homo sacer

is he who one can kill without it being deemed murder.

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide... in the first Tiburtinian law, in fact, it is noted that if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide. This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. [Homo sacer, 1995, p. 71]

is one who was accidentally missed by the bomb, as it were, and thus serves as the living dead to whom any atrocity is free to be perpetrated.

In a debate about the fate of Guantanamo prisoners on NBC about a year ago, one of the weird arguments for the ethico-legal acceptability of their status was that 'they are those who were missed by the bombs': since they were the target of the US bombing and accidentally survived it, and since this bombing was part of a legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were taken prisoners after the combat whatever their situation, it is better, less severe, than being dead. . . This reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoner almost literally into the position of living dead, those who are in a way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his life no longer counts' (Zizek 'Biopolitics: Between Terri Schiavo and Guantanamo' Artforum December 2005).

homo sacer, n.All

homo sacer