Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, formoflife and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings.

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what bare life zoe, as opposed to bios, that is qualified life is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate political beings from bare life has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of bare life as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life , but existing with regard to the good life which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the good life that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this good life. Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient

Source: Wikipedia