Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) is an Italian philosopher who teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He also teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and previously taught at the University of Macerata in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities and at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He became famous for his investigations on the concepts of a "state of exception" and homo sacer. ^[1]
Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006.
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Year 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1942 calendar). ... The Parthenons facade showing an interpretation of golden rectangles in its proportions. ... The Parthenons facade showing an interpretation of golden rectangles in its proportions. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what... Year 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1942 calendar). ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... The University Iuav of Venice (Italian: Università Iuav di Venezia, IUAV) is a university located in Venice, Italy. ... The Collège International de Philosophie (Ciph), located in Paris Ve arrondissement, is an open university co-founded in 1983 by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt in an attempt to re-think the teaching of philosophy in France, and to liberate it from... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Floating not submerging) Paris Eiffel tower as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... The University of Macerata (Italian: Università degli Studi di Macerata) is a university located in Macerata, Italy. ... Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) in Germany is named for the German poet and political thinker Heinrich Heine, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1797. ... A concept is an abstract idea or a mental symbol, typically associated with a corresponding representation in language or symbology, that denotes all of the objects in a given category or class of entities, interactions, phenomena, or relationships between them. ... Homo sacer (Latin for the sacred man) is an obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. ...

Biography

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the seventies he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and medievalist topics, where he began to elaborate his primary concerns, though without as yet inflecting them in a specifically political direction. In 1974-1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he wrote Stanzas (1979). There is no institution called the University of Rome, but there are several universities in Rome: University of Rome La Sapienza University of Rome Tor Vergata University of Roma Tre This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) (pronounced ) was an influential German philosopher, best known as the author of Being and Time (1927). ... Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek - Herákleitos ho Ephésios (Herakleitos the Ephesian)) (about 535 - 475 BC), known as The Obscure (Ancient Greek - ho Skoteinós), was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor. ... Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London. ...

Close to Elsa Morante, on whom he has written, Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, his strongest influences include Walter Benjamin, whose complete works he edited in Italian translation, and the German jurist Carl Schmitt, whom he frequently cites. Agamben's political thought draws on Michel Foucault and on Italian neo-Marxist thought. While sometimes cryptic in his published writings, in interviews he represents himself as a public thinker interested in language and social conflicts on a global scale. Elsa Morante (August 18, 1918 - 25 November 1985) was an Italian novelist, perhaps best known for her novel La Storia (History). ... Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 - November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer. ... Il Vangelo secondo Matteo is a 1964 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. ... Philip was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. ... Italo Calvino, on the cover of Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) (pronounced ) was an Italian writer and novelist. ... Ingeborg Bachmann Ingeborg Bachmann (June 25, 1926 Klagenfurt, Austria - October 17, 1973 Rome, Italy) was an Austrian poet and author. ... Pierre Klossowski (1905 – August 12, 2001) was a French writer, translator and artist. ... Jean-Luc Nancy. ... Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. ... Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 - April 7, 1985) was a German legal theoretician and political scientist. ... Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: ) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. ...

Criticism of US response to "9-11"

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to September 11, 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (zoe) and was akin to the tattooing that the Nazis did during World War II.^[2][3] A sequential look at United Flight 175 crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11—pronounced nine eleven or nine one one) consisted of a series of coordinated terrorist[1] suicide attacks upon the United States, predominantly... ... The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (Public Law 107-56), known as the USA PATRIOT Act or simply the Patriot Act, is an American act which President Bush signed into law on October 26, 2001. ... For other uses, see Martial law (disambiguation). ... A state of emergency is a governmental declaration that may suspend certain normal functions of government, may work to alert citizens to alter their normal behaviors, or may order government agencies to implement emergency preparedness plans. ... US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) is a program of the Department of Homeland Security of the United States of America aiming to protect the country from terrorist attacks by tightening the border security and recording the entry and exit of non-US citizens to and... At Disney World, biometric measurements are taken of the fingers of multi-day pass users to ensure that the pass is used by the same person from day to day. ... This article is about the tattoo, a design in ink or some other pigment, usually decorative or symbolic, placed permanently under the skin. ... The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden (blood and soil). ...

However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he points out in State of Exception (2005), rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been since then generalized and abused. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has became a criminal body". And Agamben notes that the Jews deportation in France and other occupied countries was made possible by the photos taken from identity cards.^[4] Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he explains is intrinsically related to the state of exception. The war on terrorism or war on terror (abbreviated in U.S. policy circles as GWOT for Global War on Terror) is an effort by the governments of the United States and its principal allies to destroy groups deemed to be terrorist (primarily radical Islamist organizations such as al-Qaeda... Rule by decree is a style of governance allowing quick, unchallenged creation of law by a single person or group, and is used primarily by dictators and absolute monarchs. ... Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. ... Alphonse Bertillon (April 23, 1853—February 13, 1914) was a French law enforcement officer and biometrics researcher, who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. ... It has been suggested that Bertillion Record be merged into this article or section. ... for other uses please see Crime (disambiguation) A crime is an act that violates a political or moral law. ... Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior. ... Selection at the Auschwitz ramp in 1944, where the Nazis chose whom to kill immediately and whom to use as slave labor or for medical experimentation, such as those of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. ... German identity document sample An identity document is a piece of documentation designed to prove the identity of the person carrying it. ... A critic (derived from the ancient Greek word krites meaning a judge) is a person who offers a value judgement or an interpretation. ...

Work

In The Coming Community (1993), Giorgio Agamben writes:

If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible... This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality...^[5]

This potentiality of life would become one of Agamben's main threads, throughout his critical conception of an homo sacer, reduced to "bare life", and thus deprived of any rights. Henceforth, Agamben intents to think a kind of "subjectivity without subject": humans are "an effect", "but this is not an essence nor properly a thing", but the "simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality". This "coming community" opposes itself to sovereignty, which reduces through the state of exception qualified life (bios) to bare life (zoe). Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. ... This article is in need of attention. ... Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme political (e. ...

“In United States criminal law, people accused of committing crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves verbally, but can be compelled to incriminate themselves physically.” In the state of exception this becomes an even greater heightened state. This addresses the distinction Agamben makes when turning to the theories of Hannah Arendt and her followers on zoe, bare life, and bios, referring to actions in the “form of life,” and notably the bios politicos: “the life of great actions and noble words.” One who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use one’s voice and represent oneself, the individual has not only been removed of their citizenship, but also any form of agency over their own life. “Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life.” Within the state of exception the distinction between zoe and bios is made by those in power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay operates within the state of exception in the United States following 9-11, under the power of the United States government. Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher who teaches at the University of Verona. ... Map of Cuba with location of Guantánamo Bay indicated. ...

Agamben mentions that basic human rights were revoked from Taliban individuals, captured in Afghanistan in 2001, who were then held within Guantánamo Bay. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a prisoner has been removed of their rights and placed within a state of being mere zoe, bare life, then what actions of dissent do the individuals have besides that of their own body? Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has removed the individual of power, and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. “The body is a model that can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one’s humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison also operate outside of the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding not allowing them to die. During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February of 2006, The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March of 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC [1], voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breech of the government’s power and was against the rights of the prisoners. Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest or to achieve a goal such as a policy change. ...

The Coming Community (1993)

In The Coming Community, published in Italian in 1990 and English translation by Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought. The beauty and brevity of the text is augmented by the book layout, filled with design, white space and random dots. Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of “whatever singularity” as that which has an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence”. It is important to note his understanding of “whatever” not as being indifference but based on the Latin translation of “being such that it always matters”

He starts off by describing “The Lovable”

Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover want the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. ^[6]

Following the same trend, Agamben employs, amongst others, the following to describe the “watershed of whatever”:

• Example – Particular and Universal
• Limbo – Blessed and Damned
• Homonym – concept and idea
• Halo –Potentiality and Actuality
• Face - common and proper, genus and individual
• Threshold – inside and outside
• Coming Community – State & Non-state (humanity)^[7]

Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.

Unlike other continental philosophers he does not reject the age-old dichotomies of subject – object, potentiality - actuality etc outright, but rather turns them inside-out, pointing out the zone where they become indistinguishable.

Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo ^[8]

The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability. And although criticised as dreaming the impossible by certain authors ^[9], he nonetheless shows a concrete example of whatever singularity acting politically:

Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear ^[10]

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998)

Main article: Homo Sacer

In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody -- while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony. Homo sacer (Latin for the sacred man) is an obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. ... Ordinary Magistrates Extraordinary Magistrates Titles and Honors Emperor Politics and Law Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome. ... Lady Justice or Justitia is a personification of the moral force that underlies the legal system (particularly in Western art). ... Much of the recent sociological debate on power revolves around the issue of constraining and/or enabling nature of power. ... Citizenship is membership in a political community (originally a city or town but now usually a country) and carries with it rights to political participation; a person having such membership is a citizen. ... Homo sacer (Latin for the sacred man) is an obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. ...

Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a Homo sacer, although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer was therefore excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (Basileus) -- a king, emperor, or president -- who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time). Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme political (e. ... A silver coin of the Seleucid king Antiochus I Soter. ... Look up monarch in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... An emperor is a (male) monarch, usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. ... President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, companies, trade unions, universities, and countries. ... Body politic or body corporate and politic means a state or one of its subordinate civil authorities, such as a: province prefecture county municipality city district etc. ...

Indeed, Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated. But if Schmitt's aim is to include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on the contrary demonstrates that all life can't be subsumed by law. As in Homo sacer, the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion. Justitium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" (zoe, as opposed to bios: qualified life) is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity -- from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (zen), but existing with regard to the good life (eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as a state of exception. According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.^[11] The times before writing belong either to protohistory or to prehistory. ... Modernity is a term used to describe the condition of being modern. Since the term modern is used to describe a wide range of periods, modernity must be understood in its context. ... Aristotle (Greek: AristotélÄ“s) (384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. ... Auschwitz, in English, commonly refers to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex built near the town of Oświęcim, by Nazi Germany during World War II. Rarely, it may refer to the Polish town of Oświęcim (called by the Germans Auschwitz) itself. ... For other uses, see Life (disambiguation). ... Aristotle, marble copy of bronze by Lysippos. ... Biopower was a term originally coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations. Foucault first used it in his...

Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading "State of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture describing the eclipse that politics has undergone. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that use to constitute politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State^[12]

State of Exception (2005)

In this book, written in the aftermath of US President George W. Bush's campaign labelled the "War on terror", Agamben traces the concept of state of exception used by Carl Schmitt to Roman justitium and auctoritas. This leads him to a response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to proclaim state emergency. The war on terrorism or war on terror (abbreviated in U.S. policy circles as GWOT for Global War on Terror) is an effort by the governments of the United States and its principal allies to destroy groups deemed to be terrorist (primarily radical Islamist organizations such as al-Qaeda... Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 - April 7, 1985) was a German legal theoretician and political scientist. ... Justitium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Auctoritas is the Latin origin of English authority. According to Benveniste [citation?], auctor (which also gives us English author) is derived from Latin augeó (to augment): The auctor is is qui auget, the one who augments the act or the juridical situation of another. ...

Giorgio Agamben’s text State of Exception investigates the increase of power structures governments employ, in supposed times of crisis. Within these times of crisis, Agamben refers to increased extension of power, as states of exception, where questions of citizenship and individual rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government. Agamben explores the effect of the state of exception on the individual by looking at the ideas of bios and zoe.

The state of exception invests one person or government, with the power and voice of authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the past. “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference (Agamben, pg 40).” Agamben refers a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler’s rule. “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system (Agamben, pg 2).” However simplistic and obvious it is to mention, one must acknowledge the state of exception is a dangerous and violent place of operation.

The political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government - or one form or branch of government - as all powerful, operating outside of the laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall be privileged and accepted as true and certain voices shall be heard as valued, while of course, many others are not. This oppressive distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within a time of crisis.

Agamben’s text State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to remove individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the USA Patriot Act, issued by the United States Senate on October 26, 2001, Agamben writes, “What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws (Agamben, pg 3).” Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until July 7, 2006, these individuals had been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions by the United States administration. This article needs cleanup. ... October 26 is the 299th day of the year (300th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 66 days remaining. ... 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Geneva Conventions consist of treaties formulated in Geneva, Switzerland that set the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. ... Detainees upon arrival at Camp X-Ray, January 2002 Guantánamo Bay detainment camp serves as a joint military prison and interrogation camp under the leadership of Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) and has occupied a portion of the United States Navys base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since... An enemy combatant has historically referred to members of the armed forces of the state with which another state is at war. ... July 7 is the 188th day of the year (189th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 177 days remaining. ... For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ...

Auctoritas, "charism" and Führertum doctrine

Agamben shows that auctoritas and potestas are clearly distinct - although they form together a binary system".^[13] He quotes Mommsen, who explains that auctoritas is "less than an order and more than an advice".^[14] Potestas is a Latin word meaning power or faculty. ... Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (November 30, 1817–November 1, 1903) was a German classical scholar, jurist and historian, generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century. ... In militaries, a general order is a published directive, originated by a commander, and binding upon all personnel under his command, the purpose of which is to enforce a policy or procedure unique to his units situation which is not otherwise addressed in applicable service regulations, military law, or...

While potestas derives from social function, auctoritas "immediately derives from the patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charism. This is why the tradition ordered, at the king's death, the creation of the sovereign’s wax-double in the funus imaginarium, as did Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrate in The King's Two Bodies (1957). Hence, it is necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure the continuity of dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas). Moreover, in the person detaining auctoritas -- the sovereign -- public life and private life have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes. For other persons named Max Weber, see Max Weber (disambiguation). ... Jesus is considered by historians such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader; The sociologist Max Weber defined charismatic authority as resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained... Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895-1963) was a German-Jewish historian of medieval political and intellectual history, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and in particular The Kings Two Bodies (1957). ... Public is of or pertaining to the people; belonging to the people; relating to, or affecting, a nation, state, or community; opposed to private; as, the public treasury, a road or lake. ... Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to keep their lives and personal affairs out of public view, or to control the flow of information about themselves. ... For other uses, see Augustus (disambiguation). ... The Latin word Princeps (plural: principes) means the first. This article is devoted to a number of specific historical meanings the word took, by far the most important of which follows first. ...

The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and Nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben: Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests inferior to the needs of the state, and seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, religious, cultural, or racial attributes. ... National Socialism redirects here. ... Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 - April 7, 1985) was a German legal theoretician and political scientist. ...

"To understand modern phenomenons such as the fascist Duce or the Nazi Führer, it is important not to forget their continuity with the principle of auctoritas principis {Agamben refers here to Augustus's Res Gestae}. {...} Neither does the Duce nor the Führer represent constitutionally defined public charges - even though Mussolini and Hitler endorsed respectively the charge of head of government and Reich's chancellor, just as Augustus endorsed the imperium consulare or the potestas tribunicia. The Duce’s or the Führer’s qualities are immediately related to the physical person and belong to the biopolitical tradition of auctoritas and not to the juridical tradition of potestas"^[15]

Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt. Duce was an Italian word meaning leader, derived from Latin word dux of the same meaning. ...   (Fuehrer when the ü-umlaut is not used, but never just Fuhrer) is a proper noun meaning leader or guide in the German language. ... A neologism coined by Michel Foucault, the term Biopolitics or Biopolitical can refer to several different yet not incompatible concepts. ... A right is the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. ...

Agamben concludes his chapter on "Auctoritas and potestas" writing:

"It is significative that modern specialists were so enclined to admit that auctoritas was inherent to the living person of the pater or the princeps. What was evidently an ideology or a fictio aiming to be the groundwork of auctoritas ' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to potestas thus became a figure of right's {law - "droit"} immanence to life. (...) Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate itself each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} - the state of exception, justitium, the auctoritas principis, the Führertum -, put in use in more or less different circumstances, in the 1930s - overall, but not only - in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of auctoritas and elaborated in a Führertum doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In 1933, in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the Führung principle by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage" {"identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"} (we shall note the use of weberian concepts)."^[16]

Agamben’s thoughts on the state of emergency leads him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is thin indeed, as rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance. Agamben often reminds that Hitler never abrogated the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the whole duration of the 3rd Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on February 28, 1933. Indefinite suspension of law is what characterizes the state of exception. Thus, Agamben connects Greek political philosophy through to the concentration camps of 20th century fascism, and even further, to detainment camps in the likes of Guantanamo Bay or immigration detention centers, such as Bari, Italy, where asylum seekers have been imprisoned in football stadiums. In these kinds of camps, entire zones of exception are being formed: the state of exception becomes a status under which certain categories of people live, a capture of life by right. Sovereign law makes it possible to create entire areas in which the application of the law itself is held suspended, which is the basis of Bush administration's definition of an "enemy combatant". An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere to remain within, refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of the divine as existing and acting within the mind or the world. ... The 1930s (years from 1930–1939) were described as an abrupt shift to more radical and conservative lifestyles, as countries were struggling to find a solution to the Great Depression, also known in Europe as the World Depression. ... Adolf Hitler made believe he was the incarnation of the Führerprinzip The Führerprinzip, the German name for the leader principle, refers to a system with a hierarchy of leaders that resembles a military structure. ... 1933 (MCMXXXIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ... Rule by decree is a style of governance allowing quick, unchallenged creation of law by a single person or group, and is used primarily by dictators and absolute monarchs. ... This article is becoming very long. ... Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945, standard German pronunciation in the IPA) was the Führer (leader) of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) and of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. ... The Weimar Constitution in booklet form. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the control of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)), or Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as chancellor and head of state. ... A German newspapers final issue, announcing its own prohibition (Verbot) by the police authorities on the basis of the Reichstag fire decree The Reichstag Fire Decree (Reichstagsbrandverordnung in German) is the common name of the decree issued by German president Paul von Hindenburg in direct response to the Reichstag... February 28 is the 59th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1933 (MCMXXXIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ... A concentration camp is a large detention centre created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. ... Detainees upon arrival at Camp X-Ray, January 2002 Guantánamo Bay detainment camp serves as a joint military prison and interrogation center under the leadership of Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), has occupied a portion of the United States Navys base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since 2002. ... Location within Italy Bari is the capital of the province of Bari and of the Apulia (or Puglia) region, on the Adriatic sea, in Italy. ... George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current President of the United States, inaugurated on January 20, 2001. ... The term unlawful combatant (also unlawful enemy combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent) denotes people denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions; those to whom protection is recognised as due are referred to as lawful combatants. ...

Interregnum, justitium and nomos empsuchos (the sovereign as "living law")

In the chapter preceding "Auctoritas and potestas", Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of justitium, a technical term referring to the state of exception, declared to cope with tumultus state (rebellion, uprising, riots...), at the end of the Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during interregnum periods: See also Roman Republic (18th century) and Roman Republic (19th century). ... An interregnum is a period between monarchs, between popes of the Roman Catholic Church, emperors of Holy Roman Empire, polish kings (elective monarchy) or between consuls of the Roman Republic. ...

"The correspondence between justitutium and mourning here shows its true signification. If the sovereign is a living nomos, if then anomie and nomos coïncide in his person without any left-over, then anarchy (which, at his death, when the link attaching him to law his broken, threatens to unleash itself in the city) must be ritualized and controlled, by the transformation of the state of exception into public mourning and of mourning into justitium (...) Before acquiring the modern form of a decision on emergency {Schmitt's definition}, the relationship between sovereignty and state of exception presents itself under the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. As living law, the sovereign is deeply anomos. Here also the state of exception is the life -- more secret and true -- of the law."^[17]

The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treatise "On law and justice" by pseudo-Archytas, conserved by Stobaeus with Diotogene's treatise on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of legitimacy. This theory must be radically distinguished from natural rights theory or Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" to which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion). Nomos (plural: Nomoi) can refer to: the prefectures of Greece, the administrative division immediately below the peripheries of Greece (Greek: νομός, νομοί) the subdivisions of Ancient Egypt, see Nome (subnational division) law (Greek: νόμος, νόμοι). It is the origin of the suffix -onomy. ... Anomie, in contemporary English, means a condition or malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values. ... Archytas Archytas (428 BC - 347 BC) was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, strategist and commander-in-chief. ... Joannes Stobaeus, so called from his native place Stobi in Macedonia, was the compiler of a valuable series of extracts from Greek authors. ... The word legitimacy comes from the Latin word legitimare and it has two uses: Legitimacy (political science) is variously defined, but refers in general to the peoples acceptance of a law, ruling, or a regime itself as valid. ... Natural rights is a philosophical hition of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs. ... Antigone by Frederic Leighton Antigone (Eng. ...

Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign (basileus), who is the law, from the magistrate (archōn), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law (nomos empsuchos), hierarchically superior, and a written law (gramma), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas: A silver coin of the Seleucid king Antiochus I Soter. ... A magistrate is a judicial officer. ... Look up Archon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Archon (Gr. ...

"I say that all communities are composed of an archōn (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign (ho men empsuchos ho basileus), and the inanimate one is the letter (gramma). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Endnotes

1. ^ Generally speaking, "state of exception" includes German Notstand, English state of emergency and others martial law. Agamben prefers using this term as it underlines the structure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously of inclusion and exclusion. "Ex-ception" can be opposed to the concept of "example" as developed by Kant.
2. ^ (French)"Non au tatouage biopolitique "No to Bio-Political Tattooing"", Le Monde, 2004 January 10.
3. ^ [http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/3249|"No to Bio-Political Tattooing" By Giorgio Agamben, Le Monde, Saturday 10 January 2004
4. ^ (French)"Non à la biométrie ("No to Biometrics")", ''Le Monde, 2005 December 5. (also available here)
5. ^ The Coming Community (1993), section 11.
6. ^ The Coming Community (1993), page 2.
7. ^ The Coming Community (1993)
8. ^ The Coming Community (1993)
9. ^ http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol2_2/dasilva.htm
10. ^ The Coming Community (1993), page 86.
11. ^ Of course, this understanding of "biopower" is distinct from Foucault's use of the term.
12. ^ Video clip of Agamben's lecture: On the State of Exception, Saas-Fee, Switzerland (2003) is available here or a smaller file here
13. ^ Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)
14. ^ Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht ("Roman Constitutional Law", volume III) (Graz, 1969)
15. ^ Agamben, State of Exception (ibid.), chapter 6 "Auctoritas and potestas", §7.
16. ^ Agamben, ibid., chapter 6, §8.
17. ^ Agamben, ibid., chapter 5, §3.

For other uses, see Martial law (disambiguation). ... Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 – February 12, 1804) was a Prussian philosopher, generally regarded as one of Europes most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. ... Le Monde is also the name of a song by the Thievery Corporation. ... Le Monde is also the name of a song by the Thievery Corporation. ... January 10 is the 10th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Le Monde is also the name of a song by the Thievery Corporation. ... Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (November 30, 1817–November 1, 1903) was a German classical scholar, jurist and historian, generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century. ...

Bibliography

(Only English translations are listed here; there are translations of most writings to German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There also is an updated list of publications including translations to other languages and links to texts here and a more complete bibliography here).

• Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. University of Minnesota Press (1993). ISBN 0-8166-2037-7 ISBN 0-8166-2038-5. 
• Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993) ISBN 0-86091-470-4 ISBN 0-86091-645-6
• The Coming Community (1993) ISBN 0-8166-2235-3
• Idea of Prose (1995) ISBN 0-7914-2379-4 ISBN 0-7914-2380-8
• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press (1998). ISBN 0-8047-3218-3. 
• The Man without Content (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3553-0 ISBN 0-8047-3554-9
• The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3021-0 ISBN 0-8047-3022-9
• Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999) ISBN 0-8047-3277-9 ISBN 0-8047-3278-7
• Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (2000) ISBN 0-8166-3035-6 ISBN 0-8166-3036-4
• Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2000) ISBN 1-890951-16-1 ISBN 1-890951-17-X
• The Open: Man and Animal (2004) ISBN 0-8047-4737-7 ISBN 0-8047-4738-5
• State of Exception (2005) (excerpt available here) ISBN 0-226-00924-6 ISBN 0-226-00925-4
• The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans (2005) ISBN 0-8047-4382-7 ISBN 0-8047-4383-5
• Various articles published by Multitudes, available here.
• The State of Emergency, extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland Barthes-University of Paris VII, Denis Diderot
• (Italian) "Nei campi dei senza nome", Il Manifesto, 1998 November 3.
• (French)"Gênes et la peste ("Genoa and the plague")", L'Humanité, 2001 August 27.

The Stanford University Press is a publishing house, a division of Stanford University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) (pronounced ) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. ... Il Manifesto (Italian for The Manifesto) is an Italian communist newspaper. ... Official family picture The 27th G8 summit took place in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. ... LHumanité (Humanity), formerly the daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), was the only French newspaper owned by a political party. ...

See also

• Giorgio Agamben's explanation of Auctoritas
• Agamben's response to Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the power to decide state exception
• Basileus
• Homo sacer
• Interregnum
• Justitium
• Unlawful combatants

Auctoritas is the Latin origin of English authority. According to Benveniste [citation?], auctor (which also gives us English author) is derived from Latin augeó (to augment): The auctor is is qui auget, the one who augments the act or the juridical situation of another. ... A state of emergency is a governmental declaration that may suspend certain normal functions of government, may work to alert citizens to alter their normal behaviors, or may order government agencies to implement emergency preparedness plans. ... A silver coin of the Seleucid king Antiochus I Soter. ... Homo sacer (Latin for the sacred man) is an obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. ... An interregnum is a period between monarchs, between popes of the Roman Catholic Church, emperors of Holy Roman Empire, polish kings (elective monarchy) or between consuls of the Roman Republic. ... Justitium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... The term unlawful combatant (also unlawful enemy combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent) denotes people denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions; those to whom protection is recognised as due are referred to as lawful combatants. ...

External links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Agamben
• On Giorgio Agamben's "Profanations" Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
• "Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life, German Law Journal, Vol. 5 (1 May 2004)"
• "Apocalypse Deferred" A review of Agamben's work in n+1 magazine, by Mark Greif (Fall 2005).
• "Review of State of Exception"
• "Review of The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans"
• "The lost Dress of Paradise, by Giorgio Agamben"
• (Spanish) Seminario Agamben
• (French)"État d'exception" de G. Agamben by Sandra Salomon in Multitudes, 2003, August 8.
• (French)"L'État d'exception ("State of Exception")", Le Monde, 2002 December 12.
• (French)"Une biopolitique mineure ("A minor biopolitic", interview with Agamben)", Vacarme, 1999 December.
• (Italian) filosofico.net Italian page dedicated to Agamben
• (English)/(Italian) "The Ripe Fruit of Redemption", Toni Negri reviews Agamben
• review of "State of Exception", Yehouda Shenhav, Sfarim Haaretz, 23.11.2005 (Hebrew).

Philosophy Portal