Summary of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is the one who grants the power to proclaim a state of exception, then he stands outside the juridical order, but he belongs to it because it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in its entirety.

#2 The exception is what cannot be subsumed. It defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical for mal element: the decision in absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid.

#3 The exception is an element of law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. What is excluded from the general rule is an individual case, but the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not absolutely without relation to the rule.

#4 The structure of the juridico-political order is that of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside it. The exception defines the structure of sovereignty by allowing what is outside to be included through an interdiction, and in this way, the system constitutes itself as an exterior to itself.

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Release date

E-bog: 20. maj 2022