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"it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of pure Being will we be able to master the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power, just as it may be, inversely, that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology. Brought to the limit of pure Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics (into reality), just as on the threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory."
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer1
In his early work on ontology and language, Agamben's primary philosophical concern is the factum loquendi, the fact that humans are speaking beings, distinguishing the human animal from other living beings and dividing us internally from the "mere fact" of our biology. Agamben's political works, are, by contrast, concerned with the factum pluralitatis, the "simple fact that human beings form a community."2 When, in the Homo Sacer project, Agamben turns to diagnose the way in which political community has historically been produced, the merely living being once again plays a decisive role: political community is possible, according to Agamben, due to the division between the juridically recognized and protected life of the citizen, and a politically unrecognized "bare biological life" that may be killed with impunity.
Agamben frequently intimates that there is a close relationship between ontology and politics, and his explicitly political texts draw on a range of concepts such as potentiality, play, and happy life, developed in his earlier first philosophical thought. Nonetheless, the nature of the relationship between the two remains indistinct, a difficulty that is particularly evident in the ambiguous role that 'bare life' plays in Homo Sacer. While the term principally refers to life that is excluded from the protection of the law, Agamben often also refers to bare life as zoe, natural or nutritive life, a move that conjoins the juridical problem of sovereignty to the philosophical definition of both the human as a speaking being, and the political as a linguistic form of life, and reworks the very idea of nature or zoe as it has been inherited from the philosophical tradition. What, then, is the relationship between the ontological fracture between the merely living...