Фабрика за живот. Голият живот и кризата на политическото
Life Factory. The Bare Life and the Crisis of the Political

Summary/Abstract: What is today the destiny of the Hobbesian notion for ‘life pure and simple’ and hence the destiny of the complicated intertwining of the modern positive law and ‘premodern’ natural law? The present article is trying to shed some light on this question by analyzing one of the symptomatic figures of contemporary philosophy – that of the bare life. We know it – this notion is present in the subtitle of the already notorious book of Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), to which with no doubt it has to thank for its universal success. Unlike Benjamin and under the decisive influence of Foucault’s theses on the biopolitical, Agamben conceives bare life as a product of the fundamental for the modern politics biopolitical operations. If Benjamin introduces in his essay Critique of Violence the notion das Blosse Leben, in order to designate the starting point of the vitalist ideas for life as value in itself, Agamben thinks it as a conclusive result of political techniques, in the regime of which functions the ideology of vitalism itself. In any case the political ambiguity of the notion of bare life is obvious. Is the critical risk that Agamben has taken enough to bring to a successful end the critical operation? Is the notion of bare life not by itself a symptom of the present crisis of the political? This analysis of the notion in question and the relevant figures of ‘the Muslim’ in the concentration camps, the Führer and the Messiah is aiming at criticizing Agamben’s theses, but at the level at which the Italian philosopher sets himself the task: the task of the radical critique of the modern logic of the sovereignty and its contemporary transformations.

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