Erēmos Aporos as the Paradigmatic Figure of Western (Thanato) Political Subject

The originary figure of the Western political subject is neither the Aristotelian zōon politikon nor the Agambenian homo sacer but the Socratic erēmos aporos. Like the Agambenian homo sacer, the Socratic erēmos aporos is abandoned by his fellow citizens, not outside the polis but in the polis, being a refugee in his own city. He lives, as Callicles says of Socrates in Gorgias (486c), “in his city as an absolute outcast.” Moreover, like the Agambenian homo sacer, the Socratic erēmos aporos also lives in a state close to death—“in a state as close to death as possible,” as Socrates says of himself in Phaedo (67d). However, there is a decisive difference between the Agambenian homo sacer and the Socratic erēmos aporos. Unlike homo sacer, the Socratic political subject is not abandoned by the sovereign but by himself through his own traumatic self-accusation. Furthermore, although erēmos aporos is also a “living corpse,” he is not thereby at mercy of the sovereign. On the contrary, it is he who has become sovereign, not because he has somehow managed to sublate his condition as abandoned and forlorn subject, but because this condition is the condition of sovereign freedom. In other words, it is neither his biological life in the order of nature (zoē) nor his form of life in the symbolic order of the polis (bios), not even his exposure to the threat of imminent death (homo sacer), but his symbolic suicide that renders him a sovereign individual subjected to no one. By removing the subject from his proper place in the symbolic order of the polis, such a suicide not only discloses subject’s unlimited responsibility but also renders him capable of transcending his limited position as a living being and becoming a thanatopolitical subject of his own biological death. Although such a subject also affirms life, life that is affirmed here is not mere life but sovereign life in the shade of the instinct of death.