Biopolitics and the Subject

Abstract

The article analyses the connection between sovereign exception and bare life embodied in Giorgio Agamben's figure of homo sacer. In parallel, it shows the distinction between Agamben's and Foucault's conception of both biopolitics and the subject. The main thesis of the text is that Agamben's bare life (embodied in the figure of homo sacer) is nothing less than an inner problem, and at same time an effect of the holder of sovereignty or a closed community existing as »One«. In fact, bare life is an imaginary counterpart of the holder of sovereignty, which has changed many guises through history, whereas Agamben's subject (i. e. the testimony of the so-called Muslim) represents the turning-point, as it becomes the real itself. Agamben's subject of the testimony differs from Foucault's subject of the archive in the relation to the »impossibility« of its existence as the subject as such.