Two or so years ago in the process of having my political mind entirely changed forever by reading Giorgio Agamben’s brilliant Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, I came across a lively section on the archetypal wolf-man, or werewolf. Agamben’s thesis in the book is essentially that, since Enlightenment thought and the construction of statehood as a rational institution subject to a code of normative ethics, sovereign state power has been based upon the principle of “exception.” The individual subject is theorized in Enlightenment political literature as being the result of the imposition of a political structure upon a natural “bare life.” Agamben counters this top-down theory by proposing that “nature” or “bare life” only becomes intelligible through the apparatus of sovereignty. The “natural” that lingers outside of the polity or municipality is always already formulated within state terms. The “state of exception”, popularized in World War II era by political scientist Carl Schmitt, is the concept of an emergency structure put in place, outside and beyond the written law, in particular situations (a recent example would be George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s suspension of international human rights laws, through torture and unjust imprisonment, in the name of defending “freedom” in wartime.) Agamben’s theory postulates, however, that state sovereignty is always already a state of exception: “rights,” as the bedrock of law, are always constructed by and “enforced” by the same powers that are supposedly equally subject to them. Thus state power is always already “outside” rights and the law. The rights that are based in “nature” and the natural sovereignty of the individual are codified by state power. The state is thus a liminal between-space, with nature and the political not as two poles but as between and within each other.

Agamben illustrates this theory with the archetype of the werewolf. The werewolf acts as a symbol of state sovereignty as the threshold between bios and nomos, between nature and the political. “It is a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.” The werewolf embodies the concept of liminality upon which state sovereignty is founded. Pretty cool, right? I realize I spent more time explaining Agamben’s central thesis than on the werewolf paradox, but it’s something to consider when thinking about the ways in which (fictional and nonfictional bodies) are simultaneously “natural” and continent/political.