Critical Analysis of Giorgio Agamben

In, Life That Does Not Deserve to Live, Giorgio Agamben aims to expand on Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’, to express the way in which the state has power over society in the way that ‘bare life’ is produced. He uses the Latin term homo sacer – literally translated to ‘sacred man’ – to describe a life which can be “eliminated without punishment” , one that possesses no value to the state and therefore can be terminated without the act being considered a crime. Examples of this can be seen in people who experience ‘brain death’ and subsequently have their life support machine switched off, and in people in prison camps such as Guantanamo Bay. However, the biggest example we are given of bare life, is in the Jewish Ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust.
For Agamben, the camp acts as a paradigm for the boundaries between bare life and political existence, the fence that intersects the homines sacri from the people of juridical worth represents the line between ‘bare life’ and state recognition, between bios and zoe. He states that, “every society sets this limit; every society – even the most modern – decide who its ‘sacred men will be” . Therefore, the camp as an allegory represents the boundary that all societies set in which a person becomes bare life; it symbolizes the line of distinction. This, for Thomas Lemke, is a downfall of Agamben’s argument in the sense that it does not “analyse how inside ‘bare life’ hierarchisations and evaluations become possible, how life can be classified as higher or lower” . In other words, Agamben sees only the distinction between bare life and legal existence; he does not see the variations within them both, rather they are two homogenous groups of people with no internal structure – the ‘zone of indistinction’ . In focusing on the line that separates the two groups of people, Agamben fails to see the difference within the groups themselves. For instance, Rabinow and Rose note that, “it