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Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics And The Problem Of Violence: From Animal Laborans To Homo Sacer, Andre De Macedo Duarte

Andre de Macedo Duarte

In his work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben affirms that Arendt and Foucault were the contemporary political theorists that best understood the modern dramatic political shifts that culminate in the Nazi and Stalinist extermination camps. This text explores this insight and proposes to establish an Arendtian diagnosis of the present under the paradigm of biopolitics, defined as the unifying character of different contemporary violent phenomena such as: preventive and humanitarian wars; fanatical suicidal terrorist attacks aiming at the complete annihilation of its opponents; the utilization of chemical and bacteriological mass destructive weapons by States against civilian …