Abstract

FONSECA SANDOVAL, Sara. Life as Sovereignty’s Core Concept. Biopolitics and Exception in Giorgio Agamben’s Work, Convergences and Divergences with Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt’s Thought. Estud. Polit. [online]. 2021, n.60, pp.95-116.  Epub July 02, 2021. ISSN 0121-5167.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.espo.n60a05.

Sovereignty, state of emergency, biopolitics, and totalitarianism are the core concepts of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, which intends to describe how power is exercised in the modern State. This paper is a comparative analysis of Agamben’s proposal with Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt’s thought in order to identify the divergences and convergences between them. The Agamben-Arendt-Schmitt debate allows the understanding of the way in which the mechanisms of sovereign power work through the intervention in biological life and the use of legal tools, such as the state of emergency. Thus, it is possible to conclude that those topics are still prevailing, even when it seems to have been settled by the liberal hegemony, and the fact that the State is not likely to disappear but that its power is exercised in wider fields, in a more effective way, and with less evident effects.

Keywords : Political Theory; Biopolitics; Sovereignty; Exception Status.

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