Homo Sacar

• Homo Sacar - "the sacred man" - bare life

  • bias vs zoe; forcibly reduced to zoe
  • the sacred man who cannot be sacrificed
• politial life (bias) and natural life (zoe)

  • no clear distinction between the two in modern day society
• thanatopolitics: the politics of death
• biopolitics: how power controls the life and death of individual biological bodies in order to manage the larger population

  • ie. sterilization of black women in the 20th century
• biopower: state uses methods to control the bodies of its citizens to command the social populace via instilling covert norms and common social practises that causes one to conform (ie. smoking decline)
• bare life vs dehumanization:

  • dehumanization still places value on human lives (negative value)
  • Homo Sacar is a natural, valueless life that exists outside of the political state which justifies its killing
• homo sacar: someone who can be killed but not sacrificed

  • the human who has been divested of any value, who has ceased to matter in any way that would make their killing count as a homocide
• political decision to make someone homo sacar (blurring between bias and zoe)

  • bare life is included through political exclusion
• soverign: anyone or institution who operates in a state of exception (metaphorical space where laws are suspended)
• Holocaust: when Nazi Germany stripped Jewish people of their citizenship, they became stateless and unable to appeal to human rights

  • human rights are then not natural + inalienable; they are rights of citizens
• the moments in which people need to invoke their human rights are precisely the moments in which they are unable to do so
• when decisions are made outside of the law can still be considered legal and those decisions determine what lives are relevant or irrelevant

  • ie. Palestine: Canada and U.S. don't formally acknowledge it as a state, because if Palestinians are stateless, they are homo sacar and are included in the politicall body only through their exclusion
• concentration camps in 1942 + totalitarian regiemes produce homo sacar, but current day democracies can produce it as well:

  • MAID, police killings (network or individual soverigns?)
• everyone has the potential to become homo sacar

  • ie. Nazi Germany kept expanding who they "had" to kill al the time, so no one was safe; "death drive"