Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-11-24T00:12:00+00:00

5.6. We must examine in this light the rite of the image in the Roman imperial apotheosis. If the colossus always represents a life consecrated to death in the sense we have seen, this means that the death of the emperor (despite the presence of the corpse, whose remains are ritually buried) frees a supplement of sacred life that, as in the case of the man who has survived consecration, must be neutralized by means of a colossus. Thus it is as if the emperor had in himself not two bodies but rather two lives inside one single body: a natural life and a sacred life. The latter, regardless of the regular funeral rite, survives the former and can only ascend to the heavens and be deified after the finus imaginarium. What unites the surviving devotee, homo sacer, and the sovereign in one single paradigm is that in each case we find ourselves confronted with a bare life that has been separated from its context and that, so to speak surviving its death, is for this very reason incompatible with the human world. In every case, sacred life cannot dwell in the city of men: for the surviving devotee, the imaginary funeral functions as a vicarious fulfillment of the consecration that gives the individual back to normal life; for the emperor, the double funeral makes it possible to fasten onto the sacred life, which must be gathered and divinized in the apotheosis; for homo sacer, finally, we are confronted with a residual and irreducible bare life, which must be excluded and exposed to a death that no rite and no sacrifice can redeem.

In all three cases, sacred life is in some way tied to a political function. It is as if, by means of a striking symmetry, supreme power-which, as we have seen, is always vitae necisquepotestas and always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed required that the very person of sovereign authority assume within itself the life held in its power. And if, for the surviving devotee, a missing death liberates this sacred life, for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed.

With respect to the interpretation of Kantorowicz and Giesey, the doctrine of the king's two bodies therefore appears in a different and less innocuous light. If this doctrine's relation to pagan imperial consecration cannot be bracketed, the very meaning of the theory changes radically. The king's political body (which, as Plowden says, "cannot be seen or touched" and which, "lacking childhood and old age and all the other defects to which the natural body is subject," exalts the mortal body to which it is joined) is, in the last analysis, derived from the emperor's colossus. Yet for this very reason, the king's political body cannot simply represent (as Kantorowicz and Giesey held) the continuity of sovereign power.

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