Life Excluded from Law: Agamben, Biopolitics, and Civil War

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitical sovereignty. It focuses on Homo Sacer and State of Exception to show that Agamben links sovereign violence to the establishment of a state of exception, wherein life is controlled through its exclusion from the juridical order. With this, Agamben continues the biopolitical line that sovereignty is orientated towards the regulation of life rather than the establishment of juridical order. The second part of the chapter ties this to Agamben’s discussion of civil war to argue that, contra Foucault, Agamben holds that the fundamental division marking Western politics is not a racial one, but one between oikos and polis, private and public. From this, Agamben argues that this political division makes possible and so subtends the sovereign decision to exclude individuals from law by establishing a state of exception. The key point is that Agamben links sovereign violence to life by excluding the latter from the juridical order. The chapter concludes by critically evaluating Agamben’s proposals to overcome this.