LAWS 2301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Vanishing Point
17 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
This week"s reading was on the introduction chapter of homo sacer by giorgio. At the basis of his theory is this term homo sacer. Two important terms that were discussed were bios (political life) and zoe (bare life or animal life). A person who was homo sacer was someone who was being exiled as punishment and allowed to be killed by anyone but not allowed to be ritually sacrificed. They no longer had bios and only left with zoe. Agamben takes his ideas of biopolitics and discusses them in relation to michel foucault"s theories along with others. Foucault"s history of sexuality and his analysis of power. Basically, foucault discusses two forms of power, political techniques and technologies of the self. These two powers converge and cross each other however is not clear on how or when. Agamben suggests that they are actually parallel to each other and they converge at a vanishing point.
