Homo sacer

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Homo sacer (lat. Holy person ) is a legal term in Roman criminal law .

term

A person with the legal status of homo sacer was on the one hand considered to be outlawed and could be killed with impunity. On the other hand, he was also considered holy . Because of his holiness, he could not be sacrificed because he belonged to a certain deity. This legal figure came into play after breaking the oath. The oath breaker thus belonged to the deity in whose name the oath was taken. If he was then killed, it was seen as revenge from the deity - who was obviously deceived.

According to the Twelve Tables law (8.21), a patron who deceives his clients is banned as sacer and thus as outlawed and peaceless. The associated form of arbitrary arrest existed throughout Europe until 1679 , when the Habeas Corpus Act was introduced in England , according to which every prisoner must be brought to court in person within a period of three days.

reception

In the attempt of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to decipher the phenomenon of totalitarian ideologies in modern times and to further develop Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics under the aspect of the state of emergency , he uses the figure of the homo sacer as the basis for the considerations of his legal philosophical genealogy . Agamben here refers to the lexicon of Sextus Pompeius Festus .

Following Hannah Arendt and with reference to Agamben, Enzo Traverso sees the figure of the lawless and stateless as a resurrected homo sacer an emblematic figure of the European crisis that broke out in 1914 and developed into a Second Thirty Years War .

literature

  • Giorgio Agamben: Homo sacer. The sovereign power and the bare life. Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-518-12068-9
  • Giorgio Agamben (1993): Au-delà des droits de l'homme. In: Liberation v. 9/10 June 1993
  • Giorgio Agamben (2001): Beyond Human Rights. In: 'Subtropen' supplement to Jungle World No. 28/01. June 21, 2002
  • Carl Schmitt: Political Theology. Four chapters on the doctrine of sovereignty. 7th edition, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1996
  • Eva Geulen: Giorgio Agamben for an introduction . 3rd, supplemented edition, Hamburg: Junius, 2016.
  • Rainer Maria Kieswo: Ius Sacrum: Giorgio Agamben and naked law . In: legal history. Journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History 1 (2002) pp. 56–70 full text

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hannah Arendt, Elements and Origins of Total Dominion. Antisemitism, imperialism, total rule , Piper, Munich 2001, chapter “Aporia of human rights”, pp. 601–625.
  2. ↑ Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914-1945 , Éditions Stock, Paris 2007, p. 156.

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