BETWEEN THE POLITICAL AND THE SACRED: THE CONTEMPORARY HOMO SACER

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the state of exception in a permanent, a fundamental element of democratic regimes in the contemporary world, which generates the tension between resentment – fomenting sovereign power – and the elaboration of a new ethics, with new humanizing principles. The materialization of this incongruity appears in the figure of the homo sacer – subject who can be radically despised and, at the limit, annihilated, without such an act being liable to punishment to those who have given it cause – for being paradoxical, inasmuch as is excluded, cast into an indeterminate zone, making it invisible to biopower. On the contrary, its survival denounces the presence of the state of exception, bringing out an urgency of the desecration of the mechanisms that have been sacralized by biopolitics. Between the political and the sacred one faces the politicization of death insofar as the exception experienced in concentration camps and prisons is transplanted out of these realities. This fluctuation of the death from dark areas to theoretically ordinary contexts, provides discrepancies between technique and ethics, medicine and law, preservation of life and human dignity. It is confronted with questions of deep bioethical content when naked life is exposed in its extreme vulnerability.