The State of Exception and the Homo Sacer According to Giorgio Agamben

This paper examines the concept of Homo Sacer and its relationship to the state of exception in Giorgio Agamben's thought. The paper examines the term's transformations from theology to politics, and from ancient Roman law to the manifestations of their forms today. The research investigates a range of political concepts adjacent to this term, such as sovereign power, law, biopolitics, the state of exception, and naked life. Homo Sacer is a concept with multiple meanings, but interpreting it according to new contexts, dismantling its symbolic load and expanding it semantically produces several readings of the current political modernization that puts human life within a violent policy of a state that extends its sovereignty over life and death through cases of exception. This produces the naked life of a despised outcast, excluded from political and social participation in the name of law. This paper focuses on the theoretical conflict between the legal justification for state of exception as defined by Carl Schmitt, and its ambiguity, and the implications of its employment by both the authoritarian and democratic state, according to Giorgio Agamben. The contemporary relevance of this problem is evident in the fact that the state of exception is no longer temporary, but has rather become a permanent state or legal rule in most contemporary political systems.

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This paper examines the concept of Homo Sacer and its relationship to the state of exception in Giorgio Agamben's thought. The paper examines the term's transformations from theology to politics, and from ancient Roman law to the manifestations of their forms today. The research investigates a range of political concepts adjacent to this term, such as sovereign power, law, biopolitics, the state of exception, and naked life. Homo Sacer is a concept with multiple meanings, but interpreting it according to new contexts, dismantling its symbolic load and expanding it semantically produces several readings of the current political modernization that puts human life within a violent policy of a state that extends its sovereignty over life and death through cases of exception. This produces the naked life of a despised outcast, excluded from political and social participation in the name of law. This paper focuses on the theoretical conflict between the legal justification for state of exception as defined by Carl Schmitt, and its ambiguity, and the implications of its employment by both the authoritarian and democratic state, according to Giorgio Agamben. The contemporary relevance of this problem is evident in the fact that the state of exception is no longer temporary, but has rather become a permanent state or legal rule in most contemporary political systems.

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