역문철 여행 인문학

호모 사케르 Homo Sacer는 '희생물로 바칠 수는 없지만 죽여도 되는 생명'이다. 고문헌 덕후인 아감벤이 옛날 문헌을 보다가 이상한 개념을 찾아냈다. 호모사케르라는 존재인데, 이들은 누구나 죽여도 살해의 책임을 지진 않지만, 희생물로는 바쳐질 수 없는 존재들이다. Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and might be killed by anybody, but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. 호모 사케르(라틴어로 "신성한 사람" 또는 "저주받은 사람"을 의미)는 로마 법의 한 인물입니다. 이 인물은 금지되어 누구에게나 살해당할 수 있지만, 종교 의식에서 희생되어서는 안 됩니다. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes the concept as the starting point of his main work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Roman antiquity The meaning of the term sacer in Ancient Roman religion is not fully congruent with the meaning it took after Christianization, and which was adopted into English as sacred. In early Roman religion sacer denotes anything "set apart" from common society and encompasses both the sense of "hallowed" and that of "cursed". The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person expunged from society and deprived of all rights and all functions in civil religion. A definition of homo sacer is found in Festus, who states 'homo sacer is est quem populus iudicavit ob maleficium; neque fas est eum immolari, sed qui occidit parricidi non damnatur'. Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as someone who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; and a person who cannot be sacrificed. The sacred human may thus be understood as someone outside the law, or beyond it. The term sacred man could also have been used because the condemned could only rely on protection of gods. A direct reference to this status is found in the Twelve Tables (8.21), the laws of the early Roman Republic written in the fifth century BC. The paragraph states that a patron who deceives his clients is to be regarded as sacer. The status of homo sacer could fall upon one as a consequence of oath-breaking. An oath in antiquity was essentially a conditional self-cursing, i.e. invoking one or more deities and asking for their punishment in the event of breaking the oath. An oathbreaker was consequently considered the property of the gods whom he had invoked and then deceived. If the oathbreaker was killed, this was understood as the revenge of the gods into whose power he had given himself. Since the oathbreaker was already the property of the oath deity, he could no longer belong to human society, or be consecrated to another deity.