Modern Politics in Giorgio Agamben´s State of Exception

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If Giorgio Agamben’s concept of nudity is accurately understood as the opposite of concealment, or the removal of a veil, then his work Nudities also shows us the truth about inoperativity. This philosophy is less concerned with laziness or sloth within humanity than with the continuation of human actions in the politics of the future. Modern politics are vastly concerned with the lives of people everywhere. Not just their state of living, but their ways of living. Privacy is drastically changing in a world where a sovereign power can decide one’s fate through the use of an exceptional scenario that bypasses the rights of citizens and the laws meant to uphold these rights. Agamben’s political outlook is concerned with the way in which this has occurred and what solutions there are to take the formerly extreme executive tactic to obtain power over one’s life and get back to a place where political life does not interfere with natural life.
In his major work State of Exception, Agamben builds an understanding of the evasion of laws in cases where it is necessary to keep legal order, and the confusing distinction between what should be considered legal and what should be considered illegal. Digressing from his more religious examples, he critiques the state of modern life further. Law and state differ in that the state can manipulate the law to meet its needs in governing a nation. Agamben tries to theorize how the state of exception can be both within and outside of the law when he writes how “the state of exception is not a special kind of law; rather, in so far as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept,” (SoE 4). His purpose is to point out the fact that after a certain point,...

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...s. Agamben’s state of exception, the difference between rights of the citizen and their life, is decided upon by the sovereign (government of a state).
The management of “bare life” is both a chief purpose of the modern state state. Agamben states, “Politics is now literally the decision concerning the unpolitical (the bare life of citizens)” (HS 173). His discussion sees modern politics as the development by which incorporating the ‘bare life’ of the marginalized within the political order of the citizen, but the means by which the exception, and the homo sacer and its “bare life”, becomes a modern experience: “the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm” (HS 9).

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