In Defence of the Terror. Sophie Wahnich

historiographical dimension of this criticism is still more explicit in Agamben’s Means Without End: ‘[In] all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day . . . the state makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty.’12 And the historical parallel between revolution and totalitarianism is made still more explicit in an article titled ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?’, in which Agamben maintains that

      starting with the French Revolution, sovereignty is entrusted solely to the people, the people become an embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the first time as an intolerable scandal in every sense . . . From this perspective, our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded.13