Notes on Agamben’s Homo Sacer:

1. Starting our reading of “Homo Sacer”, I’m already feeling a big difference in the style of writing between Agamben and Zizek. I guess I’d gotten used to Zizek’s way of giving many popular examples and spiraling back to previous concepts. So far, reading Agamben seems certainly very different in that he very carefully progresses along the concepts and arguments.
2. I still don’t know how to answer the question raised at the end of the meeting: Are we all abandoned by the law? I’d like to better understand what he’s describing when he talks about the original form or relationship between law and life.
3. For another perspective on biopolitics, I would highly suggest the three-part documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis, in which he explores the effects of developments in biology and ecology on our collective consciousness.
4. Would it be fair to say that “Homo Sacer” tries to raise the question of why is it that democracy could create the space for dictatorship?… I’m really not sure how to formulate this question.
5. My attempt at clarifying Agamben’s ideas of “constituted” and “constituting” power: “Constituting” power is that which constitutes rules, or rather, that which actively creates rules. “Constituted” power is that which inherits, enforces, and upholds the rules, or rather, that which has rules bestowed upon it.
6. This note is about the notes themselves. I just wanted to share a nice experience I had that involved the notes and the new appreciation for them that it gave me… I recently attempted to synthesize answers to some questions concerning Zizek and Lacan from research I did that included several of our past notes. (I used our site’s search bar to find posts that had names or key words I was trying to reference.) It was nice because I had a very fuzzy memory of us either talking or writing about certain topics, but being able to go back and read specific notes and connect them to specific meetings/recordings helped unify the knowledge and insight we gained with other reference materials. Anyway, so this process helped me write what I feel were reasonable answers to the questions posed.
   But beyond providing a nice reference for knowledge, this small experience gave me a new perspective on our notes. I used to think of them strictly as a Circle member’s way of showing engagement with our reading (as is suggested in our Project), but now I also see them as a way of capturing the collective knowledge we gained for posterity. Some of these notes were so old that I hardly remembered reading them to begin with; I’m happy to see that through our notes, these bits of our knowledge stored for the future, for us and for anyone else out there reading them.
7. I’ve been trying to figure out why Agamben says the homo sacer is “essential” to the law according. I’m wondering if he’s essential because the law needs a way to assert its reach even over the things that are outside of it. That is to say, through the homo sacer, the law can show that it is even up to it to determine who is outside the law. Not sure; I would like to clarify this concept through further readings of Agamben.
8. What other examples of paradigms?