Main entry:

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942-

Title & Author:

Homo sacer : sovereign power and bare life / Giorgio Agamben ; translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998.

Description:

viii, 199 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Series:

Homo sacer ; 1
Meridian

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-196) and index.
The paradox of sovereignty -- 'Nomos basileus' -- Potentiality and law -- Form of law -- Homo Sacer -- The ambivalence of the sacred -- Sacred life -- 'Vitae necisque potestas' -- Sovereign body and sacred body -- The ban and the wolf -- The politicization of life -- Biopolitics and the rights of man -- Life that does not deserve to live -- 'Politics, or giving form to the life of a people' -- VP -- Politicizing death -- The camp as the 'nomos' of the modern.
Translation of 'Homo sacer : il potere sovrano e la nuda vita' Torino : Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1995.

Summary:

"The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over 'life' is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed--a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective 'naked life' of all individuals"--Provided by publisher.

Resources:
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description
Table of contents

ISBN:

0804732175 (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780804732178 (cloth ; alk. paper)
0804732183 (paper ; alk. paper)
9780804732185 (paper ; alk. paper)

Subject:

Human rights.
State, The.
Sovereignty.
Religion and politics.
Right to life.
Internment camps.
Nazi concentration camps.
Human Rights
Concentration Camps
Droits de l'homme (Droit international)
État.
Souveraineté.
Religion et politique.
Droit à la vie.
Camps de concentration nazis.
Camps d'internement.
sovereignty.
concentration camps.
Staat
Menschenrecht
Souveränität
Sozialphilosophie
Ethik
Das Sakrale
Soevereiniteit.
Het heilige.
Macht.
Menselijk lichaam.
Interneringskampen.
State.
Concentration camps.

Form/genre:

Derrida copy Annotations (Provenance) NjP
Derrida copy Insertions (Provenance) NjP

Added entries:

Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

Sovereign power and bare life

Holdings:

Location: Library main 226973
Call No.: JC571 .A16813 1998
Status: Available