Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series—the first part published originally in Italian in 1995—places the figure of the Muselmann (the paradigmatic “Homo Sacer” or Sacred man) and her “naked life,” in the center of modern politics. It encounters the traditional political stress on sovereignty (“the prince”) with its negative projections, i.e. the victim or the figure of the excluded. The Jew, the immigrant, the rebel—are the icons of a new form of politics here. Committed to a critical thinking beyond left-right divisions or beyond Christian-Judaic separation, Agamben stresses the “threshold” as his springboard for a new critical examination of the law (in both theological and political terms). The Homo Sacer, he tells us, is the one who could be killed but not sacrificed, who exists outside both human and divine law.

Agamben’s theory of politics identifies itself as “biopolitical critique.” It criticizes racial stereotypes side by side with other forms of “total sovereignty.” However, as such, it turns not only against explicit totalitarian regimes, such as Stalin’s and Hitler’s, but against the capitalist order, which identifies life with consumption, and the realization of the self with economic profit. Both fascism and capitalism try to reach a point of total control or a “total politicization of life,” according to Agamben. From this angle, the difference between totalitarianism and democracy is one of quantity, not quality, of coercion. In this brave new world, the Homo Sacer is no longer a Jewish Muselmann, but a Muslim immigrant, an oppressed woman, or a political critic.