The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.̓ 1 The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are reduced to bare life; and the torture this life suffers is nothing else but its exclusion from the polis as a distinctively human life. The bare life that is produced by this abandonment by the state is not biological life; ʻnot simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element .̓2 This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi in If This is a Man. One speaks of the Shoah as industrialized mass death, and of the camps as ʻfactories of death .̓ But the product of these factories is not death but, as Arendt puts it, a mode of life ʻoutside of life and death .̓3 If for Arendt, however, the production of Muselmänner is anti-political, in that the camps are spaces in which plurality is foreclosed, for Agamben it is the emergence of the essence of the political. Such claims are difficult for political philosophy to address, as they undermine so many of its guiding assumptions. Instead of asking us to construct and evaluate different plans of action, Agamben asks us to evaluate the metaphysical structure and implications of the activity of politics as such. Instead of asking us to consider the true or proper nature of political identity, Agamben asks us to consider a threshold state of the non-identical, the liminal. And far from bringing concepts such as rights, authority, public interest, liberty or equality more clearly into view, Agamben operates at a level of abstraction at which such concepts blur into their opposites. He takes this approach because, like Arendt, he believes that claims to justice can only be made if one understands the ground of the political upon which both justice and injustice stand. If Foucault s̓ goal was ʻto make the cultural unconscious Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. Martin Heidegger, ʻLetter on Humanismʼ