Zoe / Bios (ζωή / βίος) — A Greek distinction between two senses of “life.” Zoe names bare life, the simple fact of being alive shared by all living things — humans, animals, and gods — that is, biological life in its most elementary sense. Bios, by contrast, denotes qualified life, life endowed with form and a proper way of existing: the particular manner of living of an individual or group, such as the life of the citizen, the philosopher, or the politician. The distinction is central to Aristotle, for whom the human being is zoon politikon (a political animal): unlike mere living (zen), the human end is “living well” (eu zen), which is fully realized only in the polis, in a community governed by speech and law. Thus the bios politikos — the active life of the city — is set apart from the bios theoretikos, the contemplative life devoted to knowledge. In the twentieth century, Giorgio Agamben revives this opposition in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) to analyze modern biopolitics. For Agamben, Western politics has from the outset been founded on the inclusion of zoe within the sphere of sovereign power: the Roman figure of the homo sacer — one who may be killed without the act counting as homicide or sacrifice — embodies this “bare life” captured by law. The concept engages directly with Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and with the notion of the state of exception, in which the border between zoe and bios becomes indistinct.
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