homo sacer

The theoretical discussion of the present paper is particularly based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben contextualized in Iris Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child (1975), written in the transitional period of the seventies England. It will inspect Agamben’s biopolitical insights to examine how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty considering the figure of a banished individual. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and ontological faculties of ‘love’, ‘homo sacer’ and ‘bare life’ allocated to the human being in Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child , this paper offers a different view of Murdoch’s inspirational emphatic love, socio-political abstruse problems in her novel arguing that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. It resounds through Agamben’s view as a never-ending struggle of human beings to underpin the messiness and cruelty of life in which characters are emotionally engaged and entrapped in order to examine some potentialities as the escape routes from the prevailing deadlocks of the era and eventually to trace, according to Agamben, a form-of-life that is called a happy life.

This study aims to show the reasons behind the capability of grief over the death of each person and how violence is performative in registering someone as livable or unlivable. This study also uses descriptive analysis methods and library research techniques. The main character in this novel Meftah, is an Arabic literature student, a religious person who works in the graveyard. This resulted in his recounting the story of the Sookhteh brothers whose deaths are not recognized so they are not mourned over properly. Through Butler's idea, the researcher tries to find out how livable and unlivable people are distinguished and what makes people believe that only registered lives are capable of being mourned over, and performative violence makes people differentiate between worthy and unworthy human beings.  The appearance of Homo Sacer is discussed in detail, the person who cannot be sacrificed but can easily be killed. It is deduced that people who are deprived of the primary conditions of life be it safety, welfare, or peace, as the main characters of this novel, don’t count as livable humans. They are not registered as humans, so they are not recognized and they become unrepresentable. Violence does not only lead to death but it also paves the way for people to ignore the death of some who are not subjectified and are not worthy of being grieved.

This essay revisits Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, only to fracture the coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between cultural grammars; it is a colonial deformation of ritual legibility, where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British interruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference: it inaugurates a “state of exception” in which the suspension of indigenous law reasserts imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic. Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing orders of ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics that overdetermine his body. His death, once a consecrated passage, becomes a foreclosure of sacrifice itself as a recognizable form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka does not illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose interrupted body is left neither sanctified nor redeemed, but suspended in the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.