Biopolitics : Antigone’s claim

The article discusses Giorgio Agamben’s notion of biopolitics as the fundamental event of the process of modernization. The notion of “bare life” becomes the center of modern State: it resides not on the margins of the political, but coincides with it. The exemplification of such a biopolitical body is the figure of homo sacer, which Agamben discerns in ancient Roman law: it is someone who may be killed without punishment whose life is beyond human or divine law. The notion of homo sacer finds its applications in different epochs and fields; for example, Judith Butler examines Sophocle’s heroine Antigone as the case of homo sacer: Antigone is a “living dead” in the sense of assuming a position for which there is no place in public space. Agamben states that such notion of “bare life”, which is excluded from the symbolic order, caused the emergence of biopolitics, the excessive consequence of which are the concentration camps. Slavoj Žižek goes even further saying that in today’s very democratic space we are all reduced to the status of objects of biopolitics. Politics today is reduced to biopolitics, which consists in the production not of life and death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival