Has there been a time before homo sacer? A bios forfeited (proscribed, banned, vogelfrei) and stripped of significance, reduced to zero-status and at the same time unsacrificeable: how far back does the history of this life disposed and disposed-of, supplied and confiscated, go? The question is all the more inevitable as Giorgio Agamben does not subscribe to the confident gesture with which Michel Foucault assigned a date of emergence to Western modernity, a ‘birth’ of what he called ‘biopolitics’. A clean-slate type discontinuity, particularly the idea of modernity as innovation – whether the innovation is a point, or whether it extends over more than a century, makes no decisive difference here – leaves one with the possibility of a calendar, of a sequence of ages succeeding each other in one unique trajectory.

This is exactly what Agamben does not offer. Agamben's stakes in Homo sacer are incompatible with the paradoxically soothing aspects of an approach that deconstructs the Western episode in a series of successive and independent epigenetic creations – and it would be tempting to draw the line through to Martin Heidegger on Seinsgeschichte and historiality. Although Agamben is just as wary as Foucault (from whom his work has doubtlessly received its most decisive impulse, after Heidegger) of the implications of what has become identifiable as the ‘legal’ or ‘juridical’ style of approaching politics and especially biopolitics, and is just as wary of the legalism that unconfessedly inspires a field like epistemology, the results both philosophers reach with respect to historical ‘method’ – and, far more importantly, to history itself – diverge significantly.