Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the homo sacer — the Roman legal figure who can be killed but not sacrificed — as the paradigm for understanding how sovereign power operates by reducing subjects to bare life.
Sovereignty constitutes itself by deciding who may be killed without legal consequence; bare life (zoé) is excluded from political life (bios) precisely by being included as the subject of sovereign exception. The concentration camp is modernity's biopolitical paradigm.
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