Bare Life: The Refugee in Contemporary Israeli Art and Critical Discourse

It has been over a decade since the publication of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, yet the notion of "bare life," evolved from the scathing biopolitical political analyses of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, has gained theoretical momentum in art and critical discourse only recently. 1 At the same time, its increasing deployment in these arenas has, for better or worse, risked diluting the concept into a synonym for a quasi-existentialist subjectivity; the resulting pluralism has tended to neutralize the concept. 2 In the following argument, by contrast, I will try to locate a critical position in both the visual and the theoretical fields in order to resituate the biopolitical force of bare life.