HOMO SACER DWELLS IN SARAMAGO'S LAND OF EXCEPTION

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie within or outside the boundaries of the judicial order, but in a zone of indifference. The state of exception in which the norm is annulled represents the inclusion, which in turn captures the space in which law becomes suspended. Here, I discuss how the authorities in José Saramago's Blindness and The Cave function within the law of exception, confining and defining space, and ultimately marking the Homo Sacer.

Keywords:

• Homo Sacer
• Blindness
• The Cave
• José Saramago
• Giorgio Agamben

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

1 Gina Giannopoulou writes that this is an implicit allusion to the creator of humankind who was a divine potter (334).

2 In Jean Baudrillard's discussion of Borges’ fable, he argues how the cartographers’ map has become more real than the real, which he referred to as the hyperreal. If one needs to go back to the territory, one refers to the map, which has become to signify the real (1).