My first encounter with what Agamben calls bare life (0.10) took place in a Kafkaesque setting. A few years before dying my father came down with a bout of pneumonia that kept him at death’s door for little less than a week. When we arrived at the hospital his lungs were almost completely compromised by the infection and his breathing had been reduced to a bubbling, intermittent wheezing. His Alzheimer’s, then in its early stages, took a turn for the worse and he stopped recognizing my mother and I, his immediate surroundings became an ever-shifting nightmare scenario. While I was in charge of taking him from here to there for his tests my mother took care of the paperwork. By the second day, when it seemed that my mother had also contracted the pneumococcus, I had to take care of both of them as well as of the bureaucratic procedures. The hospital to which we had taken my father, the one closest to our apartment, was not affiliated to our health provider and we had to struggle for days so that he would not be transferred to another hospital while he was in critical condition.

The first day, when I was taking my father to have a chest X-ray, I understood the fragility and vulnerability that defines us as lifeforms. Delirious, babbling as much as his breathing allowed, his eyes had lost the shine that set him apart as a person, his face had been stripped of any trace of sociability, the mask of bios had collapsed. His fear and suffering were more like those of a wounded animal than a man’s, his gaze, completely unintelligible, revealed no trace of personality. Without the help of another human he would have died in a matter of hours. His condition, subject to the vagaries of a mediocre health system, was that of bare life, zoē in its purest state.

Fortunately, my mother’s congestion turned out to be a common cold that didn’t get any worse nor require special care. On the sixth day of hospitalization my father’s lungs had cleared considerably and on recommendation of our doctor I started taking him on walks on the hospital grounds. Still delirious, as his mask reassembled, he believed he was being held against his will in an incomprehensible place, a labyrinth of corridors—which were really just two T-shaped pathways—that seemed to multiply and bifurcate at each step in his mind. Like Josef K. in The Trial, my father wanted to understand why unknown powers continually hindered his exit from such a terrible place, but in his condition no explanation was ever enough. At times he thought he was being detained because of some distant fault he could not remember anymore. Above all, he wanted to leave the hospital/labyrinth, but when he arrived home he couldn’t remember it either; he was stuck in a threshold which he could neither enter nor exit.

The locus terribilis is both a legal-political state of life in society as well as a mental state. It is a few steps beyond health, reason and sanity, which is precisely where our society lies at this time.