Bare Life, Facticity, and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Early Heidegger

Abstract The first book of Agamben's Homo Sacer series contains very few references to Heidegger. Even so, the pages that Agamben devotes to Heidegger in the third part of the book are far from a digression. They touch on a number of crucial topics that are vital to both Heidegger and Agamben, such as the relationship between philosophy and politics, the specific philosophical motivations behind Heidegger's political commitment, and life as a central philosophical theme. This article evaluates Agamben's interpretation of Heidegger in those pages by concentrating on two interrelated questions: (1) whether and to what extent Agamben's biopolitical reading of Heidegger is plausible and persuasive, and (2) how to judge the relationship between their respective accounts of life, which center around the two seminal concepts of “bare life” and “facticity.”