These multiple and repeated restrictions risk leading to the establishment of what the Nazi era German constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt defined in his critique of liberal democracies as “the state of exception”, in which the sovereign chooses to act outside the structure of the law.Ĭarl Schmitt: Nazi-era philosopher who wrote blueprint for New Authoritarianism The UN Secretary General Antonio Gueterres warned on April 23 that the coronavirus crisis was “fast becoming a human rights crisis”, with the risk that it could “provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic”.Īround the world, governments have introduced measures to legally justify limits on personal freedoms, starting with the freedom of movement. 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.In times of emergency, the rule of law and democracy no longer go hand in hand. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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