According to Agamben, the ambiguity that allows the sovereign to be simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order associates it with an obscure figure of Roman law: the homo sacer, a “sacred man” which anyone could kill with impunity but who, nevertheless, cannot be sacrificed to the gods; a figure that is outside of both human and divine justice and inhabits “a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.”¹ This zone, a clear threshold between the human and the divine, produces a symmetrical figure:

the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri [sacred men], and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”²

Thus, the double and inextricable figure of the sovereign/homo sacer is at the root of the dialectic of sovereignty which, since times immemorial, has tied the murderers to their victims.

The homo sacer's sacred nature, which belongs to the gods, associates it with another interesting figure of the Roman religion, the devotus, a man who, before going into battle, “consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger.”³ The fact that both the devotus and the homo sacer belong to the manes, a category of the di inferi (0.4, 0.10), reveals the link of the terrible places of sovereignty with the invisible world (0.11).

The act of consecration of the devotus to the manes was very particular: if the man died in battle the rite was considered fulfilled, but if he survived

then a seven-foot image (signum) of him must be buried under the ground and a victim must be immolated in expiation. And no Roman magistrate may walk over the ground in which the image has been buried. But if [the subject] does not die, he cannot perform any rite, either public or private…⁴

Since it is not possible to take back what has been consecrated to the di inferi, this funerary ritual in imago points towards the necessity to keep their promise to the gods. Now, the “unfortunate” situation of remaining alive after being consecrated results not only in the loss of the right to perform rites—which amounts to the loss of civil rights—it also implies a paradoxical situation: the devotus has ceased to belong both to the world of the living and to the world of the dead. He is a “living dead” which, like K. in The trial belongs to a threshold between Law and Life (0.9), a twilight in which one is “dead” to both.

---

1. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 48 ↩︎
2. Ibid., 53 ↩︎
3. Ibid., 59. ↩︎
4. Ibíd., 60. ↩︎