![]() ![]() Bare life, encompassed in the exception, inhabits the threshold of the juridico-political community. This it achieves through the enactment of the exception in which the law is suspended, withdrawn from the human being who is stripped of legal status and transformed in relation to sovereign power into a bare life without rights. Sovereign power, Agamben argues, establishes itself through the production of a political order based on the exclusion of bare, human life. Responding to Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, in which human life becomes the target of the organisational power of the State, Agamben argues that there exists a ‘hidden tie’ between sovereign power and biopolitics, forged in the exceptional basis of State sovereignty. The theory of sovereign power offered by the book is based on the state of exception (as in Schmitt ) and the production of a bare, human life caught in the sovereign ban, which constitutes the threshold of the political community. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, the first book of his multi-volume Homo Sacer project, urges a reconsideration of theories of sovereignty as put forward ‘from Hobbes to Rousseau’ (1998: 109). ![]()
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