Zoe And Bios
Zoe and Bios are two terms that indicate Nature and Culture, respectively; and these two terms animate the analytic of Agamben's Homo Sacer. (Henceforth, HS)
First, it is important to note that zoe, or bare life, is functionally defined by bios, as that which is prior to capture, as that which is not yet included specifically into the citizenry. Yet here the term indicates that which is also included in being excluded. That is, even though Zoe is technically excluded from bios, it is also marked as biopolitical; the process (one might say of domestication) is one of being released from existence (invisible) to zoe (very visible) in order to be included in bios (passable). That is, with zoe, one is banned from bios in order to be included in bios, or, perhaps, to be further excluded. It is the latter moment that constitutes the camp, where one is neither bios nor zoe, if we take zoe to mean the intention for X is to be included in bios.
This frame of zoe and bios has always been part of the history of the West. Aristotle noted that human being (men, more specifically) is "animal with the capacity for politics" (HS, 3, 7), and yet, in order for it to achieve eudaimonia, it requires being grafted into politics. Of course, not all men were potentially political. According to the history of the concept of The People (cf., Homo Sacer, pp 176-7), the term People traces an index of ambiguity; for the term, "The People", cannot fail to exclude the mass, a group of people incapable of rule, one might say, but of which it would be more precise to say, as rendered incapable of ruling by the ruling class. Aristotle says that the common man, with his hands dirty from the trades, has not acquired the capacity to be contemplative enough to participate in politics. It was always the exclusion of poor people, refugees, migrants, from ruling everyone that made the construction of Zoe possible; yet, if class politics are essential in the modern state, the concentration camp as permanent potential zone isn't surprising. If the need to define bios, traced in Nazi Germany as the need to define the Germanic people by way of eugenics, is part of what we do--and the trace, The People, indicates this possibility--, then the camp is not some distant moment in the past, but is, rather, "the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are living." (HS, 166).
Sovereignty
The Sovereign is the one that has the legal capacity to establish martial law, which is a legal moment (thus, justified) in which (s)he can suspend the law (HS, 15). In this moment of suspension, the rule of law that certain crimes are punishable, is no longer present. In this moment whereby the sovereign can act as they please, they have legally made themselves an exception to the law; rather than suppose that the chaotic state of nature is left at the gates of the city, those captured by the (papa)ratus are forced to yield (with the threat of remaining zoe to the paparatus), to the sovereign which takes into itself the possibility of redressing the state of nature writ large. The state of nature is not what is prior to domestication; no, the state of nature is the result of the sovereign suspending the rule of law; the creation of chaos (in order to produce the filial desire for order) (HS, 35). Given that the legal function of the Sovereign contains the legal possibility of illegality, or rather, the possibility of this term no longer making sense, the Potentialities of the state conjoin as legality and extra legality, whereby the law and the state of nature become indistinct. Only the Sovereign is legally outside the application of martial law; everyone within becomes potentially zoe.
If individuated natural violence is inadmissable because it is extra-legal, because it short circuits the need for the maintaining violence of the state (the police), then the only extra legal violence that is permissible is the forever potential natural violence of the sovereign in enacted martial law. What justifies this potential? What a silly question. Some might say that it is because we, the people, cannot do anything about it that it justifies itself. It is because the sovereign is independent that we cannot do anything about its potential (and ongoing) violence. We are impotent before the law because it has made itself indefeasible. To explain the genesis of this situation, we might affirm that it is precisely because our legal system is defined as "representational" that something like the state of exception or martial law can have a potential legitimate function. It is that everything is already in play, and only things in play can challenge what is already in play. Therefore, stopping altogether, which is what is required, is out of the question because the game is in motion.
What of the Constitution? What of the need for re-election? So many of us know that its rigged against us, that we can do nothing to stop it; that the continuity of the health of the nation is what defines the capacity of the Sovereign to Dissolve as it pleases. Our existence is already fully biopolitical in the fact that natural violence is already always out of the question. What constitutes the maintenance of violence is something outside the state, necessarily; but all that is outside the state (culture) is what is natural; The extra-legalized sovereign, in Potential Act, fills this space. What Constitutes is merely the capacity to say such is unconstituted; and the state, the elite, the wealthy, the rulers, bios, relative to the nation, have taken away every capacity to say such is unconstitutional.
Now, that doesn't mean there isn't the possibility of overthrowing the law; that organized messianic violence and the destruction of everything couldn't be possible; the problem runs deeper. It's that we who desire revolution, we on the side of god that wish to abolish property and class, must contend with the mini-sovereigns that would oppose us (HS, 84). In the state of ban, perhaps, it is possible for a revolutionary to kill without impunity; but a revolutionary already kills without remorse because they know the game is stacked. The mini-sovereigns, in the ban, can also kill, and it is to be expected that they will also kill for the health of the biopolitical community.
So long as we don't step out of line, the liberal reasons, everything goes well. Since they agree with the rulers that everything is well, that is, all is well in the mere potentiality of the law, they will kill the one that willfully steps out of line, that threatens their conception of peace, if the maintenance of violence doesn't already. Whether or not the State will kill us, depends on how much we threaten the more or less majority ruling on peace, on how much we fall under the notion of terrorist.
The Government of the People for the People sounds nice, provided the terms are univocal; above I reiterated Agamben's position that they are equivocal; that bios rules whatever it defines as zoe. With the constitution we are told that our rights will be protected, and we are deceived into thinking that we ratified it. We can look at them, more or less, and, relative to our own nation-states, say that they are very utilitarian; but the question is always and only whether we have in fact given them to ourselves, or whether they have been given to us. And the test is simply that if they are altered by rulings, or acts of amendment, whether we can do anything about it. If they are taken away, and public outcry does nothing, obviously it is the government of a people by another people. Only a complete destruction of the legal apparatus can make it so that we are a people that rules ourselves. If we think that our representatives listen to us, we aren't listening to what they are saying: At best they could only ever do what is going to guarantee their re-election, which is always and forever stacked against the individual.
Form-of-life
At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben outlines four "arbitrary" possibilities given the analytic of bios, all of which have something to do with Homo Sacer. I haven't really outlined this particular concept because I have already been talking about it. The concept is taken from Roman Law, whereby a person is marked as being sacred (but not capable of sacrifice). The term itself trades on an ambiguity at the root of being set aside. To be set aside, like a pig in Jewish gastronomy, simply means to have been taken outside the realm of ordinary politics (bios) whereby a person would have been protected by the sovereign.
To be abandoned to bare life (zoe), that is to say, captured and not permissibly given to bios, constitutes the most interesting possibility for militant anarchists: being outlaw. (HS, 183-4). Yet, here one is always already potentially caught under the paparatus because one is defined as zoe. Insofar as one is not caught however, and rendered a prisoner or dead, one has a curious relationship to the fuhrer, barring the fact, of course, that the were-wolf, the half-man-half animal that retains the rite to natural violence, is always an enemy. The fuhrer freely moves back and forth between zoe ad bios because whatever is his existence is defined as the proper essence for the existence of the specific kind of people. The fuhrer spoke, that is to say, and it was law; The health of the fuhrer is the health of the state. Thus the outlaw is never bios, whereas the fuhrer must always be bios or (freely) zoe. Finally, the fuhrer wants to render the outlaw who has zoe, to the group, the Jew in the camp that has neither bios nor zoe. The question of leviathan's Gears is whether the Jew in the camp is the final cause, drawing the poor. The pure bios individual (Flamen Diale) (HS, 182-3) is what life in bios holds out for the one that never has to worry about becoming zoe, say, because they are financially secure.
For Giorgio Agamben, the final (desired) position is neither zoe nor bios, but rather something prior to both (HS, 188). Form-of life picks out a being that is only its own bare existence, whereby its zoe (bare life) is already its own bios. In this final gesture we can see that perhaps what Agamben is saying is that if one is to avoid being seduced by the city, and so, seduced by the herd mentality of constituting a biopolitics that would kill the abandoned being, as if one were simply a lacky of the sovereign vying for power, one must seek eudaimonia on one's own terms, rather than presume it is given by the Sovereign. In this sense, Agamben is advocating for existential sedition.
Early on in the text (HS, 12) Agamben notes that his conception of the ban and the logic of Sovereignty is conceived in part as a criticism of Anarchism. Anarchism is at fault for developing a morality, for developing a sense of good and evil, which will always construct a notion of bare life that it will ostracize. Whether or not mere association and disassociation is sufficient for the non-morality of the anarchic politics to come is the question, I think, that anarchy leaves open without passing into (Marxist) anarchism.
Of course, Agamben does not think that it is easy to avoid the panoptic eye; Nothing appears to offer a way to avoid the demands of the Sovereign, "it seems" (187). So long as one is in the city, one will be sorted as bios or zoe, depending on the way in which one follows the law, lockstep. But this little possibility, this little moment of breaking away and becoming existentially seditious, and (of course) invisible, might make all the difference imaginable in our way of life.
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