A Postcolonial Reading of Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project - Conference Paper ETC2017.pdf (original) (raw)

Agamben’s biopolitical critique is embodied by the figure of the ‘homo sacer’, who is representative of Agamben’s notions of the bare life and the state of exception. In his work Agamben makes a distinction between two domains of human life, zoe and bios. Whereas zoe is identifiable with the biological life of humans (private sphere), bios is the politicised aspect of human life, thus bios may be interpreted as the politicisation of the way of life of an individual within a community (public sphere). This interaction leads to the creation of bare life, the politicised form of natural or biological life. Bare life is encompassed within the political order of a state and the function of the sovereign is to produce bare life as a means of enforcing sovereign power over the members of the state. Therefore whereas Foucault argued that in ancient Greece zoe and bios were separate, Agamben states that within the polis there is a lack of distinction between zoe and bios, and the that the only figure that has the ability to free himself from the political is the sovereign. The figure of the sovereign becomes the exception to the rule who has the authority to enforce the rule, therefore the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2011). Thus bare life is human existence whose natural life has been separated from political life but still falls within the political order. Bare life is to be understood as human life stripped of all political and legal qualities and is placed within the possibility of death. The possibility of creating bare life also allows for the creation of a state of exception, whereby the state uses its sovereign power and enacts a law that suspends itself. In order to deal with exceptional cases of emergency like wars or insurrections, civil law is suspended and replaced by martial law. Therefore, the state of exception implies a state of abnormality and limited time but in many instances, states use their sovereign power to make the state of exception a permanent state. The claim of this study is the assertion that the notion of bare life and the state of exception found in Agamben’s Homo Sacer opus is applicable and supported by the history and testimonies of western colonialism. Using a close reading of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, this research will attempt to offer a post-colonial reading of Agamben’s political work and argue that examples of bare life and the state of exception are prevalent in Fanon’s work. There are clear similarities between the figure of the Homo Sacer and the lives of the locals inhabiting the colonised lands like Algeria. Anyone who kills the Homo Sacer is free from guilt or punishment as is the coloniser when killing a local individual. This thesis will further argue that the figure of the Homo Sacer and the Muselman, as defined by Agamben are effectively represented in the image of the colonised other.