Emerging from a nine-volume canon, Agamben’s ideas offer a rich reflection on the inner workings of sovereign power and its relationship to people living in the state. Often intimately tied to ideas of statehood, sovereignty, for the Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b1942), is much more concerned with power and the capacity of the sovereign to order life.
The concept of sovereignty has provoked a vast set of literatures seeking to better understand the roots, manifestation, performance, evolution, and contestation of sovereign power. The Al Khalifa’s decision to strip him of his citizenship – along with countless others - was the action of a sovereign using all manner of technologies of control in support of regime survival. In doing so, he became stateless, devoid of legal rights or protection and his life stripped of the political meaning that had been his cause for so long. At the time of our conversation, however, the man was not a citizen of Bahrain, having had his citizenship revoked by the ruling Al Khalifa family.
The man, a former Member of Parliament in Bahrain, welcomed me into his home during Ramadan to discuss the events of the Arab Uprisings. In the summer of 2013 I sat in the home of a man who in the years that followed would become a close friend.
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