The theological dimension of homo sacer’s abandonment remains unread in Agamben

Evidence

There is a strange moment in Homo Sacer that engages the question of belonging and abandonment, of belonging-in-abandon, while throwing something like a dark light unto the remnant constituted and deconstituted by “The Savages.” Having defined homo sacer as “a person who is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law,” Giorgio Agamben goes on to describe the particular mode of exception under which “homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability.” One may understand this not falling under divine law while nonetheless belonging to God as the structure of the exception as included exclusion as Agamben describes it. 55 And yet the question of how to describe a belonging that would not be within the law remains. The question is made all the more urgent when Agamben argues that the task of political theory is to find a space that would be void of relation, and most particularly of relation to law, even in the mode of the exception, even in the ban that banishes the subject from law: “Only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law (even that of the empty form of law’s ‘being in force without significance’) will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty toward a politics freed from every ban.” I cannot presume to answer to this daunting imperative, but I do want to suggest that what could be called its theological dimension remains to be read. My question, then, is how does homo sacer “belong” to God? And is this belonging still a relation? — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 766

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Agamben’s homo sacer and state of exception to the exclusion/inclusion structure of the Jew as enemy threaded through the whole book.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how the theological reading of the ban restructures Agamben’s political theory.