limit zone

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"in the notion of bare life the interlacing of politics and life has become so tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. until we become aware of the political nature of bare life and its modern avatars (biological life, sexuality, etc), we will not succeed in clarifying the opacity at their center. conversely, 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."

"karl lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a 'politicization of life' and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: 'since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation 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 politicization of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life.'"

"it is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves."

"if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. this line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest."

"modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. . . 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) character 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 at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns - in its new and definitive form - into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused."

"in the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state."

"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. once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty - nonpolitical life - is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn."

 "sade stages. . . the theatrum politicum as a theater of bare life, in which the very physiological life of bodies appears, through sexuality, as the pure political element. . . not only philosophy but also and above all politics is sifted through the boudoir. indeed, in dolmance's project, the boudoir fully takes the place of the cite, in a dimension in which the public and the private, political existence and bare life change places. . . sade's modernity does not consist in his having foreseen the unpolitical primacy of sexuality in our unpolitical age. on the contrary, sade is as contemporary as he is because of his incomparable presentation of the absolutely political (that is, 'biopolitical') meaning of sexuality and physiological life itself."

"it is as if every valorization and every 'politicization' of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without punishment. every society sets this limit; every society - even the most modern - decides who its 'sacred men' will be."

"the paradox of nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task. the totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible. . .  when life and politics - originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life - begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception."

"what is decisively more disquieting is the fact (which is unequivocally shown by the scientific literature put forward by the defense and confirmed by the expert witnesses appointed by the court) that experiments on prisoners and persons sentenced to death had been performed several times and on a larger scale in our century, in particular in the united states (the very country from which most of the nuremberg judges came). . . what the well-meaning emphasis on the free will of the individual refuses to recognize here is that the concept of 'voluntary consent' is simply meaningless for someone interned at dachau, even if he or she is promised an improvement in living conditions. from this point of view, the inhumanity of the experiments in the united states and in the camps is, therefore, substantially equivalent."

"the only possible answer is that in both contexts the particular status of the VPs [human guinea pigs] was decisive; they were persons sentenced to death or detained in a camp, the entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political community. precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life."