A_p

Slavoj Žižek
Ingo Günther
Matthew Hylan
K.Zakravsky

MEDITATIONS ON BARE LIFE

Katherina Zakravsky

I. Onion Theories
If we hear the expression "bare life" without refering to any particular theory connected to it we are immediately struck by its ambivalence. "Life" seems a clear term if it is used within a system of binary expressions. "Life" and "death" indicates that "life" is a state that can be lost. "Living" and "inanimate" means that "life" is a quality specific to certain beings only. Thus "bare life" sounds like "mere life" - the simply fact of being alive - not dead and not inanimate. Not a stone and not a corpse.
"Bare life" is the state that human beings - specimen of the human species - share with other organisms. We are facing the familiar grounds of "onion theory" here. "Onion theories" claim, that the specific qualities of all beings can be described starting with the most general qualities they share with others. These would be the "core qualities", the most general quality being "being" itself any being shares with all other beings. A complex being such as a human person would consist of many layers, the outermost layers being very specific individual qualities of character, biography, features, occupation etc., a medium zone of national, cultural, gender qualities and finally the more general and amorphous qualities such as "bare life". In this sense one could claim that "bare life" comes closest to "being" itself. If we stick to onion theories we would also expect that the outer layers may appear first, but they are thin and can easily be removed - remember Freud's talk of the thin veneer of civilization. The deeper down the human onion is peeled the more we encounter the thick and essential parts that become so general they cannot be described, but also not removed without destroying the whole onion. After all, an onion peeled off to its core still stays an onion.
Onion theories ask the question - or rather trigger a question they do not ask themselves - what stuff it is the human being is made of. There are various conclusions drawn from onion theories. The variant critical of civilization would discover the "ape man" or the "beast" underneath the thin layer of civilization. In this sense the core is a violent magma always ready to explode. Civilization is the pot to keep the pressure down. The core of man is animal - but not quite. It is an animal that went wrong, a monster. The esoteric variant concludes exactly the opposite. The outer layers of the onion are only a crust of dirt and dust covering and hiding a pure and crystalline core - the good, natural core of the human being as it was meant to be.
We still have to ask who or what is doing the peeling? Violent influences or indeed the onion theory itself? This theories, while claiming to explain something, already indicate that peeling is revealing. There is an uneasy feeling that there is too much information making up a human being - there should be a technical method to split the necessary from the unnecessary. So we can shift our train of investigation. We do not ask if the onion theory is appropriate, we ask: what is it that asks for reduction? Which desire for peeling humans is asking for onion theories?

II. "I am not alive"
"Bare life" - a simple fact. A state. What are its limits? If we are thinking within a simple binary code of "dead" or "alive" we know exactly what "bare life" is all about by knowing where it ends. "Bare life" simply is "not dead". In this sense the best expert for "bare life" would be the sovereign who decides about life or death - and the hangman who serves him (or her). We all probably know the child's lust of playing dead. I used to hang my head over the edge of my bed, trying to make by body absolutely limb. This is one effort to come to the border of "bare life", to find the shape and the limit of something so shapeless by touching it from its unreachable outer borders. Who ever asks about the meaning of "being alive" is sure to be already caught within this state. The limits of "bare lile" are dissolving in fog like our memories of the long forgotten day when being consciously awake first arose from the dreamy continuity of early infancy. Would this be changed by us being non-biological beings that do not grow up but are just switched on? Who knows. The android vamp in Philip K. Dick's "Balde Runner" is maybe the only character who can say "I am not alive". Let that resonate.

III. Jacob's Sheep
As unrecognizable as the limits of "bare life" is its scale. How much is "bare life"? How much is it worth? If peeling a person to bare life means reduction - how much is removed and how much stays left? Is it all the unnecessary luxury of civilized living in abundance that is peeled off leaving a sustainable core behind? We know the stories of survivors who just lost everything but they cry of joy not just like millionaires or kings but like gods, because they saved the only thing that really makes them rich - their lives. We can imagine a rich society traveling down the trail of decadence so far that there soon will be an industry that stages fake accidents and catastrophes to provide the enthusiasm of mere survival to the numb customers. As if we must always add one more unnecessary thing to our property because our senses became indifferent to the sensation of being alive. Yet life is one big process of gaining and losing, growing and shrinking. The living thing about life is the oscillation. It pulsates by involving the whole environment. Every living thing is growing this skin that is already a complex machine separating an inner and an outer space to make them exchange. How I love this old testament semantics saying that Jacob grew and Laban shrank - meaning the one having been a better expert in rearing sheep than the other.
For such an agricultural semantics Jacob and the sheep form one sphere of life. They share a metonymic relationship. You could not reduce Jacob to his own bare life by subtracting all his sheep - they are his bare life.