Agamben's Homo Sacer Explained: Biopolitics & State Power

Giorgio Agamben describes the 'state of exception' as a situation where the sovereign suspends all laws and civil authorities to deal with perceived threats. Carl Schmitt called this a 'black hole of law' where normal legal institutions are suspended. After 9/11, the US entered this state, where the military and police take over governance. The sovereign decides who lives and dies, and all civil rights are suspended. Guantanamo Bay became a 'black hole of law' where prisoners were held without legal protections. Western governments have transformed Muslim identity from a peaceful religion to a threat to civilization. This transformation has been supported through funding, education, and political support for radical Islamic ideology.

States of exception are emergency measures that nation-states use to suspend normal laws and rights due to perceived threats. Guantanamo exemplified this through its creation following September 11th. However, the museum has created various states of exception of its own through the specific nature of its territory, establishing free travel zones where people of all nationalities can travel without passport control. This subverts conventional use of states of exception by using them to expand access and prefigure desired changes rather than restrict them. The key insight is that states of exception aren't merely things that happen to us or that nation-states use to increase power—they can also be introduced by communities to suspend existing orders and introduce new policies. What we believe or allow ourselves to believe is itself a politics unto itself, shaping what becomes politically feasible.

The state of exception - a legal framework that allows suspension of normal legal protections - has become the normal form of governance. Each crisis (war on terror, economic crisis, pandemic, war in Ukraine) generates new legal tools of emergency that remain in place even after the crisis ends. This creates a permanent state where emergency measures become standard governance, fundamentally transforming democracy into something else. The system produces both vulnerable populations (the 'naked bodies' of the exception) and protected elites (the 'untouchables'), creating a permanent state of exception that resembles a global Guantanamo. The case of the 89-year-old pensioner who shot at the EΦKΑ represents a tragic response to institutional failure, illustrating how bureaucratic systems can become autonomous entities that exist beyond individual human accountability.

The Guantanamo Bay case study illustrates violations of fundamental rights. After the 9/11 attacks, the US government detained approximately 600 people at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base without proper legal procedures. These individuals were held without trial, without access to their families, and without following due process. The case demonstrates that fundamental rights violations can occur anywhere and by anyone, including democratic governments. The instructor uses this example to emphasize that rights violations are not limited to authoritarian regimes but can happen in any country, including those with democratic systems.

Following September 11, 2001, the Bush administration invoked presidential wartime authority to act beyond legal limits, directing investigations into Saddam Hussein's alleged connections to al-Qaeda despite no evidence. The administration declared any nation protecting terrorism would be considered hostile. 12 men were arrested and 8,000 detained, mostly Muslims. The National Security Agency received powers to intercept communications without court orders, violating 1978 legal norms. The security system overwhelmed the population with constant alerts, with potential terrorist targets increasing from 160 in 2003 to over 300,000. The administration classified detainees as 'enemy combatants' outside the law, eliminating field hearings and denying Geneva Convention rights. The US transported detainees to 'black sites' where torture was practiced. By May 2003, Guantanamo held 680 men, with only 5% captured by Americans and over 80% handed over by warlord militias. Only 8% were al-Qaeda fighters. Less than a month after 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan to destroy Islamist fanatics it had previously helped arm and train to defeat the Soviets.

Roberto Esposito proposes that the paradigm of immunity provides the necessary flexibility to understand biopolitics by revealing its inherent contradiction: immunity involves introducing controlled evil (such as attenuated pathogens in vaccination) to protect against greater evils, thereby exposing how biopolitical protection requires accepting risk rather than eliminating it entirely; this immune logic, which operates across law, politics, and biology, allows tracing biopolitics' evolution from modernity through to its apocalyptic culmination in Nazi totalitarianism, while also suggesting possibilities for redirecting this logic toward communitarian ends.

Roberto Esposito argues that community and immunity are conceptually linked through their shared relationship with biopolitics, where immunity functions as both protective and destructive force that shapes modern political subjectivity; he proposes an affirmative biopolitics that transforms immune systems from exclusionary barriers into operational filters between inside and outside, thereby expanding spaces of the common good against the privatization and immunization that threaten collective existence.

Immunity, derived from the Latin 'humus' and conceptually opposite to 'community' (comunitas), represents a protective mechanism that mediates between biological and political-social domains; it functions as both a biological filter maintaining the body's relationship with its environment and a social-political mechanism that enables modern civilization to function by preventing conflict through legal frameworks, thus requiring a balanced approach that protects without causing an 'immune disease' of isolation.

Expósito proposes the duality of 'community' and 'immunity' as key concepts for understanding biopolitics. Community is based on 'munus' (the gift given to the other), which exposes the subject to vulnerability and bond simultaneously, opening to a sense of community as exposure and relationship with the other, with the risks this entails. Immunity, by contrast, is the modern strategy to protect the individual from this bond, leading to a negative community that conserves life at the price of neutralizing its exposure. The individual remains in closure, making evolution and development with necessary resistances impossible.

Hate speech labels apply only to groups protected by global progressivist discourse, not any minority. Chesterton warned that speaking truth would become intolerable. The immunitarian paradigm in biopolitics treats hate speech as viralizing pathology threatening community stability. As philosopher Roberto Esposito shows, this defensive logic neutralizes life itself: in the name of preserving community from perceived pathogens, the system suppresses dissent, friction, and disagreement—the very elements giving vitality to public space. Liberal democracy immunizing itself attacks the principle that gives it meaning: freedom.

The concentration camp represents the paradigmatic space of modern politics where the exception is permanently embedded within society. Refugees and stateless persons exemplify the production of bare life - individuals stripped of legal protection while simultaneously included in the political order as 'included exclusion.' Their namelessness and liminal status reveal the fundamental structure of political power. Agamben applies his theory to contemporary refugees, showing how these figures exist in spaces where they are neither fully inside nor outside the political system.

Homo sacer, in Roman law, is someone excluded from both human and divine order - can be killed but not sacrificed. Agamben argues this is the hidden paradigm of modern politics: the migrant at the border stands between two legal orders, neither protecting them. Their existence is purely biological, stripped of political, legal, and social dimensions. Hannah Arendt, who experienced statelessness as a Jewish refugee, wrote that stateless people's situation exposed the falsity of human rights declarations. While declarations speak of natural rights, in practice rights belong only to citizens. Those without citizenship in any functioning order lose all rights. The international system operates on state sovereignty as the foundation of legal order, with rights belonging to citizens. Those without a state fall into the gap between orders, at the mercy of those to whom no mercy is owed. Detention camps are material embodiments of this gap - places where people exist in suspension, neither free nor formally imprisoned, neither welcome nor deportable. Their biological life continues but their political life, their capacity to act and decide about themselves, is suspended indefinitely.

Hannah Arendt gave an insightful phenomenological account of the political dynamics that make refugees stateless, depriving them of legal rights. She showed how statelessness denies human beings access to so-called universal human rights because there is no state to which refugees can appeal to have those rights. Refugees are often persecuted by their governments or caught in the crossfire of war, but Arendt's analysis suggests that many minorities are in a stateless or near-status condition even if not cast out of their countries, such as undocumented immigrants in the United States or the 8500 remaining Jews of Iran. International Human Rights conventions offer no guarantees of protection to refugees unless they receive asylum. Arendt analyzed the effects of this situation, showing the problem to be that people who subsist without legal rights are not part of a political community.

This segment discusses Giorgio Agamben's concept of human rights. The speaker explains that Agamben argues that becoming human means becoming a citizen of a nation-state, which is a 'fiction' of the nation-state. The speaker notes that for refugees and pariahs, becoming human means becoming citizens of a nation-state, which Agamben argues should be rejected. The speaker raises the question of what it means for pariahs to become human. The speaker connects this to the concept of 'dignified death' in the Palestinian context, noting that for Palestinians in Gaza, options are limited: they can fight for liberation (which may not be possible), or they can commit suicide (which is forbidden in Islam).

This section analyzes the crisis of citizenship and the universal right to have rights. The human right to migrate has been attacked ferociously, leaving portions of individuals without citizenship that grants rights and obligations, and in many cases in conditions of statelessness. Being undocumented leads not only to juridical indefensibility but also to problems of identity and condemnation of invisibility. Arendt warned that by leaving portions of the population without the right to have rights, governments condemn this sector to marginality. The existence of millions of undocumented persons represents the failure of the basic pact between citizens and state, where these cede part of their liberty in exchange for protection. It also represents a rupture with the idea of communities based on political equality before particular differences.