Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception

From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy, expanded and updated for our times.

With the Dot by Paul Klee. Public domain image found on Rawpixel.

In State of Exception (the second volume in the series entitled Homo Sacer), Giorgio Agamben examines how governments avail themselves of states of emergency to assume extra-legal powers under the guise of protecting the public interest.

Agamben develops Foucault’s concept of biopolitics alongside Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism. Arendt provides Agamben with the historical–phenomenological analysis of totalitarianism as a regime that reduces human beings to mere biological life, destroying their political capacity (bios), a precursor to the idea of biopolitics. Biopolitics marks the shift from sovereign power to kill its subjects, to managing the life of whole populations, specifically by controlling the health, reproduction and productivity of groups. This gives rise to racist policies and eugenics as the purview of the state — apartheid, genocides, but also regulating women’s reproductive bodies and backing the power of private property in workplaces.

For Agamben, Foucauldian biopolitics explains how modern states can strip certain lives down to what he calls ‘bare life.” Agamben’s term homo sacer designates that individual stripped of human rights, existing beyond or…