The Power of Bare Life in Gotham:

Batman as Homo Sacer

Daniel J. Pool

















I Am Vengeance!
I Am the Night!
I Am... Agamben!
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What could black spandex, a penchant for kung fu and a street legal tank teach modern
society about political thought? The question seems odd, but in Christopher Nolans film The
Dark Knight brings up what place a political exception holds in humanity. Exceptions made to
the law sometimes must be made to protect that law. To better understand how Batman can
expand the meaning of political exception one should study Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer and
Christopher Nolans The Dark Knight.
The film is set in fictional Gotham City (The Dark Knight, 2009). Fashioned after New
York City having a hangover, the crime rate had steadily risen to the point that the mob families
no longer had to hide from the lawthey were the law. This is when Batman steps in (or rather
kicks) forcing the worst of the worst criminals out of town as a vigilante. Wearing a cape and
mask he fights the evil that the police cannot handle. Flash forward a year of crime fighting and
bat-a-rang tossing and we see that the major criminals are scared for their lives (Batman is
closing in on their money laundering) and minor criminals have grown superstitious about doing
anything illegal when the Bat-Signal is lit from the rooftop of the Major Crimes Department.
This is when Joker appears on the scene (Dark Knight, 2009). He is a force of criminal
nature indiscriminately murdering his way to the top. A biopolitical body created by the actions
of the sovereign (Agamben, 6). He seems less than human and is hunted like an animal by the
crime families when a large bounty is placed on him dead or alive, making him the wargus (104).
Like a half-man-half-animal he does not belong to civilized society or even to criminal society.
He himself states that he is just a dog chasing cars. I wouldnt know what to do with one if I
caught it, (Dark Knight, 2009). He is an agent of chaos destroying and stealing in a seemingly
random fashion (McGowan). Later in the film he even burns the money he fought so hard to gain
because he never cared about the money but the fear it would cause to steal it. He does not need
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money because it is a mark of inclusion; what he wants are bombs and gasoline. The reward of
destruction and chaos is payment enough for him.
Batman, on the other hand, stands vigilant over the city deciding who is worthy of living,
(without intervention) making him a type of sovereign over the city (Agamben, 15). This title
expresses his duality, being both an inclusion to society as Bruce Wayne (his public name) and
exclusion as Batman (his alter ego). As the Bat he decides the state of exception (11). He
controls the city through both his ego of being a rich philanthropist and as his alter-ego of
masked vigilante. He serves as a force of law, both deciding and creating what the law (27)
should be while always standing outside of it (17). Strapping on his finned gauntlets he embodies
the combination of Bia and Dik, violence and justice, or Nomos (31). This Nomos is justice
through strength. Batman cannot keep fighting every night; however, as his vigilantism is only
treating the symptoms of crime and not the underlying corruption it will outlast his reign (63).
Batman needs people who can show their face in public to take up his mantle of what he
stands for (McGowan). To take his place, Bruce picks Harvey Dent, Gotham Citys District
Attorney and White Knight. Joker decides to eliminate Harvey and his bride-to-be with a show
of force in a massive gas explosion. Batman (half) saves Harvey, however he is scarred both
mentally and physically from the event and his fianc does not survive. Recovering at Gotham
General Hospital, Harvey is visited by the Joker and given the choice to kill him. The Joker
defends his actions saying:
I dont have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am,
Harvey? Im a dog chasing cars. I wouldnt know what to do if I caught one. I just do
things. Im a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyones. Maroni has
plans. Gordon has plans. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I am not a schemer. I
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show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that
what happened to you and your girlfriend wasnt personal, you know Im telling the
truth.
Using the luck of a coin toss as the pure force of law (Agamben, 27) to determine where Harvey
should place his guilt he spares the clown and goes to hunt the corrupt police who kidnapped his
family (McGowan). Dent is filled with guilt for the law failing his fiance and becomes the man
without peace, the Friedlos, (Agamben, 104) becoming exactly the kind of man he had devoted
his life to putting behind bars. He had live[d] long enough to see [himself] become the villain.
Each one of these characters is a different kind of exception (McGowan). Whether they
hide their identity under a mask, smothered in paint, or burned away, they are set apart from the
rest of society by their ethics and not their appearance. The Joker himself remarks how ethics are
really only aesthetic choiceslike a good purple suit that he wears.
The physical transformation is an artistic display of the philosophical changes they
undergo in their internal struggle (Agamben, 107). Each character is reborn when they exercise
their ability to resist the violence of others and instead exercise the right punishing those who are
different from them (106). These violent forms of the exception are considered already dead
(105); Harvey is declared dead, the Joker can be shot on sight so he might as well be dead, and
the Gotham City Police have orders to arrest Batman. The exception to the law is chased even
though it helps in the protection and maintenance of that society (McGowan) because we must
chase [them] as Commissioner Gordon puts it.
What separates the Joker and the Batman in many ways is their choice of what they
attack. For Batman it is the protection and betterment of the polis but for the Joker it is the direct
interference with the zo of the city (McGowan). The Joker kills and tortures individuals in an
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attempt to create chaos and social awareness of the aesthetics of good and evil. By his games, the
Joker attempts to tempt the citizens into making the exception of chaos the rule (Agamben, 9).
His end goal is to constitute the hedonistic fascism of mob rule (11).
In order to disrupt the bios or community living (Agamben, 1) of Gotham the Joker
threatens the zo or bare life of the citys inhabitance (140). To do this the Joker blows up
hospitals and warns the city that any escape other than by boat would be booby-trapped (The
Dark Knight, 2009). This forces the citys peoples to try and leave the area by two ferries.
Furthermore the Joker decides to play different games such as kill-the-accountant (in which
hospitals will not blow up if a certain account for Wayne Enterprises is dead) and Two-Face
Harvey Dent goes on a corrupt police officer hunt. This makes the endangered citizens homo
sacer, or the sacred life, as they begin to turn on the very bios that had shielded them from being
in this sort of event (Agamben, 81).
Gotham at this time becomes like a concentration camp; a place created when the
exception becomes the rule (Agamben, 168-69). In the streets, justice and violence meet (Nomos)
(Agamben, 31) and creates a place where the law is suspended (169). The threshold between law
and fact blur together and the two become indistinguishable (171). The citizens act as the
prisoners and the forces of chaos/order (i.e. the police, gangsters, Harvey, Joker, and Batman) act
as the sovereigns (170). These sovereigns can then act as if there was no law as they create it as
the act and that power is realized normally. This is to say that Batman can break his moral codes
he would not otherwise and the police can act without warrants or proper paperwork.
The only way to end the chaos is for the Batman to capture the Joker or rather the only
way to bring homeostasis to the bios is for the Sovereign to capture the Wargus. To do so
Batman must bring the Joker within his sovereign sphere or a zone of indistinction between
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sacrifice and homicide (Agamben, 83). Because Joker is a homo sacer he can be eliminated
without being a sacrifice or murder however he must be within Batmans sphere of control. Like
a city police officer who cannot chase a criminal onto the highway without special permissions
so too Batman needs a jurisdiction over Joker
1
. For a normal man this would mean filling out
paper work and following clues from different crime scenes. For Batman he creates a machine to
create a surveillance network
2
over the whole of Gotham using cellphone signals (The Dark
Knight, 2009). In this way he reduces the city to Agambens bare life by invading every message
and packet of information that the citizens create.
Once finding the Joker, Batman engages him in hand-to-hand combat that ends with the
clown hanging upside down from a grappling hook (The Dark Knight, 2009). The Joker remarks
about how, This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object. You
truly are incorruptible, which outlines how their roles interact. They are like Nietzsches
Dionysus and Apollonian, each at one end of the scale. That is to say Batman will not kill
anyone, even someone as worthy of it as the Joker because he is the representation of pure order
just as the Joker is the pure representation of chaos. They are weights on a balance beam needing
one another to keep the other from falling off. They are unstoppable and unmovable because they
need one another. If a sovereign does not have a wargus then the people do not need a sovereign.
In this way Batman and Joker are producers of tension creating debasing Gotham to bare life. I
think you and I are destined to do this forever, says the Joker hanging from a forty story
building. They are perpetual opposites of exception. Without one of the two the other would not
exist. However it is this tension that Gotham now needs in order to operate because the exception
has become the rule and bios and the zo are now one in the same (Agamben, 38).

1
Just like a certain Chinamen from earlier in the film.
2
Much akin to Foucaults Security.
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By studying the characters of Bruce Wayne Batman, Harvey Two-Face Dent, and the
Joker one can see the contemporary figures of exception, those individuals who are included in
society by their exclusion. Furthermore by exploring the forms of violence and punishment in
Gotham one can better understand the place that bios and zo hold in law. In conclusion,
Agambens theory of bare life is a relevant reading of modern political struggle as well as
popular culture as it describes the exception of the heroes and villains.

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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1998.
Dark Knight, The. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, and Heath
Ledger. Warner Brothers, 2009.
McGowan, Todd. "The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight." Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media 51.Spring (2009).