It is precisely this creation of a ‘threshold’ space, within which juridico‐political decision‐making finds validity, that delimits the ‘state of exception’ itself. Agamben, State of Exception, op cit, p 87. It is this form of inclusion through exclusion that Agamben designates as the ‘relation of exception’: a form of sovereign power and a ‘force’ of law that ‘consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority’ ( HS 18).ģ. Stemming from the Latin ex‐capere, which means ‘taken outside’, the exception is that which is ‘included through its own exclusion’ ( HS 170).

To fully understand this point it is pertinent to note the etymological root of the term ‘exception’. In Roman custom homo sacer was exemplified by the fact that he could not be subjected to a judicial execution – he exists outside the law of the city – but, in the role of an outlaw, he could be killed by anyone without that act being considered murder. The term ‘bare life’, as opposed to the literal Italian translation ‘naked life’ used in the original version of the book, has been largely adopted by translators and commentators alike.Ģ.

The phrase also has a counterpart in Walter Benjamin’s use of ‘bare life’ ( bloßes Leben) in ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). Agamben’s use of the phrase ‘bare life’ is related to the Greek term zoe and Hannah Arendt’s description of the refugee’s ‘naked life’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Currently professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Giorgio Agamben has progressed his theory of homo sacer, sovereignty and ‘states of exception’ in, respectively, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, hereafter referred to as HS followed by page number, and State of Exception, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2005.

State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben