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Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man") is an obscure figure of Roman law
Roman law

Roman law is the law system of ancient Rome. As used in the West the term commonly refers to legal developments prior to the Roman/Byzantine state's adopting Greek language as its official language in the 7th century....
: a person
Person

The term person in common usage means an individual human being. In the fields of law, philosophy, medicine, and others, the term also has specialised context-specific meanings....
 who is banned
Ban (law)

For the policy on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Banning policy.A ban is, generally, any decree that Prohibitions something.Bans are formed for the prohibition of activities within a certain political territory....
, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed
Human sacrifice

Human sacrifice is the act of killing human beings as part of a religious ritual . Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general....
 in a religious ritual. The person is excluded from all civil rights
Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights ensuring things such as the protection of peoples' physical integrity; procedural fairness in law; protection from discrimination based on sexism, religious intolerance, Racism, Homophobia, etc; individual freedom of freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom...
, while his/her life is deemed "holy" in a negative sense.

Homo sacer according to Agamben
Italian
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
 philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italy philosophy who teaches at the University Iuav of Venice. He also teaches at the Coll?ge International de Philosophie in Paris, at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy....
 used this concept for his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.






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Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man") is an obscure figure of Roman law
Roman law

Roman law is the law system of ancient Rome. As used in the West the term commonly refers to legal developments prior to the Roman/Byzantine state's adopting Greek language as its official language in the 7th century....
: a person
Person

The term person in common usage means an individual human being. In the fields of law, philosophy, medicine, and others, the term also has specialised context-specific meanings....
 who is banned
Ban (law)

For the policy on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Banning policy.A ban is, generally, any decree that Prohibitions something.Bans are formed for the prohibition of activities within a certain political territory....
, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed
Human sacrifice

Human sacrifice is the act of killing human beings as part of a religious ritual . Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general....
 in a religious ritual. The person is excluded from all civil rights
Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights ensuring things such as the protection of peoples' physical integrity; procedural fairness in law; protection from discrimination based on sexism, religious intolerance, Racism, Homophobia, etc; individual freedom of freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom...
, while his/her life is deemed "holy" in a negative sense.

Homo sacer according to Agamben


Italian
Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
 philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italy philosophy who teaches at the University Iuav of Venice. He also teaches at the Coll?ge International de Philosophie in Paris, at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy....
 used this concept for his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Agamben describes the homo sacer as an individual who exists in the law as an exile
Exile

Exile means to be away from one's home while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened by prison or death upon return....
. There is, he thinks, a paradox: It is only because of the law that society can recognize the individual as homo sacer, and so the law that mandates the exclusion is also what gives the individual an identity.

Agamben holds that life exists in two capacities. One is natural biological life (Greek: Zoë) and the other is political life (Greek: bios). This zoe is related by Agamben himself to Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was an influential Germany-Jewish political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theory because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on...
's description of the refugee
Refugee

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecutionOwing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality,...
's "naked life" in The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Origins of Totalitarianism is a book by Hannah Arendt which classed Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian movements.It was recognized upon its 1951 publication as the comprehensive account of its subject, and was later hailed as a classic by the Times Literary Supplement....
 (1951). The effect of homo sacer is, he says, a schism of one's biological and political lives. As "bare life", the homo sacer finds himself submitted to the sovereign
Sovereignty

File:Leviathan gr.jpgSovereignty is the exclusive right to control a government, a State, a people, or oneself. A sovereign is a supreme lawmaking authority....
's state of exception
State of exception

State of Exception may mean:* State of exception* State of Exception , a book written by Giorgio Agamben...
, and, though he has biological life, it has no political significance.

Agamben says that the states of homo sacer, political refugee
Refugee

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecutionOwing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality,...
s, and those persecuted in the Holocaust and other sites are similar. As support for this, he mentions that the Jews were stripped of their citizenship
Naturalization

Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship or nationality by somebody who was not a citizen or national of that country when he or she was born....
 before they were placed in concentration camps.

Thus, Agamben argues, "the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens
Citizenship

Citizenship refers to a person's membership in a political community such as a country or city. It has different legal definitions in different countries....
 of a state", following in this Hannah Arendt's reasoning concerning the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, defining the individual and collective rights of all the estates of the realm as universal....
, which tied human rights
Human rights

Human rights refer to the "basic rights and freedom to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of speech, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, i...
 to civil rights
Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights ensuring things such as the protection of peoples' physical integrity; procedural fairness in law; protection from discrimination based on sexism, religious intolerance, Racism, Homophobia, etc; individual freedom of freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom...
. Although human rights were conceived of as the ground for civil rights, the privation of those civil rights (as, for example, in the case of stateless people or refugee
Refugee

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecutionOwing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality,...
s) made them comparable to "savages", many of whom were exterminated, as Arendt showed, during the New Imperialism
New Imperialism

New Imperialism refers to the colony expansion adopted by Europe's power and, later, Japan and the United States, during the 19th and early 20th centuries; approximately from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I ....
 period. Arendt's thought is that respect of human rights depends on the guarantee of civil rights, and not the other way around, as argued by the liberal
Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism is a doctrine stressing individual freedom, free markets, and limited government. This includes the importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, individual freedom from restraint, equality under the law, constitutional limitation of government, free marke...
 natural rights
Natural rights

Some philosophy and political science make a distinction between natural and legal rights. Natural rights are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity....
 philosophers.

See also

  • Burakumin
    Burakumin

    , are a Japanese people social minority group. The burakumin are one of the main demographics of Japan, along with the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the Ryukyuans of Okinawa and the Zainichi Korean and Han Chinese descent....
  • Civil death
    Civil death

    Civil death is a term that refers to the loss of all or almost all civil rights by a person due to a conviction for a felony or due to an act by the government of a country that results in the loss of civil rights....
  • Dalit
    Dalit

    Dalit is a self-designation for a South Asians group of people traditionally regarded as untouchables or of low caste system in India. Dalits are a mixed population of numerous caste groups all over South Asia and speak various languages....
  • Hague Conventions
    Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907)

    The Hague Conventions were international treaty negotiated at the First and Second Peace Conferences at The Hague, Netherlands in 1899 and 1907, respectively, and were, along with the Geneva Conventions, among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the nascent body of secular international law....
  • Non-person
  • Stateless person
  • Third Geneva Convention
    Third Geneva Convention

    The Third Geneva Convention of 1949 , one of the Geneva Conventions, is a treaty agreement that primarily concerns the treatment of prisoners of war , and also touched on other topics....
  • Unlawful combatant
    Unlawful combatant

    An unlawful combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent is a civilian who directly engages in armed conflict in violation of International Humanitarian Law and may be detained or prosecuted under the domestic law of the detaining state for such action....


External links

  • August 20, 2005
  • By Ulrich Raulff, German Law Journal No. 5 - Special Edition, 1 May, 2004)
  • A paper delivered by Andonis Tsonis at 'Forms of Legal Identity', 19th Annual Law & Society Conference, Melbourne, 10 - 12 December 2001
  • March 24, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed piece by Slavoj Zizek on Terrorism and normalization of torture.