One of the most important new concepts introduced in contemporary theory is Georgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. (see article here)

To develop the paradoxes of bare life, let us begin with Agamben’s definition of this concept. Reworking Aristotle’s [2] and Hannah Arendt’s [3] distinctions between biological existence (zoe)and the political life of speech and action (bios), between mere life and a good life, Agamben introduces in Homo Sacer his own interpretation and his own necessarily selective genealogy of “bare life” from antiquity to modernity. Stripped from political significance and exposed to murderous violence, bare life is both the counterpart of the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the target of sovereign violence. To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to stress the point that is made sometimes only implicitly in Agamben’s work and not always sufficiently stressed by his commentators: namely, the fact that bare life, wounded, expendable, and endangered, is not the same as biological zoe, but rather the remainder of the destroyed political bios. As Agamben puts it in his critique of Hobbes’ state of nature, mere life “is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (1998, 109). More emphatically, the conclusion of Homo Sacerstresses the fact that “[e]very attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios” (187). To evoke Theodor Adorno, we could say that bare life, not only the referent but also the effect of sovereign violence, is damaged life, stripped of its political significance, of its specific form of life.