
inaugurated by national sovereignty and the declaration of rights.28 I cannot
recapture here the complex analysis that shows how modern liberal politics
founded upon the notion of universal human rights is built upon sovereignty in
such a way as to further erode the distinction between life and politics; instead I
want to emphasize his point about bio-politics. Agamben states:
One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue
to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in
life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. ...

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Once zo is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And
when natural life is wholly included in the polisand this much has by now
already happenedthese thresholds pass, as we shall see, beyond the dark
boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead
man, a new sacred man.29

He goes on to examine in powerful ways the current refugee crisis and the cooptation of humanitarian organizations in service to bare life as the initial symptoms
of the final, normalized and collective political organization of human life founded
solely on bare life and the exception. He speaks frighteningly but soberly of a
biopolitics, the assumption of the care of the nations biological body, that necessarily turns, in his assessment, into thanatopolitics. Prisoners under the current
conditions that exist in American prisons, but even more poignantly, prisoners
in Guantanamo Bay and those who were held prisoners at Abu Graib in Iraq by
American soldiers, and also the use of rape as a political weapon in war, are examples of bare life, that is, exceptions that do not belong under the protection of
the establishment but are subject to sovereign power. All these occurrences are
symptoms of the erosion of the distinction between zo and bios, a condition in
which, as Agamben argues, the physician and sovereign exchange roles.30
One would expect that we are reaching an age in which sovereignty is replaced
by international integration and cooperation. And indeed this is what the times
and economic conditions demand. It would mean the end of war in its traditional
form as the exercise of sovereign authority. Yet in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
war as the legitimization of the sovereign and sovereign power has returned in the
name of freedom and democracy. War on a global front, beyond the fixed borders
of nationhood, and therefore undeclared war, is the execution or putting to work
of sovereignty itself. The American use of the rhetoric of shock and awe in the
Persian Gulf War and the spectacle of the unleashing of extreme and indiscriminate force reassure that sovereign power is not after all dead. War is a state beyond
law, a reversion to the sovereign power above law where law has broken down.
The spectacle of spectacular technology promises the final accomplishment of
absolute power abstracted from any necessary content and applying its force to a
new world order that can reach to the ends of the earth. It is no coincidence that
we attempt to fight war on a technological basis. One of the frightening aspects of
the so-called American War on Terror is the potential it has for making permanent
the exception to law and the absolute power of the sovereign. The enemy could be
anywhere or anyone, even you and I. The danger of this combination of the life
of the sovereign and the technicity of war is that the execution of sovereign right
and power is fulfilled in death. Modern democracy, in Agambens view, is not the
end but the repression of sovereignty, and we live in a world that does not know
how to displace sovereignty, and is thus destined to replay it.

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For Agamben, the question of politics is the question of power. But here Agamben insists that the ground upon which power needs to be thought through is the
metaphysical notions of potentiality and actuality which still to this day govern
the operation of political power. This leads Agamben to draw a close connection
between traditional politics and ontology and to claim:
Only an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and
necessity and the other path tou ontos will make it possible to cut the knot
that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And only if it is possible to think
the relation between potentiality and actuality differentlyand even to think
beyond this relationwill it be possible to think a constituting power wholly
released from the sovereign ban.31

I would like to end on this faint hope of a possibility for a new politics that Agamben opens up in this quote.
There seem to me to be two or three levels operating in Agambens work. Certainly, there is the critical level, where the dichotomy between universal sovereign
power and the particular lives upon which it is exercised is both critically analyzed
and problematized. There is also a unique understanding of the contemporary
political situation that sees in the collapse of confidence in the rule of law and the
growing illegitimation of the force of law, a law increasingly without content, an
opportunity to see for the first time the essence of law. For Agamben, the Fhrer in
the Third Reich is an exemplary manifestation of this contemporary phenomenon.32
The Fhrer embodies the political in its extreme contemporary guise, and seems to
finally erase the difference between life and the political. His word is the law. There
is no distinction between form and content. He no longer has any particularity, or
in other words, his particularity is subsumed by the law. The Fhrer is no longer
the holder of an office; his person is the law. And finally there is a third level, namely
the attempt to think beyond the political in some sense and to organize political
life for the first time in a way that is free and abundant, where we are all governed
by our exceptionality and singularity in a world where means are without end,
where potentiality is not determined by its actualization, and where the form-oflife belongs to life itself as a free possibility. It is Agambens hope and belief that the
coming community will break the cycle of violence in political life by undoing the
bind that connects life and politics and affirming a free politics of life.

Notes
1. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 1.
2. See Agamben, State of Exception, 3, for his comments on the USA Patriot Act in this
regard.

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3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
4. See Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus, trans. D. Kishik and S. Pedatella (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
5. Antonio Negri, Il potere constituente: Saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Milan:
SugarCo, 1992), p. 31.
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18.
8. Ibid., 28.
9. Ibid., 59.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. Catherine Mills,Agambens Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy
Life, Contretemps 5 (December 2004).
12. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38.
13. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland and S. Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
16. For an elaboration of Agambens sense of potentiality, see Giorgio Agamben, On
Potentiality, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 11.
17. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1845.
18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
19. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 128ff.
20. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 27ff.
21. Arendt, The Human Condition, chapter 2.
22. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8.
23. See Potentialities, Part 1.
24. Agamben, State of Exception, 26.
25. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5.
26. Ibid., 6.
27. Ibid., 9.
28. Ibid., 130.
29. Ibid., 131.
30. Ibid., 143.
31. Ibid., 44.
32. Ibid., 184.