Bare life (nuda vita) is Giorgio Agamben’s term for human existence stripped to its biological minimum — life that is included in the political order only by being excluded from it. Agamben develops the concept in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), drawing on Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty.
The homo sacer is a figure from archaic Roman law: a person who could be killed by anyone without the killing counting as murder, yet could not be sacrificed in religious ritual. The homo sacer exists in a zone of indistinction — neither fully inside political life (where killing is regulated by law) nor fully outside it (where killing has no political meaning). Agamben argues that this figure is not an archaic exception but the hidden foundation of modern sovereignty. The sovereign is the one who decides which lives count as political (citizens with rights) and which are reduced to bare life (the refugee, the detainee, the person on life support).
Bare life is not natural life. It is life that has been produced as bare by a political operation — the sovereign exception that simultaneously includes and excludes. The concentration camp, in Agamben’s analysis, is the paradigmatic space where bare life is produced: a space where law is suspended and the inhabitants exist as pure biological life under total administrative control.
The concept appears in the Write-for-a-Month: Zombie Novel curriculum as a theoretical foundation for Act I (Administration). The zombie is a figure of bare life taken to its limit: biological process continuing without political subjectivity, kept alive — or undead — by systems that have outlived their purposes.
Related terms
- biopolitics — the form of power that produces and manages bare life
- necropolitics — Mbembe’s extension to contexts where sovereignty operates through death
- ontology — bare life raises the question of what kind of existence the politically excluded inhabit
- auto-immunity — the immunitary logic that produces bare life as a byproduct of protection