We'll have a mostly Agamben week coming up (portions of part 3 of Homo Sacer, "The Camp as the Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern" on both days, with a short response question for Tuesday.

Our Tuesday readings include three relatively brief chapters, “The Politicization of Life,” “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man” & “Life That Does Not Deserve to Live” 119-143

On Thursday we'll have turn to the subsequent three, “’Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People’,” “VP” & “Politicizing Death,” 144-165

For our Tuesday short response, I notice an observation offered in the middle of the second chapter which appears to have pretty broad applicability across a number of the circumstances and examples that Agamben examines:

“One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes or separates what is inside from what is outside.”131

With this in mind try to find and briefly discuss a couple of similar junctures in the text (from elsewhere in our Agamben selections so far) where an apparent broader claim is made that captures something of what the author sees as at stake in these lines of inquiry.

Also, can you think of occasions or examples beyond the immediate text at hand that reinforce or challenge these points?What implications or consequences seem entailed?