While the distinction between zoē and bios disappeared from our languages, the split latent in their meanings came down intact to modern jurisprudence. The original title of the declaration of 1789 is: Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen which, according to Agamben, does not clarify “whether the two terms [“man” and “citizen”] are to name two distinct realities or whether […] the first term is actually always already contained in the second,”¹ that is, if the zoé (natural life) is contemplated as an intrinsic part of the bios (citizenship).

The overspecification of the rights of “the man and of the citizen” points to an intricate ambiguity:

human rights, in fact, represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoē) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty.²

Bare life, fragile and vulnerable from birth, is the pivot around which revolve the modern ideas of state and sovereignty a circumstance which, according to Agamben, who borrows the concept from Foucault, founded a biopolitics, that is to say, a politics in whose core is the manipulation of life in all its aspects.

In fact, our current locus terribilis is inseparable from this legal-political circumstance, it is a theatre in which sovereign power plays a determining role in the fate of the multitudes, which it treats with the contempt and indifference with which Cyrus the Younger treated the beasts in the paradeisos of his great-grandfather Xerxes, hunting prey for a young prince (0.3). What from the point of view of the sovereign is a Paradise—a closed park intended for hunting—is the locus terribilis for the herd. Truly, the human species is divided into herds of cattle, each of which has a master, who looks after it in order to devour it.

The savagery of our present terrible place becomes even more horrendous insofar as it tends towards the depolitization of society, that is, to the disappearance of the polis as the legitimate scenario of human relations. With this loss the exercise of power begins to focus exclusively on the manipulation of life in its facet of zoē and the minimization of any factor that relates it to the bios. We are, in the eyes of our leaders, about to become completely dehumanized, mere hunting prey. But our paradeisos is no longer a closed park, it is a global market in which each one of us becomes a mere commodity.³

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1. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, 18. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 19. ↩︎
3. Another way to verify the perilous disappearance of the polis and of politics as the scene and exercise of human interaction is through its definition as “the exercise of reason in the public sphere” (Achilles Mbembe, Necropolitics, 13). A world like ours in which reason (ratio) has ceased to be, for a long time now, the moral north by which society is governed, not only implies the disappearance of the usual scenario of sovereignty, —which is clearly beyond reason and sanity (0.15)—,but also explains the slow collapse of political institutions in the West since the French Revolution. This position, of course, is prefigured in Hobbes's Leviathan, which, through its refusal to elaborate its theory of government making use of the concept of summum bonum (greater good), the basis of rational ethics in the classical and medieval world, concentrates no longer on the exercise of reason but of passions which lead to the appearance of a summum malum (greater evil) that justifies and legitimates the rise of a sovereign who commands obedience and imposes order.