On Homo Sacer and Agamben

For class we are given the introduction to Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and selections from The Open. There are many ideas in these dense texts that revolve around the concept of life. Agamben brings up "homo sacer", "bare life", "good life", and in the other reading "umwelt" which I think can link back to the idea of the zombie well enough, with specifically George Romero's Day of the Dead in mind. However, I had to travel to the internets to help myself even begin to unpack what is being said.

In Homo Sacer Agamben talks about old Roman laws and quotes Aristotle frequently. A big idea he borrows from Michael Foucault is the idea of "biopolitics" in which politics are ingrained entirely into human lives. I don't think this is to say that politics have a complete controll over lives, but more that one cannot really have life without the other. It seems to me that politics exist for the lives of people and the people exist within the politics. It's almost symbiotic. This ties into what Agamben refers to as a "bare life" where a person's rights as a citizen are removed yet he still lives, able to be killed by anyone yet still sacred, i.e. "Homo sacer". Even with bare life where your rights are all removed, you are included in society by that very exclusion, as Agamben puts it. This is opposed to a "good life", which isn't used as often, but is implied that it is a life with politics and the use of those rights.

From this it seems clear to me the parallels between a bare life and the existance of a zombie. Zombies are exempt from any sort of political laws or restrictions but are still able to be killed by the humans on the other side. In Day of the Dead, even when the society at large has apparently broken down there is still a functioning group work within the military research bunker, much how biopolitics posits that politics are so ingrained in human life. Even with some ten people together, the zombies are still treated as Homo sacer by the people and the scientists. The only way to keep the zombies within the percieved laws of this new organization is by force. In the case of "Bub" the zombie test subject, the idea of biopolitic surfaces again a little as he does an instinctive salute motion to the Captain Rhodes' uniform, showing that even though zombies are removed from society and politics there is still a memory of it that keeps them included yet excluded.

Lastly, in Agamben's excerpts from "The Open" I found an interesting idea in his reporting on the "umwelt". This is the sense that what is the world view to us is different than the world view of say a rat or a spider or a plant. There is no way for us to understand how another animal might see the world. An interesting anecdote I remember is of the bee that was ingesting honey. Even if its abdomen was severed, it would continue to drink the honey because it saw that it had to, that gathering the honey was its purpose. In "Day" we are shown that zombies consume, yet have no physical requirement to do so. This is their "umwelt", which we as living humans cannot fathom. If we're full, we stop eating. Zombies will keep eating and keep existing.