Homo Sacer: A Person Who May Be Killed by Anybody but Not Sacrificed
A figure in Roman law that poses existential questions about the nature of law and power
Homo sacer (Latin for “the sacred man”) is a status originating from Roman law. It refers to a person who is excluded from society, one who can be killed by anyone without consequence (qui occidit parricidi non damnatur), but who cannot be the subject of a human sacrifice during a religious ceremony (neque fas est eum immolari). This person no longer possesses any civil rights.
The concept of homo sacer is, along with the primary rite of sacrifice, one of the founding elements of the magico-ritualist thought that emerged in ancient Rome.
Origins
The meaning of the term “sacer” in ancient Roman religion differs from its later Christianized meaning, which was eventually adopted into English as “sacred”. In early Roman religion, “sacer” denotes anything “set apart” from common society, encompassing both the senses of “hallowed” and “cursed”. The homo sacer could thus represent a person expelled from society, deprived of all rights and functions within the civil religion. In certain Western legal traditions concerning specific monarchs, the concepts of the sovereign and the homo sacer have been conflated.
The Enigmatic Nature of the Concept according to Agamben
This classical concept has attracted significant attention in contemporary critical theory, as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has devoted several books to exploring its multi-layered meaning. Homo sacer is a paradoxical figure: one who may not be sacrificed, yet may be murdered with impunity. In this sense, the homo sacer is situated outside or beyond both divine and human law.
Though Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a homo sacer, they remained “under the spell” of the law. Agamben explains this idea as “human life… included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)”. Thus, the homo sacer was excluded from the law itself while being simultaneously included. This figure is the mirror image of the sovereign, who stands both within the law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason as a natural person) and outside the law (since, as a body politic, he has the power to suspend the law for an indefinite time).
The Place of this Concept in Modern Biopolitics
Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where the law is indefinitely “suspended” without being abrogated. Although Schmitt aims to add the necessity of a state of emergency to the rule of law, Agamben demonstrates that the law cannot encompass all aspects of life. As in the case of homo sacer, the state of emergency includes life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of their exclusion.
Agamben’s provocative thesis posits that the homo sacer is evidence not merely of an original ambivalence in the notion of the sacred, as anthropology has long contended, but that the realm of the political itself is constituted by making an exception of the very people in whose name it is created.
The homo sacer emblematizes the sovereign’s power over life and death, the ability to designate a life worth neither saving nor killing. For Agamben, the most complete realization of the homo sacer is the concentration-camp inmate. He contends that the sheer possibility of doing so in relation to human life enabled Nazism’s exterminationist politics.
The very same possibility, he argues, is at the origin of democracy too, which is constituted as a biopower focused on the population, not the individual.
In conclusion, the figure of the homo sacer remains relevant in modern biopolitics, as it sheds light on the complex relationship between law, power, and life.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sacer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#Homo_Sacer:_Sovereign_Power_and_Bare_Life_(1995)
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095943431
