No time above the walled city by Gill Arno | 11:16
Music composed in Annandale-on-Hudson, Summer 2011.
Recordings and dumbphone shots collected in the surroundings of Frank Benson’s „Flag“ (2005), at CCS Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art.
Quoted text: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer – Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, published in the U.S.A. by Stanford University Press.
„The time has come, therefore, to reread from the beginning the myth of the foundation of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau. The state of nature is, in truth, a state of exception, in which the city appears for an instant (which is at the same time a chronological interval and a nontemporal moment) tanquam dissoluta. The foundation is thus not an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision. What is more, the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of the citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element, the Urphänomen of politics. Yet this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and the beast, nature and culture.“
G. Agamben