Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Bare Life and Death

I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s excellent treatise on the ‘sacred man’ who can be killed but not sacrificed (owing to his reading of Carl Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’). I’ll write more on this later, but there’s one excellent quote which I simply couldn’t resist typing it right now:

The principle of the sacredness of life has become so familiar to us that we seem to forget that classical Greece, to which we owe most of our ethic-political concepts, not only ignored this principle but did not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that we indicate with the single term ‘life.’ Decisive as it is for the origin of Western politics, the opposition between zoe and bios, between zen and eu zen (that is, between life in general and the qualified way of life proper to men), contains nothing to make one assign a privilege or a sacredness to life as such. Homeric Greek does not even konw a term to designate the living body. The term soma, which appears in later epochs as a good equivalent to our term ‘life,’ originally only meant ‘corpse,’ almost as if life itself, which for the Greeks was broken down into a plurality of forms and elements, appeared only as a unity after death. ((Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 66))

I love especially this last sentence, where life is only considered as a unity after death. This of course has many resonances with Buddhist thought, where there is no ‘unity’ to life, at least not in the ‘individual,’ whose existence may be described only a play of forces mis-cognized as a ‘self.’ The individual’s life dissolves in death, and is reborn in life, on and on and on, until the cognition of no-self is truly achieved, and enlightenment occurs.

Similarly to the note regarding the Greek concept of Soma, we can note that in Khmer as well, the word for body (khmaoch) also means corpse.