This semester we are reading Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Last Thursday, we discussed the introduction and Part One, “The Logic od Sovereignty.” In particular, we spoke about the paradox of sovereignty: the sovereign as a borderline concept, being inside and outside of the juridical order. We then introduced some fundamental concepts, such as the twofold understanding of life for the Greeks: life as zoē (natural life) and as bios (individual or communal life). We highlighted the importance, according to Agamben, of natural life entering the sphere of the polis, and thus the beginning of biopolitics. We spoke about the exception, bare life, homo sacer (as the life that can be taken away at will; a person that can be killed but not sacrificed.) We problematized the notion od sovereignty as supreme power with references to various philosophical traditions, conservative (e.g., Hobbes) and more progressive (e.g. Rousseau). We thus spoke about the emergence of the law and asked whether there could be an order of the law different from the sovereign law. One attendee made an analogy between political law and physical/mathematical law. We also spoke about the difference between the political (typical of the sovereignty paradigm) and the ethical order of the law. We also addressed the question of violence, as it follows from the theme of sovereign power. We will continue to address these issues in our next meetings. In keeping with the general theme and framework of the FIG, we will try to challenge such philosophical and political concepts (usually taken for granted), such as power, authority, the state, and so on, from a transdisciplinary perspective in order to gauge their importance in the contemporary world.

-Bruno Gulli

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.