“Bare Life” and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle

Giorgio Agambenʹs critique of Western politics in Homo Sacer and three related books has been highly influential in the humanities and social sciences. The critical social theory set out in these works depends essentially on his reading of Aristotleʹs Politics. His diagnosis of what ails Western politics and his suggested remedy advert to a "biopolitical paradigm," at the center of which stand a notion of "bare life" and a purported opposition between bios and zoe. Agamben claims that this distinction is found in Aristotleʹs text, in ancient Greek, and in a tradition of political theory and political society stemming from fourth-century Athens to the present. However, a close reading of Aristotle refutes this assertion. There is no such distinction. I show that he bases this view on claims about Aristotle by Arendt and Foucault, which are also unfounded.