Beyond Formal Freedom? Empowering Homo Sacer.

We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave’s mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself.1

In an arresting echo of Chesterson’s reflection on slavery, the psychoanalytic model formulated by Jacques Lacan outlines that as infants we are attached to our mothers, much like the slave who is attached to a concept of freedom. The infant eventually obtains its own conception of identity through the realization that it is not a bodily extension of the mother. This shift occurs the moment the infant sees itself in the mirror as a constituted whole apart from her.2 Yet in Chesterson’s logic, the slave will never attain the freedom granted to the child in Lacanian thinking. Freedom is made unattainable by the slave’s strictly defined position, unrecognised by the law but simultaneously defined by it and enslaved to it.

In the realm of contemporary capitalist existence, human identity is configured along political, social and economic axes that mark the individual as either included or excluded. Social inclusion stipulates that the populace has to be documented on paper in order to exercise full political autonomy as citizens - outlined, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.3 In order to exercise democratic rights, there must be, according to Roman archaic law, habeas corpus ad subjiciendum [a body in which to show].4 Those who lack documentation of their existence within the system, namely refugees and undocumented migrant workers, are outside the rule of law yet most significantly impacted by it. Their bodies, undocumented and therefore lacking access to basic human rights and protections, have become transformed into modern day slaves.

Heidi Kellett, "Santiago Sierra: HOMO SACER and the Politics of the Other"