The Revolt of Bare Lives and the Return to Normality in Heroes Season One: Genesis (2006-07)

Abstract

Heroes exemplifies a revolt of homo sacer, a topological counterpart of the sovereign in Giorgio Agamben’s works on the state of exception and sovereignty. Through its rendering of the main characters’ struggles against the Company's conspiracy, this show portrays a political subject that attempts to constitute itself outside biopolitical sovereign power. Considering this political subject as an example of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's multitude, this paper argues that the main characters become a heroic collective: a group of people who can be heroic only as a group without an authoritarian leader. This paper's reading of the show also reveals that the heroic collective is compromised by the critical challenges that Hardt and Negri’s multitude often faces, as the struggles of the heroic collective degenerate into a conventional heroic myth: the community’s redemption through heroic sacrifice. While explicating the collective struggles of the heroic collective, this paper concludes that the heroic collective’s limitation in envisioning a new world underscores Hardt and Negri's fail to see past sovereign politics when they imagine another world.