About Homo Sacer and Iustitium: Two Models of Sovereing Exception. From Rome to our days

Abstract

Agamben suggests a view about the homo sacer from a sentence from Festus. What this text proposes is to review some Agamben’s statements, tracing them on roman literary context, and assuming a series of continuities since Arcanum imperii until these days. At the end of the text, there will be two conclusions: one can be read as a result of Agamben’s analysis; the other one as a result for the route made on the text and related with Argentinean situation that took place during 1976-1983. After Agamben’s text, we can conclude that the relationship between power and life configures the environment of politics, acknowledging that the heart of politics is the state of sovereign exception, where life has been trapped since the beginnings up to our days. On a different aspect, going through the text itself —particularly over iustitium figure— it will appear that it’s a mistake to consider “National Reorganization Process” as a dictatorship, since it’s rather a moment of rights suspensions. There resides the difficult to judge the facts occurred during the periods of rights