Abstract

I. The New World Order The issue at the center of Giorgio Agamben's book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), that of the relation of bare life to politics and the law, has, in the ten years since the book's appearance, been propelled so forcefully into the foreground by events on the world political stage that Agamben's central figure has taken on an uncanny actuality.1The images broadcast around the world of Guantánamo Bay appear like visualizations of the homo sacer, the definition of which is he who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”2 Even more so…