Professional Documents
Culture Documents
he compares Schmitt and Benjamin (Agamben 2003:89109). In Agambens reading, for both Schmitt and
Benjamin 172 The Jargon of Exception the stake of the political game is anomiethe failure of the state to
reign in undetermined life. The historical reference was the radical polarization of German society by
revolutionary movements, economic crisis, and the political weakness of the Weimar republic. Schmitt
seeks to bring anomie back into the folds of law by positing a sovereign who simultaneously enacts anomic
and legal life and therefore has the capacity to impose rules of right and wrong upon anomic life. Anomie is
primarily defined as a normative vacuum that needs to be brought within a normative framework. To do
threshold between anomy and law. Working across this threshold is the
central constitutive element of juridico-political ordering . Benjamin on the other hand
seeks to free anomie completely from law. He is looking for a concept of violence that is neither
constitutive of law nor constituted by law. He calls this divine violence which is a form of violence that
has no reference to law; it simply is violence that articulates its own existence (Benjamin 1996). Against
Schmitt, Benjamin seeks to retain anomie as pure life, empty of any determination. Benjamins anomie is
the emancipation of life from law. In this reading, the state of exception is a zone of absolute
indeterminacy between law and anomie. The sphere of creation (life) and the juridical order (law) are both
dragged in an eschatology without end where there is no redemption, no transcendence of the factuality of
being. It is a catastrophe in which the dialectic relation between law and anomy ceases to structure
societal and political practice. The political is not about bringing camps and revolutionary action back into
the folds of a constitutional order. On the contrary, the political stake is the enactment of anomie that has
completely broken its relation to lawin other words, a revolution and violence that are simply means
without redeeming ends (Agamben 2003:9699). In line with Benjamins notion of divine violence,
Agamben draws a radical, systemic split between law and politics . Life is no
longer politically enacted through a dialectic play between a
normative force that seeks to constrain politics by crystallizing a rigid
normative system and an anomic political force that seeks to transgress law
by applying the force-of-law without norms. Politics and law become both
simply living practices that may refer to each other but that are actually not
related (Agamben 2003). For Agamben, this condition of the exception-asthe-rule makes debates about suspending rights of due process to
address a severe security threat, seeking to reframe the balance
between liberty and security, and asserting the necessity of
executive decision to tackle a severe crisis illusory. They attempt to
reproduce a situation in which power remains defined in its relation to law
either constrained by it or transcending itwhen in fact the dialectic between
anomie and law that makes such references politically significant no longer
operates effectively. These illusory debates are not without political significance, however. It has
an important ideological function, according to Agamben. They nurture the idea that law has still a grip on
politics and life, while the practices that are deployed are radically detached from any legal framework. In
hiding this radical change in the nature of political power, debates like the one on reconciling liberty and
security become an ideological move that reads a radical transformation in the exercise of power back into
a familiar framework as if nothing has really changed. In Agambens understanding of the current
predicament, such a move sustains the direct exercise of political power on life which manifests itself
among others in camps but also in the violent interventionist international politics following 9 11
(Agamben 2003:144148). Agambens exception-as-the-rule differs from the idea that law is a political fig
leaf. The point is not that law is used to legitimate self-interest but the more radical idea that the relation
Under the
exception-as-the-rule, politics does not require law to legitimate itself ;
political history is beyond the legal political dialectic. The idea of legitimacy
retains the idea that the relation between law, as a legitimating practice, and
political power is an important stake that structures political debate and
practice. Defining the new politics of exception-as-the-rule, however, are the
practices that radically separate powerand violencefrom law (Agamben
2003:148). In the latter condition, politically significant life runs its course
without regard for law or legal practice and law becomes a self-referential
practice that operates at a great distance from factual life. It is a condition of anomie
between law and politics has become an historical Jef Huysmans 173 ontological irrelevance.
that is empty of any determination of life (Agamben 2003:89109). This leads us to the second difference
between Schmittean exceptionalism and Agambens definition of the exception-as-the-rule.
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-the-stateand-the-concentration-camp/)//MEB
Violence by soldiers and police also expressed the logic of
sovereignty. In Sherene Razacks study of the peacekeeping intervention in Somalia for instance,
soldiers explained and tried to excuse abuse on grounds such as that the context was hostile, that it was a
chaotic Hobbesian state of nature, and that the normal expectations of everyday life had broken down .
The sociology of police, conducted by authors such as Robert Reiner, shows that
police also think of certain social groups including black
communities, marginal poor communities, and dissident activists
as police property who are outside normal protections, to be
treated according to order rather than law. To an extent, ideas such as
states of exception and homo sacer are also applied to issues such as the AIDS crisis in Africa, where
people are treated by rich western countries as not worth saving because of their poverty and
marginality, though this kind of use is more contentious. The application of Agamben in such cases often
shades over into discussions of Foucaults work on governmentality, or everyday techniques of
government power, which produce a kind of micro-sovereignty diffusing the power of decision among
experts.
"whatever being."
More recently he has used the term "forms-of-life." These concepts come from
that is 'man'."
For Benjamin and Agamben, mere life is the life which unites law and life. That tie
permits law, in its endless cycle of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power .
The total
condition that is man refers to an alternative life incapable of
serving as the ground of law. Such a life would exist outside
sovereignty. Agamben's own concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of
varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also shaped by several particular dense thinkers,
including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever being, in its
in this distinction, and empowered to decide on the value, and non-value of life (1998: 142). Since then,
every further politicization of life, in turn, calls for "a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which
life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without
punishment" (p. 139).
Links
Surveillance
Surveillance is key to the sovereign normalizing the
exception
Douglas, 9 (Jeremy, independent scholar, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//MEB
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal
dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and
exceptional. Thus,
practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry (ibid). These
new control measures have created a situation in which not only is there no clear distinction between
private and political life, but there is no fundamental claim, or right, to a political life as such not even for
citizens from birth; thus, the originary biopolitical act that inscribes life as political from birth is more and
more a potential depoliticization and ban from the political realm .
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//MEB
This politics of potentiality is created through the de facto laws of state of exception legislation like the
Patriot Act. Looking at actual parts of the Act, we can see that it
exemplifies the state of emergency referred to by Agamben et al.;
the normal law of the state is not abolished but its application is
suspended so that it still technically remains in force (Agamben
2003, 31). As such, the suspension of the normal application of the
law is done on the basis of its right of self-preservation (Schmitt
1985, 12), so that the exception is that which must produce and
guarantee the norm. Obviously then the state of exception is not intended to be anything more
than a temporary safeguarding of normal law. In fact, there can be no normal law without the state of
exception: the state of exception allows for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order
(Agamben 1999, 48). The use of the state of emergency to protect the normality of the legal order dates
back at least as far as the Roman Empire. Whenever the Senate believed the state to be in danger, they
could implement the iustitium, which allowed for the consuls to take whatever measures they considered
necessary for the salvation of the state (Agamben 2005, 41) Looking back at the Judean Roman camp
example, the detention of the Jews could be seen as enacted during an iustitium when Jewish
rebelliousness was endangering the newly acquired Roman providence of Judea. The iustitium, as with
between ancient and modern camps. Moving away from ancient examples of the state of exception and
powers that are clearly distinguishable from normal law. The Patriot Act, to be sure, is clearly identifiable
from normal US law, but The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 was not passed under that name
(nor under the alias Patriot Act II), but was tacked on to other Senate Bills piecemeal. For example, some
enhanced surveillance measures were not passed under the Patriot Act, but were passed into US Code -
NSA
Minor reforms wont fix the NSA or the broken system
behind it exception is the rule and the aff wont solve
Lennard, 14 (Natasha, writer covering civil liberties, dissent, and
nonelectoral politics, Obama weighs NSA reform, but our surveillance
state is going nowhere
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/09/obama_weighs_nsa_reform_but_our_
surveillance_state_is_going_nowhere/)
Anyone investing much hope in President Obama reining in National Security Agency surveillance practices
is not paying enough attention. The line from the White House feeding excitable headlines about likely
big reforms is worthy of scrutiny (as, of course, is any line from the White House). The president is
expected to heavily restrict spying on foreign leaders an NSA practice revealed by Edward Snowdens
leaks that understandably prompted a diplomatic firestorm from U.S. allies, like German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, whose phones were being NSA surveilled. Obama is also reportedly (and somewhat more
significantly for the rest of us) considering restricting the NSAs bulk hoarding of Americans telephonic
data. The latter reform was among the bolder suggestions made to the president in a report compiled late
last year by an advisory counsel. Six months after Snowdens first revelations about NSA dragnet
it is crucial to
consider what is at stake in these reform efforts and where their
limitations lie. I propose (and havemade this point here before) that there
are profound limits to how far greater transparency and oversight of
the spy agency will go in reining in our current state of totalized
surveillance. A vast corporate-government surveillance nexus is intractably
part of (and gives shape to) contemporary life under late capitalism; it wont
crumble with a handful of government reforms. Secondly, reforms to NSA practices
would be a Pyrrhic victory if Espionage Act charges facing Edward Snowden are not dropped. So long
as Snowden continues to face persecution for bringing the extent of
NSA surveillance to light, it is clear that we live in a dangerous
national security state: Control over truths about government
activities that affect us all remain in the hands of the few and the
powerful. The pantheon of persecuted U.S. whistle-blowers Snowden and Chelsea Manning chief
surveillance came to light, and with the sniff of coming reform in the air,
among them should stand as a chilling testament to the governments war on information, which
proceeds unabated.
punishment.
The strongest reform reportedly under consideration by the president (and so the one I
will focus on here) would see the end of the NSAs dragnet collection of U.S. citizens call data. This is
significant:
Under proposed reforms, telecom companies, not government spy agencies, hold on to users
communications data, but and this is crucial in a format that makes the data readily accessible to the
NSA. The NSA would be able to access the records only by obtaining separate court approval for each
search, though exceptions could be made in the case of a national security emergency. The first point to
note here is that if separate court approval entails something akin to the furtive decision-making of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, this is hardly reassuring. Secondly ,
Privacy Rights
Privacy right schemes fail security justifies exceptions,
surveillance will continue to be extended
Buscher et al. 13
Terrorism
Securitization for the war on terror leads to the
suspension of basic rights, and a permanent state of
exception, which blurs the line between military and
civilian and suspends basic human rights such as privacy
Buscher et al. 13
(Monika Buscher, PhD in Sociology, Professor at Lancaster University, Lisa
Wood, lecturer in Social Sciences at Lancaster Medical School, and Sung-Yueh
Perng, Postdoctoral Researcher on the Programmable City project, worked in
the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, Privacy, Security,
Liberty: Informing the Design of EMIS, pgs. 6-7, VW)
Widening our perspective yet further, for societies the collection and
processing of personal data may become problematic, because
basic rights, such as freedoms of speech and movement can be
eroded. Contemporary constructions of risk and danger, especially
since the start of the war on terror after 9/11, may be leading
societies into a permanent state of emergency/exception. A potent
driver is the transformation of fear, which, according to sociologist
Frank Furedi: is no longer simply an emotion, or a response to the
perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom . Popular
culture continually encourages an expansive alarmist imagination.
(Furedi, 2006). Frightened societies have begun to accept, or even call
for, a far-reaching securitization, even militarization of everyday
life (Graham, 2010), that is, an embedding of security/military
perspectives and technologies into of everyday spaces and
everyday lives, e.g. through all-surround CCTV or the use of blast proof
concrete in buildings. EMIS, too, are incorporating military inspired
technologies, such as incident command system (ICS) structures and GPS.
Military metaphors and technologies can deeply affect the way in
which emergency management is done: The centralization of
emergency response under the Department of Homeland Security
in the US after 9/11, for example, played a significant part in the
failure of humanitarian response to Katrina (Birkland, 2009; see also
Tierney, 2006). The embedding of military technologies into everyday
life and ICT has a long history, from the Internet to GPS. However,
recent years have seen an acceleration, as technology companies
bound up with the military sell to civilian and public authority users,
and create new products that are no longer purely military or
purely civilian (Wood, Ball, Lyon, Norris, & Raab, 2006). Pressures of
shrinking military budgets no doubt fuel some of this doubling, or reorientation. A militarization of emergency response and everyday
culture contributes to what Giorgio Agamben describes as a spread
of exceptions, often declared to protect national security (Agamben,
2005), where fundamental human rights to privacy can be
suspended. Agambens argument is complex and it is beyond the scope of
this paper to explore it in detail, but readers may find elaboration in
(Scheuerman, 2006). Most importantly, the extension of exceptions indexes
Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes
already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society.
But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the Collge
de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic
practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.
Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily concerned with the prevention of
hunger or the regulation of production, but wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and
"secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of
security lead to an opening and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security
intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, security
wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of
traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies the
ideas of liberalism.
Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of
a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security
becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive
measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole
criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state
which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be
provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.
We should not forget that the first major organization of terror after the war, the Organisation de lArme
Secrte (OAS), was established by a French general, who thought of himself as a patriot, convinced that
terrorism was the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way
it was understood by theorists of the "science of police" in the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police,
the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the end security and terrorism
may form a single deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate each othetrs actions.
The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents, but that the search for
security leads to a world civil war which makes all civil coexistence impossible. In the new situation
created by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states it becomes clear that security finds
its end in globalization: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is in truth the worst of all disorders.
But there is another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measure
of security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run they are irreconcilable
with democracy.
Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as basic principle of state politics.
European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical
general use of this figure of though. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves: but
maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, not merely towards
their control. On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies.
It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred,
terror, and destruction and not to limits itself to attempts to control them once they have already
occurred.
Agamben 1998, 6). In this famous book, entitled Homo sacer, the Italian
thinker holds that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm
constitutes the original if concealed nucleus of sovereign power.
It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at
least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the
center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing
other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life.
In a follow-up of this book, Agamben (2005) develops further implications of
his concept of homo sacer (bare life) in the context of contemporary
biopolitics by analyzing the state of exception established in the
aftermath of 9/11. His critique aims at the very heart of Western
democracies, arguing that, faced with the unstoppable progression
of what has been called a global civil war, the state of exception
tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of
government in contemporary politics (2005, 2). Living in a state of
exception means living on a threshold of indeterminacy between
democracy and absolutism, situation that would have been made
obvious by the political decisions of Bush administration following
the 9/11 terrorist attacks: The immediately biopolitical significance
of the state of exception as the original structure in which law
encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges
clearly in the military order issued by the president of the United
States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the indefinite
detention and trial by military commissions (not to be confused
with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of
noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities [...] What
is new about President Bushs order is that it radically erases any
legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable
and unclassifiable being [...] The only thing to which it could possibly be
compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager [camps], who,
along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity, but at least retained
their identity as Jews. As Judith Butler has effectively shown, in the detainee
at Guantanamo, bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy. (2005,
34)3 If the policies of U.S. and its allies against terrorism seem to
inspire further developing of Agambens radical critique of
contemporary institutions and biopolitics, following the footsteps of
Foucault, Arendt and Schmitt, it has to be said that the failure of
Western political regimes to prevent the escalation of Islamist
terrorism, as well as the growth in religious fundamentalism
noticeable in many parts of the world, represent phenomena that
are seriously putting to the test the whole theory of communicative
action developed by the renowned philosopher J. Habermas during
his entire career. The dilemma would be the following: based on
Habermass universalist theory of communicative action, how are we to
proceed when dealing with exponents of a culture that doesnt
believe in the value of rational dialogue and tends to consider any
discussion with an unfaithful, at least on religious themes, rather as
an evil temptation to be repressed than as a mean to reach some
kind of agreement or mutual understanding? It could be argued that
Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the
Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of
governance. Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not
primarily concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation
of production, but wanted to allow for their development to then
regulate and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power
isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening
and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security
intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to
produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security
can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual
initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies
the ideas of liberalism. Today we face extreme and most dangerous
developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual
neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of
the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to
be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the
first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political
legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk . A state
which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a
fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become
itself terroristic. We should not forget that the first major organization
of terror after the war, the Organisation de lArme Secrte (OAS),
was established by a French general, who thought of himself as a patriot,
convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in
Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by
theorists of the "science of police" in the eighteenthe century,
be the very condition of the authority of law and of the sovereign exercise of
power, the very condition of the political and of the state (Borradori 2003,
102). And if it is of course true that not every experience of terror is
necessarily the effect of some terrorism (103), isnt it equally true that there
has never been a war that didnt entail the intimidation of civilians, and thus
elements of terrorism (XIII)? More than that, having in mind the fact that
the political history of the word terrorism is derived in large part from a
reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, a terror that
was carried out in the name of the state and that in fact presupposed a legal
monopoly on violence, how are we to deal with the notion of state
terrorism? And this is of vital importance, since every terrorist in
the world claims to be responding in self-defense to a prior terrorism
on the part of the state (103), in this case, the alleged terrorism on
the part of U.S. and its allies. Or how can we decide whether we
should speak of a national or an international terrorism in the
cases of Algeria, Northern Ireland, Corsica, Israel, or Palestine
(104) ? Are we allowed to forget the fact that terrorists might be
praised as freedom fighters in one context (for example, in the
struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) and
denounced as terrorists in another (and, these days, its often the
very same fighters, using the very same weapons)? It is true that we
usually understand terrorist actions as being direct attacks on civilians or
direct threats posed to the lives of the innocents. But how confident are we
that indifference and nonactions such as letting die, or not wanting to
know that one is letting others die (the hundreds of millions of human
beings dying from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so on in
disadvantaged regions of the world) should not be considered, from a moral
and political point of view, as part of a more or less conscious and
deliberate terrorist strategy? (108), asks Derrida. I shall quote only one more
question the French thinker challenges us to answer: What would September
11 have been without television? [...] [T]he real terror consisted of and,
in fact, began by exposing and exploiting, having exposed and
exploited, the image of this terror by the target itself . [...] This is again
the same autoimmunitary perversion. (1089) By this last statement we are
touching what is arguably the most provocative thesis in Derridas
argumentation. The French philosopher is claiming that 9/11 was in
fact only the latest manifestation, at that time, of a crisis of
autoimmunization characterizing the very functioning or the very life
of our modern neo-liberal democracies. This statement should be
understood both on a symbolic level and on a very realistic one, if
we take into account, on the one hand, the questions raised after
9/11 about the incapacity of the most advanced Intelligence services
in the world to foresee and prevent the attacks and, on the other
hand, the fact that the suicide terrorists that hijacked the planes
had been trained in the States during the Cold War. As we know, an
autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in
quasi-suicidal fashion, itself works to destroy its own protection, to
immunize itself against its own immunity (Borradori 2003, 94). Derrida had
already used the couple immunity/autoimmunization borrowed from biology
when referring to the question of religion and its complicate relation to
a crazed effort to preserve these from Taliban raids. The second image is of
the painted walls depicting scenes of lovers either in an embrace or
travelling towards each other through forest and meadow (12-13). These
images of the romantic love are terribly damaged by bullets, demonstrating
the violence inflicted by Taliban and other external forces within the borders
of Afghanistan. Lara further reinforces the atrocities inflicted over centuries
on this land: This country was one of the greatest tragedies of the age. Torn
to pieces by many hands of war, by the various hatreds and failings of the
world. Two million deaths over the past quarter-century. Several of the lovers
on the walls were on their own because of the obliterating impact of the
bullets nothing but a gash or a terrible ripping away where the
corresponding man or woman used to be. A shredded limb, a lost eye. (14)
Almost all the characters of this novel are tormented by different wars in
different ways. The interconnectedness of the wars that have so deeply
affected these characters is apparent when Lara, having heard David speak
of his brother, thinks about Vietnam: A different war but may be at some
level it was the same war. Just as tomorrows wars might be begotten by
todays wars, a continuation of them. Rivers of lava emerging onto the
surface after flowing many out-of-sight miles underground. (362) Laras
musings suggest that we are too hasty in considering wars in different
regions and at different times in isolation; subtly highlighting the
reality of a global civil war in the twenty-first century. Each local
war should not be viewed in isolation, but as a part of a grand
constellation, linked to other war zones and areas that might not
be presently at war. As Nadeem Aslam says about wars in Afghanistan:
Once the Soviets withdrew, and US interest waned, the Taliban
rose 10 years later 9/11(and the ensuing War on Terror)
happened and half the planet woke up. They had no idea it came
out of the cold war." (Jaggi par 15). Civil war in Afghanistan is not
the armed conflict between sovereign and non-sovereign
combatants within a single sovereign territory (Hardt 08). It
involves a wide range of global actors. It is being funded by foreign
sources that had stakes in the region by virtue of former colonial
occupation and because of economic interests which ranged from
the mining of gems to the production of opium and heroin poppies.
As Aslam says: The years of war and civil war have emptied this
countrys museums (70). Civil war in Afghanistan here is
introduced not on its own, but in relation to a more general, more
broadly undefined war. The implication being that civil war has
occurred and continues to occur in partial relation to this other
type of war, and has been set in motion by the economic interests
in the landscape that had such gems buried in its soil. The text
attempts to outline this economic interest as ancient, through the image of
the diamond taken at some point from Afghanistan, placed in the eye of a
statue in India, and then looted to end up in first an Armenians hand and
then a Russian rulers. At one point Marcus ruminates that The lapis lazuli
of their land was always desired by the world, brushed by Cleopatra onto her
eyelids, employed by Michelangelo to paint the blues on the ceiling of the
Sistine chapel (18). Such references underline the fact that Afghanistan
has been raided for commodities for millennia, and that the currentday
occupation of the country by NATO mimics and echoes earlier invasions and
raids. There is a close relationship between civil war and what
Giorgio Agamben says state of exception. He says in his ground
breaking book State of Exception that civil war is the opposite of
normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to
the state of exception, which is state powers immediate response
to the most extreme internal conflicts (2). Further he says: modern
totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment , by means of
the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the
physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire
categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be CounterHegemonic Discourse in the Wasted Vigil Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary
Studies, 2(7) July, 2014 105 integrated into the political system. (2) After
9/11, American government has declared nothing less than a
global state of exception through the occasion presented by the
War on Terrorism. The phrase War on Terror provided US
government enough freedom over time and space. The word
terror is not a country, so the war could be taken to different
places. And it is very difficult to find out who the enemy really is in
War on Terror. As Spivak says that War on Terrorism has been zoomed up
to face an abstraction (82). Afghanistan has been virtually turned
into a Camp, that according to Agamben is a space where the
rules of the world cease to apply, where we have the communities
of people without the rights to have rights. It is the bare life of
these homo sacers in Afghanistan that Nadeem Aslam is trying to bring
to the limelight to the global audience in The Wasted Vigil. The way the
War on Terror has been represented contribute to the construction
of hegemonic narratives through which the America came to
imagine itself as a beacon light of democracy and a civilizing
bulwark against the violent forces of terrorist rogue states. Using
the rhetoric of just and unjust wars, the War on terror moralizes
rather than legitimizes the use of global violence by putting it
outside the realm of reason and critique. The violence inherent in
the War on Terror is normalized and dehistoricized. It has changed
the entire social and political makeup of Afghanistan and world at
large, where a distinction between war and civil society has
become obsolete. It is through the disembodiment of this global
violence that the dehumanization of Afghanistan in particular and
majority of the globes population in general, takes on normative
and naturalized state of existence. Aslams novel thus dramatizes the
transformation of the countrys civil war into a permanent state of exception.
In post-9/11 Afghanistan the state of exception has become a rule.
When state of exceptionbecomes the rule, Agamben says,
then the juridico-political system becomes a machine which may
at any moment turn lethal (86). It is this lethal machine whose
biopolitical motor is the state of exception that is, in Agambens
analysis, leading the West toward a global civil war (87). The
Wasted Vigil presents an extraordinary search for social justice through the
narrative and seeks to understand the operative modes of violence beyond
their historical and social configurations. Conceptualizing global civil
Danish Institute for International Studies, The War on Terrorism: When the
Exception Becomes the Rule http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B
%3ASELA.0000033618.13410.02)//MEB
This article argues that the semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a
significant shift in United States' discourses on security. This shift can best
be described as a move from defense to prevention or from danger to risk.
Whereas the notion of defense is closely connected to the state of
war, this article claims that the war on terrorism instead
institutionalises a permanent state of exception. Building upon Agamben's
notion that the state of exception is the non-localisable foundation of a political order, this article makes
two claims. First, it argues that semiotic shifts in United States' security politics point at a general trend
that, to some extent, structures international American interventions. In a sense ,
the semiotic
shifts in American security discourse declare the United States as
the sovereign of the global order: they allow the United States to
exempt itself from the (international) framework of law, while
demanding compliance by others. Second, it claims that this production of
American sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some)
individuals to the bare life of homo sacer(life that can be killed without
punishment). In the war on terrorism, the production of bare life is
mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk
management and surveillance , which reduce human life to
biographic risk profiles.
been the direct and indirect result of the state of exception which
has prevailed because of terrorist threats .
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/after-september-11our-state-exception/)//MEB
We are living in the State of Exception . We dont know when it will
end, as we dont know when the War on Terror will end. But we all
know when it began. We can no longer quite remember that moment, for the images have
long since been refitted into a present-day fable of innocence and apocalypse: the perfect blue of that late
summer sky stained by acrid black smoke. The jetliner appearing, tilting, then disappearing into the skin of
the second tower, to emerge on the other side as a great eruption of red and yellow flame. The showers of
debris, the falling bodies, and then that great blossoming flower of white dust, roiling and churning
To
Americans, those terrible moments stand as a brightly lit portal
through which we were all compelled to step, together, into a
different world. Since that day ten years ago we have lived in a
subtly different country, and though we have grown accustomed to these changes and think
upward, enveloping and consuming the mighty skyscraper as it collapses into the whirlwind.
little of them now, certain words still appear often enough in the newsGuantanamo, indefinite detention,
tortureto remind us that ours remains a strange America.
are not unknown in our historythe country has lived through broadly similar periods, at least
half a dozen or so, depending on how you count; but we have no proper name for them. State of siege?
Martial law? State of emergency? None of these expressions, familiar as they may be to other peoples, falls
it those emergency categories while emphasizing that this state has as its defining characteristic that it
transcends the borders of the strictly legalthat it occupies, in the words of the philosopher Giorgio
overwhelming majority of Americans the changes have come to seem subtle, certainly when set beside
how daily life was altered during World War II or World War I, not to mention during the Civil War. Officially
sanctioned torture, or enhanced interrogation, however dramatic a departure it may be from our history,
happens not to Americans but to others, as do extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention; the
particular burdens of our exception seem mostly to be borne by someone elseby someone other. It is
possible for most to live their lives without taking note of these practices at all except as phrases in the
newsuntil, every once in a while, like a blind man who lives, all unknowingly, in a very large cage, one or
another of us stumbles into the bars. Whoever takes the time to peer closely at the space enclosed within
those bars can see that our country has been altered in fundamental ways. When President Barack Obama
in his elegant address accepting the Nobel Peace Prize declares to the world that he has prohibited
torture, we should pause in our pride to notice that torture violates international and domestic law and
that the notion that our new president has the power to prohibit it follows insidiously from the pretense
that his predecessor had the power to order itthat during the state of exception, not only because of
what President George W. Bush decided to do but also because of what President Obama is every day
deciding not to do (not to look back but look forward), torture in America has metamorphosed.
Before the War on Terror, official torture was illegal and anathema;
today it is a policy choice.
it is in accordance with
the arbitrary decision-making processes of the state that the author
of such conduct is labelled a terrorist. This confusion between
transgression and compliance with the law, such that what violates
a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder
(Agamben 1998: 57), is a central paradox of the state of exception.
transgressive and was clearly capable of innocent explanation. Yet
incarceration, of permanent unemployment and global warming: what Jakob Augstein recognized last week
in Der Spiegel as nothing short of totalitarianism. The extraordinary measures of rendition, black sites,
secret laws, black budgets and retroactive legalizations that have accompanied the vicious internal
targeting of Muslims, protesters and whistleblowersall of this has become the new normal, and coming
decades will reap the whirlwind. This is what Paglen has dubbed the terror state: not merely the
and the question of whose legal jurisdiction prevails in Waziristan seems faint at best. Certainly, no matter
how broadly one reads the term war, one struggles to find in this anything like the strangely resilient
imagery of nation states battling each other with state of the art weaponry, no matter how much this
continues to dominate the way we think of war. In none of the usual accounts can one find something like
Jean Bodins definition of sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of the republic, one of the
principal influences from which Carl Schmitt famously drew his definition of the sovereign as he who
decides on the exception to the law. But I would insist: these are not esoteric historical or theoretical
concerns. I want to offer a very different approach here to the question of what sovereignty means.
evacuation of the ground surface of Gaza, did bodies, rather than territories, or death, rather than space,
turn into the raw material of Israeli sovereignty? In Weizmans Thanato-tactics, sovereignty is simply the
management of death. The Israeli General Security Services assassination program, which began in 2000
before 9/11produced the sprawling surveillance and counterinsurgency apparatus of the occupation.
But it also provided the template and testing grounds for the United States own assassination program.
What Weizman is really interested in is the logic of the lesser evil, by which economizing language
produces this environment of managed death. From this perspective, collateral damage calculations are
not a humanitarian triumph limiting the scope of violence. Rather, they are a crucial part of the ideological
apparatus by which acts of state violence are rendered legal and legitimate, encompassed within the
permissible logic of forestalling greater violence. Weizman quotes Israeli Air Force commander Eliezer
Shkedi saying, before the 2006 invasion of Gaza, that the only alternative to aerial attacks is a ground
operation and the reoccupation. Assassination, he added, is the most precise tool we have. So too with
proportionality, balancing, efficiency, pragmatism, the injunction to be realistic, and the entire pantheon
of reasonable constraints. All of the oppositional forces of military interests and intelligence agencies,
human rights groups and journalists, can be incorporated within the same project: the maintenance of
humanitarian violence, albeit one that bills itself as a lesser form of violence compared to the alternatives.
As Will Saletan put it in Slate earlier this year with memorable enthusiasm: Drones kill fewer civilians, as a
percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. Theyre the worst form of warfare in the
history of the world, except for all the others. civilian casualties? Thats not an argument against drones.
Its the best thing about them. The choice presented is always between assassination and invasion,
between Hellfire missiles and imprecise bombsbetween fewer dead and more dead. It is not a choice
between war and peace. Well-trained commentators cannot even imagine a world in which such things
simply do not happen. And one never questions the legitimacy of the system in which, as Hannah Arendt
emphasized, one must choose evil. Periodic eruptions of unchecked violenceas in the Israeli invasion of
Gaza in 2008 and the bombardment in 2012are neither accidents nor failures. The normal practice of
violence through checkpoints, annexation, resource extraction, and assassination is maintained against the
the ever present threat of greater violence, regularly demonstrated. The greater evil kept at bay by the
lesser evil, in an endless state of war. This permanent threat of arbitrary violence is precisely what we call
sovereignty. The Only War there Is Beginning with his observation that states are at the same time forms
of institutionalized raiding or extortion, and utopian projects, David Graebers definition of sovereignty is
simple enough: the right to exercise violence with impunity. Graeber offers the example of the Ganda
kingship to the south of the Shilluk. In the late 19th century, European visitors to the court of King Mutesa
offered a gift of firearms. Mutesa responded by firing the rifle in the street and killing his subjects at
random. When David Livingstone asked why the Ganda king killed so many people, he was told that if
[the king] didnt, everyone would assume that he was dead. However, the notoriety of the Ganda kings
for arbitrary, random violence towards their own people did not prevent Mutesa from also being accepted
as supreme judge and guardian of the states system of justice. Indeed, it was the very foundation for it.
Specifically, Graeber is interested in the transcendent quality of violence: the violence and transgression of
aspect of violence divine. It isnt just that kings act like gods; its that they do so and get away with it.
This remains the case in the modern state. Walter Benjamins famous distinction between law-making
of Independence or the American Constitution were all traitors by the legal order under which they were
born. There really is no resolution to this paradox. The solution of the left is that the people may rise up
periodically and overthrow the existing legal regime in a revolution. The solution of the right is Carl
Schmitts exception: that sovereignty is exercised by the head of state in putting aside the legal order. But
in Southern Sudan, the function of violence is even clearer. With rainmakers, as with Shilluk kings, the
health of the land is tied to the health of the king. If the rains fail to fall, first people will bring petitions,
then gifts. But after a certain point, if the rains still dont come, the rainmaker must either flee or face a
community united to kill him. It isnt hard to see why rainmakers would want something like the states
monopoly on violence or a retinue of loyal, armed followers. But the crucial point is that insofar as the
people could be said to exist, they were essentially seen as the collective enemy of the king. European
explorers in the region often found kings raiding enemy villages only to find that the villages contained the
kings own subjects. They were delivering arbitrary violence to the people they were supposed to protect.
that arbitrary violence is the constitutive principle of sovereignty, defining the relationship between the
sovereign and everything else: What we call the social peace is really just a truce in a constitutive war
between sovereign power and the people, or nationboth of whom come into existence, as political
entities, in their struggle against each other. There is no inside or outside here. Contra Schmitt and his
friend-enemy distinction, this constitutive war precedes wars between nations and peoples. From the
perspective of sovereign power, there is no fundamental difference in the relation between a sovereign
that the war against Al Qaeda will continue for another decade? How did the AUMF and the Patriot Act
together come to constitute something like Americas Article 48, creating a permanent state of exception
How
did drones become an inevitable part of the near future in New York
City? After all, the War on Terror really isnt anything like a war at all
in which something like the NSAs giant automated Stasi is simply accepted as the new normal?
at least, not in the conventional imaginary of nation states commanding disciplined military forces on
established fields of battle. The United States commands a degree of military power and comparative
dominance simply unprecedented in human historywhat is elegantly referred to, in the anodyne
language of military planners, as asymmetry. There are no strictly defined battlefields, and the formal
enemies in the War on Terror have rarely amounted to more than the insurgent army of a deposed dictator
(funded and armed by the U.S., albeit long ago) and a few hundred religious students in the mountains of
Central Asia. It is in fact genuinely strange how resiliently this conventional image seems to persist in both
popular and intellectual imagination. Even scholarly responses to the War on Terror begin from the
assumption that something new and strange is happening when battlefields and opponents alike are no
longer delimited but rather always and everywhere. If one limits oneself to legal documents, this is pretty
much the only possible conclusion. The conventional imagery really seems to be most useful in obscuring
the more fundamental realities of what war really is. In part, war consists of the far more common practice
of civil wars, guerrilla wars, genocide and internal repressionbut also, in a larger sense, the fundamental
state of war between the sovereign and his people that is the originary, constitutive state for sovereign
rendition and detention programs. But at the edges of this arrangement, one finds Agambens homo sacer,
Fiskesjs barbarians: those excluded from the legal order, stripped of rights, subject to death at any time
This
is the logic of sovereign violence taken to its most extremeand not
insignificantly, this has been accomplished in part by euphemizing
that violence, whether in the sanitized parlance of the military
the point at which an empire converts those beyond its reach into obedient subjects or corpses.
focused obstruction, targeted killing, kinetic actionor the more artful, ideological euphemization
by which assassination programs become complex and debatable moral issues in the liberal press. It
should come as no surprise that this has been accompanied by the infinite expansion of an apparatus of
exception.
Without an end to
this constant state of exception, untold abuses of power remain
inscribed in the state of the union.
president to appeal to emergency powers at the expense of civil liberties.
after the suspension of the juridical order in the exception or after the
application of law is withdrawn in order to expose life to the force of law
without application. In other words, the state of exception unfolds as an
emptiness of law that at once bans in order to abandon the living
being to law. Through the idea of the abandonment of life to law, Agamben
succeeds in illustrating the biopolitical significance of the state of
exception that culminates in producing a legally unnamable and
unclassifiable being bare life (or la nuda vita, as the original Italian
text calls it). Along with undertaking the task to clarify the conceptual
uncertainty around the syntagm, the state of exceptionwhich, in its
semantic as well as practical indeterminacy, has been conflated with the
state of necessity, emergency, full powers, and martial lawAgamben, in the
State of Exception, attempts to provide an answer to the question that
never ceases to reverberate in the history of Western politics: what does it
mean to act politically (2). That is to say, the retrieval of politics in the
wake of the end of all politics by the exception is inextricably
intertwined with the biopolitical nexus that binds life to law by
means of exclusion. The biopolitical threshold of the exception is
the extreme zone of intensity wherein law remains but its
application is deactivated. Agamben characterizes this exceptional
locus where law blurs with violence as a zone of anomie where law
remains but 256 The Killing Machine of Exception only as a pure force
of violence. Agamben puts this anomic place of law as the force of law .
In this assessment of the proper locus of the exception, Agamben juxtaposes
Carl Schmitts notion of dictatorship and Benjamins idea of pure violence. He
also revisits ancient Roman institutions and practices of the iustitium and
auctoritas only to find that the exception is a no mans land, an absolute
nonplace, an empty space in which is manifested a legal void (vuoto as the
original text has it [15]) that runs, regardless of time and place, through the
entire political life in the West. Thus, for Agamben, the exception is
neither a purely constitutional nor strictly a historical problem. It is
not constitutionally determined because it does not strictly belong
to totalitarian governments only; rather it constitutes a threshold
of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism, thereby
giving way to what have come to be known as protected
democracies. Furthermore, it is not a historical issue, not only because it
is as much present in ancient Roman republic as it is in contemporary
republics, but also because there is no time prior to the state of exception.
Agamben categorically rules out the possibility of any simple outside to the
state of exception: There are not first life as a natural biological given and
anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the
state of exception (2005b, 87). Intrinsically too exceptionalism causes,
for Agamben, the same destabilization of the opposition between
the inside and the outside. As he argued in Means without End (2000),
etymologically, exception (excapere) suggests that what is being excluded in
various structures of exception is captured outside, that is, it is included by
virtue of its very exclusion (39). Since the exception is a kenomatic (empty
or void) instead of a pleromatic state in which the sovereign assumes plenary
powers, it is not a dictatorship either.
Inclusive-exclusion in WOT
Individuals accused or suspected of being involved in
terrorist activities are subjected to the law but not
protected by the law
Rogers, 8 (Nicole of Southern Cross School of Law and Justice, Terrorist v
Both homo sacer and the sovereign are, for different reasons,
outside the law, and thus they represent the two poles of the
sovereign exception (Agamben 1998: 110). This point is made with some poignancy by
Terry Hicks, the father of David Hicks who, for so long, in his extended incarceration in Guantanamo Bay,
exemplified homo sacer; Terry has marvelled over the fact that his sons name is so frequently mentioned
by President Bush (Souter 2006). Others have observed that the sovereign and the terrorist are linked in
the sovereign in
contemporary legal discourse is located vis--vis the terrorist and that
terrorism, which is an injury to the body sovereign, provides meaning for the
sovereign figure (2006: 11).
the war against terrorism discourse. Anna Szorenyi and Juliet Rogers argue that
men arrested in the same raids in Sydney attended their committal hearing in a dock encased in armoured
glass (Kennedy & Allard 2007, Hoare 2006). This is not without precedent; the 1961 Israeli trial of the Nazi
war criminal Eichmann also featured the court appearances of the defendant within a bullet-proof glass
box (Schechner 2002: 177). Terrorist suspects have been dressed in orange overalls, thereby evoking
comparisons with Guantanamo Bay detainees.
dehumanising .
has described in relation to the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. She writes that in such
In a state of exception, legal performances work within the power apparatus of the state. In the majority of
the state of
exception prevails in contemporary Western societies and the rule of
law carries little meaning. Biopolitical strategies utilised by the state to
control and monitor the activities of the contemporary form of homo
sacer, the accused terrorist, are accepted by the courts. The executive, with
appropriate legislative endorsement, can exercise an extraordinary degree of
power over the body of the accused terrorist. Legal performances confer
legitimacy upon this regime. The terror trials are designed with a
predetermined outcome in which the guilt and need for containment
of the accused terrorists are conclusively established. Antonia Quadaras
legal performances considered above, we find support for Agambens contention that
description of a hypothetical Australian trial of David Hicks as an official performative sacrifice at the
hands of the law (Quadara 2006: 147) has a broader application. Yet it is within the context of the
Australian terror trials that we find, surprisingly, the application of the rule of law. Despite an attack on the
rule of law by prominent members of the community, it seems that the contemporary state of exception is
not absolute. The lesson from the Thomas and Ul-Haque cases is that the courts, in reaching a final
decision on the guilt or innocence of accused terrorists, are prepared to apply the rule of law.
Drones
Drone use is an indicator of the state of exception
curtailment doesnt begin to solve
Sassen, professor of sociology at Columbia University, 13
(Saskia, Drones over there, total surveillance over here
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/2013210114231346318.ht
ml //MEB)
The big story buried in all the commentary about the US government's drone
policy is that the old algorithm of the liberal state no longer works. Focusing
on drones is almost a distraction ,
children they have killed in only a few years.
condition that enables the drone policy , and so much more, and
that is the sharp increase in unaccountable executive power, no matter
what party is in power. The 1960s and the 1970s saw the making of laws that called for the executive
branch of government to be more responsive to basic principles of a division of power and accountability
to citizens. Many of its owners were curtailed by the legislative. With Reagan, Clinton and especially BushCheney,
that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of
this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ)combined. The military historian Andrew
but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified
in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single
greatest cause of that threat .
Even
scholarly responses to the War on Terror begin from the assumption
that something new and strange is happening when battlefields and opponents
resiliently this conventional image seems to persist in both popular and intellectual imagination.
alike are no longer delimited but rather always and everywhere. If one limits oneself to legal documents,
this is pretty much the only possible conclusion. The conventional imagery really seems to be most useful
in obscuring the more fundamental realities of what war really is. In part, war consists of the far more
common practice of civil wars, guerrilla wars, genocide and internal repressionbut also, in a larger sense ,
the fundamental state of war between the sovereign and his people
that is the originary, constitutive state for sovereign power itself.
The forever war, then, has effectively allowed the United States to
claim sovereignty to farthest reaches of the earth. Certainly, this is
not a question purely of drones: the apparatus also consists of a
deep surveillance state , total international digital surveillance, a military larger than the
combined militaries of the rest of the world, and extralegal rendition and detention programs. But at the
edges of this arrangement, one findsAgambens homo sacer, Fiskesjs barbarians: those excluded from
the legal order, stripped of rights, subject to death at any timethe point at which an empire converts
those beyond its reach into obedient subjects or corpses. This is the logic of sovereign violence taken to its
most extremeand not insignificantly, this has been accomplished in part by euphemizing that violence,
whether in the sanitized parlance of the militaryfocused obstruction, targeted killing, kinetic
actionor the more artful, ideological euphemization by which assassination programs become complex
Security
Crisis motivated politics removes any decision for the
state of exception it is a now permanent feature of
modern sovereignty
Agamben, Philosopher, 2014
[Rational International, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
Destituent Power, http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agambendestituent-power-democracy/, 7/5/15, CY]
One possible way to sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin
and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this perspective, we
could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex public
safety is the highest law and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the
canonistic principle that necessity does not acknowledge any law, with the
comits de salut publique during French revolution and finally with article 48
of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the Nazi regime.
Such a genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really
explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures which are
familiar to us. While the state of exception was originally conceived as
a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an immediate
danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security reasons
constitute today a permanent technology of government . When in
2003 I published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of
exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal system of
government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so
accurate. The only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took
power in February 1933, he immediately proclaimed a decree
suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning
personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire
Third Reich can be considered as a state of exception which lasted
twelve years. What is happening today is still different. A formal state of
exception is not declared and we see instead that vague non-juridical
notions like the security reasons are used to install a stable
state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly
identifiable danger. An example of such non-juridical notions which
are used as emergency producing factors is the concept of crisis .
Besides the juridical meaning of judgment in a trial, two semantic traditions
converge in the history of this term which, as is evident for you, comes from
the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the medical
tradition, crisis means the moment in which the doctor has to judge,
to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which
this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the decisive days. In theology, crisis
is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can
see, what is essential in both traditions is the connection with a certain
moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is precisely this
connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement, is split from
its temporal index and coincides now with the chronological course
There are a few sections of the Patriot Act that are worth discussing in order to demonstrate the modern
state of exception, as well as its link to surveillance and the camp. Under Section 412 of the Act, entitled
to certify that
an alien meets the criteria of the terrorism grounds of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or is
engaged in any other activity that endangers the national security of the
United States, upon a reasonable grounds to believe standard, and take
such aliens into custody. The Attorney General must review the detention
every six months and determine if the alien is to remain in detention because
of a continued risk to security . But what remains ambiguous, and allows
for the indistinction between law and violence and between police and
sovereignty, is this reasonable grounds to believe standard. Suffice it to say,
Mandatory detention of suspected terrorists, the Attorney General has the power
without going into greater depth, this standard is grounds for racial profiling and the detention of political
exception camp for those who may threaten the normal force of the law this is the aforementioned void,
What we have been discussing thus far applies to the indefinite and mandatory detention of aliens, but
on increased surveillance
measures that target aliens and native citizens alike. These
surveillance activities include the collection of DNA from anyone
detained for any offence or suspected of terrorism, phone taps,
wiretaps for electronic communications, the collection of individual
library records (Section 215; this Section in particular has received
heavy criticism and debate), the collection of banking and financial
records, and other indirect surveillance methods, such as the
the Patriot Act and the Terrorism Act contain various sections
mandatory dentition
of aliens suspected of terrorism extends to include Americans, who
Act 2003 (alias, Patriot Act II). Under Section 501 of Patriot Act II the
As Gore Vidal remarks, under Patriot Act I only foreigners were denied due process of
law as well as subject to arbitrary deportationPatriot Act II now includes American citizens in the same
category, thus eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights (Vidal 2003). Section 501, Expatriation
of Terrorists, of the Act states: This provision (i.e. Section 501) would amend 8 U.S.C. 1481 to make clear
that, just as an American can relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile foreign army, so can he
relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile terrorist organization. Specifically, an American could be
expatriated if, with the intent to relinquish nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material
support to, a group that the United States has designated as a "terrorist organization," if that group is
Economy
The underpinning of the economy emphasizes the notion
of biopolitics
Agamben, Philosopher, 1998
(Stanford University Press California, The Open: Man and
Animal, http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~ewa/Agamben,%20The
%20Open.pdf, 7/3/15, CY)
Today, at a distance of nearly seventy years, it is clear for anyone who is not
in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer histor- ical tasks that can be
taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was in some ways already
evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nationstates were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples
themselves were bound to disappear. We completely misunderstand the
nature of the great totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century if we see
them only as a carrying out of the nineteenth-century nation-states last
great tasks: nationalism and imperialism. The stakes are now different and
much higher, for it is a question of taking on as a task the very factical
existence of peoples, that is, in the last analysis, their bare life. Seen in this
light, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century truly constitute the other
face of the Hegelo-Kojevian idea of the end of history: man has now reached
his historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again,
there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of
the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological
life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task. It is likely that
the times in which we live have not emerged from this aporia. Do we not
see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any
essence or identitywho are delivered over, so to speak, to their
inessentiality and their inactivity {inoperosita }and who grope
everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance
and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple
relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal
or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy,
often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being
seem to appear as humanitys last historical taskif indeed it makes sense
here to speak of a task. The traditional historical potentialitiespoetry,
religion, philosophywhich from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian
perspectives kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake, have long
since been transformed into cultural spectacles Animalization and
private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this
eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the
assumption of the burdenand the total managementof biological life,
that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and
humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which
posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last,
impolitical mandate. It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has
taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is
(Karine, 2014, Alert Press, Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial
Humanitarianism,
http://openanthropology.org/Good_Intentions_Ch5_Economic_Exceptionalism_
USA_Perron_2014.pdf, accessed 7/7/2015, JAK)
Championing itself as the leader of capitalism, more obviously so since the
Cold War, the US has led the world into an era of neoliberalism in which the
free market is deemed to be the ultimate way to prosperity (Ellwood, 2010).
In fact, after memories were cleared of the factors that led the US into the
Great Depression of the 1930s, the end of World War II was followed by the
rebirth of the belief in the free market, a belief which was best expressed
through the creation of the Bretton Woods trio: the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), the latter succeeded by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since
then, the US has controlled a good deal of the financial world and it
can be argued that the country has both written the rules and
enforced them. However, a simple look at the course of US economic
history allows one to realize that the US feels free to break the rules
of capitalism it advocates whenever the occasion demands it for the
benefit of the country and especially its corporations. Michael Ignatieff
has addressed the exceptionality of US capacity to both be an advocate of
human rights, while disrespecting them on multiple occasions: What
needs explaining is the paradox of being simultaneously a leader
and an outlier (Ignatieff, 2005, p. 2). It is with this paradox in mind that
this chapter examines what we might call a state of exceptionalism: the
various ways in which the US influences the international economy
in its favour and imposes on the rest of the world rules it does not
apply to itself. The role of multilateral international economic and politic
institutions in which the US holds sway, with a focus on the IMF, will first be
examined. Then, the claims of the US to economic liberalism will be
contrasted with the managed trade policy that has actually been applied and
the way the WTO has been both advocated and disregarded according to the
situation. The overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954, as just
one notorious case, will provide an example of the extent to which the US
has gone to control the economic and political direction of dissident countries
The Law
Law and sovereign violence are synonymous The law is
used to control life
Agamben, Italian continental philosopher, 98 (Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 65 //NK)
The violence that Benjamin defines as divine is instead situated in a zone
in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between exception
and rule. It stands in the same relation to sovereign violence as the state
of actual exception, in the eighth thesis, does to the state of virtual
exception. This is why (that is, insofar as divine violence is not one kind of violence among others but
only the dissolution of the link between violence and law ) Benjamin can say that
divine violence neither posits nor conserves violence, but deposes it. Divine
violence shows the connection between the two violences and, even more,
between violence and law-to be the single real content of law. "The function of
violence in juridical creation," Benjamin writes, at the only point in which the
essay approaches something like a definition of sovereign violence, "is
twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as the
means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of its instatement
does not depose violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking and in
the name of power, it specifically establishes as law not an end immune and
independent from violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound up with
it" ("Zur Kritik der Gewalt," pp. 197-98). This is why it is not by chance that Benjamin, with a seemingly
abrupt development, concentrates on the bearer of the link between
violence and law, which he calls "bare life" (Hoffa: Leben), instead of
defining divine violence. The analysis of this l'igure-whose decisive function in the economy of
the essay has until now remained unthought- establishes an essential link between bare
life and juridical violence. Not only does the rule of law over the living
exist and cease to exist alongside bare life, but even the dissolution of
juridical violence, which is in a certain sense the object of the essay,
"stems . . . from the guilt of bare natural life, which consigns the living,
innocent and unhappy, to the punishment that 'expiates' the guilt of bare lifeand doubtless also purifies [entsti/mt] the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law" (ibid., p. 200).
sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law,
legally places himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can
also be formulated this way: the law is outside itself, or: I, the sovereign,
who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law [che
non ce unfiiori legge].
Human Rights
The refugee embodies how human rights break down in
the face of homo sacer
Agamben 98
(Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 75, VW)
2.1. Hannah Arendt entitled the fifth chapter of her book on imperialism,
which is dedicated to the problem of refugees, The Decline of the NationState and the End of the Rights of Man. Linking together the fates of the
rights of man and of the nation-state, her striking formulation seems to imply
the idea of an intimate and necessary connection between the two, though
the author herself leaves the question open. The paradox from which Arendt
departs is that the very figure who should have embodied the rights
of man par excellence the refugee signals instead the concepts
radical crisis. The conception of human rights, she states, based
upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down
at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were
for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all
other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still
human (Origins, p. 299). In the system of the nation-state, the socalled sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack
every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no
longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. If one
considers the matter, this is in fact implicit in the ambiguity of the very title
of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, of 1789. In the
phrase La dclaration des droits de lhomme et du citoyen, it is not clear
whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings or
instead form a unitary system in which the first is always already included in
the second. And if the latter is the case, the kind of relation that exists
between homme and citoyen still remains unclear. From this perspective,
Burkes boutade according to which he preferred his Rights of an
Englishman to the inalienable rights of man acquires an unsuspected
profundity.
Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints concerning the link
between the rights of man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has
therefore not been followed up. In the period, after the Second World War,
both the instrumental emphasis on the rights of man and the rapid growth of
declarations and agreements on the part of international organizations have
ultimately made any authentic understanding of the historical significance of
the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop regarding
declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical
values binding the legislator (in fact, without much success) to
respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider them
according to their real historical function in the modern nation-state.
Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the
inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nationstate. The same bare life that in the ancien rgime was politically
neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was
(Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 78, VW)
2.4. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we
are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the
rights of man from the rights of the citizen, in the final analysis,
however, humanitarian organizations which today are more and
more supported by international commissions can only grasp
human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite
themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they
ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity
campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that
here human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly
good reasons for this) as sacred life which is to say, as life that can
be killed but not sacrificed and that only as such is it made into the
object of aid and protection. The imploring eyes of the Rwandan
child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who is now
becoming more and more difficult to find, alive, may well be the
most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian
organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A
humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the
isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp
which is to say, the pure space of exception is the biopolitical
paradigm that it cannot master. The concept of the refugee, (and
the figure of life that this concept represents) must be resolutely
separated from the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously
consider Arends claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are
bound together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies
the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he is:
nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question
the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birthnation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to
clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service
of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted,
either in the state order or in the figure of human rights.
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v11/n1/full/cpt201045a.html,
7/6/15 CY]
Human rights have become a predominant discourse in global politics
particularly in the post-Cold War era as they have been invoked to address
multifarious forms of injustice ranging from violence against women to global
poverty. If this transformation has been welcome by some for its promise of a
cosmopolitan future, it has also become the target of several critics who
underline the insidious effects of human rights as a new form of power. The
cosmopolitan aura of human rights has been increasingly demystified as
various scholars have pointed out their deployment in the justification of
neoimperial interventions (Anderson, 2002; Mutua, 2002; Douzinas, 2007),
their masking of a political power constituting subjects in need of political
protection (Brown, 2004), and their hegemonic hold on our political
imagination (Kennedy, 2002). Giorgio Agamben makes a distinctive
contribution to this contemporary debate with his analysis aiming to
demonstrate how human rights, perceived as normative guarantees against
the state, actually participate in rendering human lives vulnerable to
sovereign violence. Although Agamben joins some other critics, especially
those influenced by Michel Foucault's work (for example, Wendy Brown), in
making this claim, he radicalizes the critique of human rights in many ways.
The critique is radical literally as it tries to grasp the problem by its roots. To
do this, Agamben goes back to the early formulations of human rights in the
eighteenth-century declarations, especially the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen, and shows how these declarations reiterate the
biopolitical fracture between political and natural life at the heart of Western
metaphysics and politics. Once these declarations make life the foundation of
the nation-state, every aspect of life becomes politicized and is subjected to
sovereign power to an unprecedented degree. This analysis showing how
human rights participate in the reproduction of a centuries-old problem takes
Agamben also to a conclusion that is much more radical than those drawn by
other critics: Given the underlying assumptions of human rights, there is no
possibility of thinking them anew; we instead need to imagine a politics
beyond human rights so as to sever the tight link that holds human life
in the grip of sovereign power. This article aims not only to understand
Agamben's distinctive intervention in the contemporary debates on human
rights but also to assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human
rights. I argue that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western
politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to
biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any human rights
struggle cannot help but participate in the reproduction of the
sovereign violence that it aims to contest.
the way to a more universal conception of human rights points to the crucial
contribution of Agamben to the debates on human rights. Agamben's work
differs from the Foucauldian critique also in its call for abandoning human
rights altogether in order to sever the link between life and sovereign power.
From a Foucauldian perspective, it is still possible to rethink rights and invoke
them in ways contesting sovereign power. For example, despite her criticisms
of identity-based rights claims, Wendy Brown urges a rethinking of the
democratic power of rights a rethinking that moves away from the
prevailing conception of rights as remedies for injuries suffered by particular
groups to a more radical democratic conception focusing on the (fictional)
egalitarian imaginary created by rights discourse (Brown, 1995, p. 133; see
also Brown, 2000).5 For Agamben, however, there is no such possibility,
precisely because human rights are inextricably tied to sovereign
violence, given their reproduction of the biopolitical fracture between bios
and zo since their original formulations in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen. This second point forms the linchpin of my critical
engagement with Agamben: although Agamben persuasively argues for a
critical inquiry that looks into the paradoxically violent effects of the human
rights discourse, his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights
remains questionable, and as I will show, is at odds with his own attempts to
understand history in terms of contingencies and potentialities (2000, pp. 15
26). From Agamben's standpoint, precisely because human rights are
doomed to reproduce sovereign violence, any struggle for rights seems
to be futile: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive
political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights
won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always
simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals lives
within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for
the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves.
(1998, p. 121)
Democracy
Modern democracys attempt to free the oppressed, those
without political life, is impossible, it has caused it to
converge with the totalitarian state and guarantees
fascism and the repeat of Nazism
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at university of Verona,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 13, accessed 7/5/15, FZ)
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical
democracy, then, it is that modern democracy presents itself from the
beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoe, and that it is constantly
trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak,
the bios of zo. Hence, too, modern democracys specific aporia: it wants to
put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place bare life
that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that
leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the
body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be
sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this
aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It
is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at
the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over
its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself
incapable of saving zoe, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts,
from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracys decadence and gradual
convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular
societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and
finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be rooted
in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces
it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. Today politics knows no
value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the
contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and
fascism which transformed the decision on bare life into the
supreme political principle will remain stubbornly with us. According
to the testimony of Robert Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who
lived there was precisely that calling into question the quality of man
provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race
(Lespce humaine, p. II).
protection of a bare life that is more and more driven to the margins
of the nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national
identity. The contradictory character of these processes is certainly
one of the reasons for the failure of the attempts of the various
committees and organizations by which states, the League of
Nations, and, later, the United Nations confronted the problem of
refugees and the protection of human rights, from the Bureau
Nansen (1922) to the contemporary High Commission for Refugees
(1951), whose actions, according to statute, are to have not a
political but rather a solely humanitarian and social mission. What
is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual
cases but as happens more and more often today a mass
phenomenon, both these organizations and individual states prove
themselves, despite their solemn invocations of the sacred and
inalienable rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the
problem and even of confronting it adequately.
State of exception
The state has a monopoly over decision-making within the
law and aboe the law the exception is the rule, the aff
can only feed into sovereign power.
Agamben, Philosopher, 1998
(Stanford University Press California, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life,
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/HomoSacer.pdf, 7/3/15, CY)
*The following evidence has been gender modified
The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general
codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical formal
element: the decision in absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute
form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can
be valid. Every general rule demands a regular, everyday frame of life to
which it can be factually applied and which is submitted to its regulations.
The rule requires a homogeneous medium. This factual regularity is not
merely an external presupposition that the jurist can ignore; it belongs,
rather, to the rules immanent validity. There is no rule that is applicable to
chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense. A regular
situation must be created, and sovereign are they who definitely decides if
this situation is actually effective. All law is situational law. The sovereign
creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. They have the
monopoly over the final decision. Therein consists the essence of State
sovereignty, which must therefore be properly juridically defined not as the
monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the monopoly to decide, where the
word monopoly is used in a general sense that is still to be developed. The
decision reveals the essence of State authority most clearly. Here the
decision must be distinguished from the juridical regulation, and (to formulate
it paradoxically) authority proves itself not to need law to create
law. . . . The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter
proves nothing; the exception proves everything. The exception does
not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone. A
Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity of which
theological reflection was still capable in the nineteenth century said: The
exception explains the general and itself. And when one really wants to study
the general, one need only look around for a real exception. It brings
everything to light more clearly than the general itself. After a while, one
becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general there are
exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then neither can the general be
explained. Usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the general is thought
about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. The exception,
on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion. (Politische
Theologie, pp. 19-22) It is not by chance that in defining the exception
Schmitt refers to the work of a theologian (who is none other than Sren
Kierkegaard). Giambattista Vico had, to be sure, affirmed the superiority of
the exception, which he called the ultimate configuration of facts, over
positive law in a way which was not so dissimilar: An esteemed jurist is,
therefore, not someone who, with the help of a good memory, masters
positive law [or the general complex of laws], but rather someone who, with
sharp judgment, knows how to look into cases and see the ultimate
circumstances of facts that merit equitable consideration and exceptions
from general rules (De antiquissima, chap. 2). Yet nowhere in the realm of
the juridical sciences can one find a theory that grants such a high position to
the exception. For what is at issue in the sovereign exception is, according to
Schmitt, the very condition of possibility of juridical rule and, along with it,
the very meaning of State authority. Through the state of exception, the
sovereign creates and guarantees the situation that the law needs for its
own validity. But what is this situation, what is its structure, such that it
consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule? The Vichian
opposition between positive Jaw (ins theticum) and exception well expresses
the particular status of the exception. The exception is an element in law that
transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. The exception is to
positive law what negative theology is to positive theology. While the latter
affirms and predicates determinate qualities of God, negative (or mystical)
theology, with its neither ... nor ... , negates and suspends the attribution to
God of any predicate whatsoever. Yet negative theology is not outside
theology and can actually be shown to function as the principle grounding the
possibility in general of anything like a theology. Only because it has been
negatively presupposed as what subsists outside any possible predicate can
divinity become the subject of a predication. Analogously, only because its
validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the
normal case as the realm of its own validity. 1.2. The exception is a kind of
exclusion. What is excluded from the general rule is an individual case. But
the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is
not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule. On
the contrary, what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to
the rule in the form of the rules suspension. The rule applies to the exception
in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus
not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its
suspension. In this sense, the exception is truly, according to its etymological
root, taken outside (ex-capere), and not simply excluded. It has often been
observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of
what is simultaneously pushed outside. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari were
thus able to write, Sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of
interiorizing (Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, p. 445); and, concerning
the great confinement described by Foucault in his Madness and
Civilization, Maurice Blanchot spoke of societys attempt to confine the
outside (enfermer le dehors), that is, to constitute it in an interiority of
expectation or of exception. Confronted with an excess, the system
interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way
designates itself as exterior to itself (Lentretien infini, p. 292). The
exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is, however, even more
complex. Here what is outside is included not simply by means of an
interdiction or an internment, but rather by means of the suspension of the j
uridical orders validity by letting the juridical order, that is, withdraw from
the exception and abandon it. The exception does not subtract itself from
the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the
exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception , first
constitutes itself as a rule. The particular force of law consists in this
capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. We shall give the
name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which
something is included solely through its exclusion. The situation created in
the exception has the peculiar characteristic that it cannot be defined either
as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a
paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two. It is not a fact, since it
is only created through the suspension of the rule. But for the same reason, it
is not even a juridical case in point, even if it opens the possibility of the force
of law. This is the ultimate meaning of the paradox that Schmitt formulates
when he writes that the sovereign decision proves itself not to need law to
create law. What is at issue in the soveteign exception is not so much the
control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and definition of the
very space in which the juridico- political order can have validity. In this
sense, the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization (Ortung),
which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from what is outside
but instead ttaces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on
the basis of which outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter
into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical
ordet possible. The ordering of space that is, according to Schmitt,
constitutive of the sovereign nomos is therefore not only a taking of land
(Landesnahme) the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of
an Ordnung and an Ortung) but above all a taking of the outside, an
exception (Ausnahme). Since there is no rule that is applicable to chaos,
chaos must first be included in the juridical order through the creation of a
zone of indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal
situation the state of exception.
It may seem incongruous to define the structure of sovereign power, with its
cruel factual implications, by means of two innocuous grammatical
categories. Yet there is a case in which the linguistic examples decisive
character and ultimate indistinguishability from the exception show an
unmistakable involvement with the power of life and death. We refer to the
episode in Judges 12.; 6 in which the Galatians recognize the fleeing
Ephraimites, who are trying to save themselves beyond the Jordan, by asking
them to pronounce the word Shibboleth, which the Ephraimites pronounce
Sibboleth (The men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he
said, Nay; then they said unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said
Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him,
and slew him at the passages of Jordan). In the Shibboleth, example and
exception become indistinguishable: Shibboleth is an exemplary exception
or an example that functions as an exception. (In this sense, it is not
surprising that there is a predilection to resort to exemplary
punishment in the state of exception.) 1.5. Set theory distinguishes
between membership and inclusion. A term is included when it is part of a set
in the sense that all of its elements are elements of that set (one then says
that b is a subset of a, and one writes it b a). But a term may be a member
of a set without being included in it (membership is, after all, the primitive
notion of set theory, which one writes b a), or, conversely, a term may be
included in a set without being one of its members. In a recent book, Alain
Badiou has developed this distinction in order to translate it into political
terms. Badiou has membership correspond to presentation, and inclusion
correspond to representation (re-presentation). One then says that a term is a
member of a situation (in political terms, these are single individuals insofar
as they belong to a society). And one says that a term is included in a
situation if it is represented in the metastructure (the State) in which the
structure of the situation is counted as one term (individuals insofar as they
are recodified by the State into classes, for example, or into electorates).
Badiou defines a term as normal when it is both presented and represented
(that is, when it both is a member and is included), as excrescent when it is
represented but not presented (that is, when it is included in a situation
without being a member of that situation), and as singular when it is
presented but not represented (a term that is a member without being
included) (Ltre, pp. 95-115). What becomes of the exception in this
scheme? At first glance, one might think that it falls into the third case, that
the exception, in other words, embodies a kind of membership without
inclusion. And this is certainly Badious position. But what defines the
character of the sovereign claim is precisely that it applies to the exception in
no longer applying to it, that it includes what is outside itself. The sovereign
exception is thus the figure in which singularity is represented as such, which
is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable. What cannot be included in any
way is included in the form of the exception. In Badious scheme, the
exception introduces a fourth figure, a threshold of indistinction between
excrescence (representation without presentation) and singularity
(presentation without representation), something like a paradoxical
inclusion of membership itself. The exception is what cannot be included in
the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the
whole in which it is always already included. What emerges in this limit
figure is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing
between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and
what is inside, between exception and rule. Badious thought is, from
this perspective, a rigorous thought of the exception. His central category of
the event corresponds to the structure of the exception. Badiou defines the
event as an element of a situation such that its membership in the situation
is undecidable from the perspective of the situation. To the State, the event
thus necessarily appears as an excrescence. According to Badiou, the relation
between membership and inclusion is also marked by a fundamental lack of
correspondence, such that inclusion always exceeds membership (theorem of
the point of excess). The exception expresses precisely this impossibility of a
systems making inclusion coincide with membership, its reducing all its parts
ro unity. From the point of view of language, it is possible to assimilate
inclusion to sense and membership to denotation. In this way, the fact that a
word always has more sense than it can actually denote corresponds to the
theorem of the point of excess. Precisely this disjunction is at issue both in
Claude Lvi-Strausss theory of the constitutive excess of the signifier over
the signified (there is always a lack of equivalence between the rwo, which
is resolvable for a divine intellect alone, and which results in the existence of
a superabundance of the signifier over the signifieds on which it rests
[Introduction Mauss, p. xlix]) and in Emile Benvenistes doctrine of the
irreducible opposition between the semiotic and the semantic. The thought
of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of the exception in every
area. Languages sovereign claim thus consists in the attempt to make sense
coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two
in which language can maintain irself in relation to its denotata by
abandoning them and withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the
linguistic state of exception). This is what deconstruction does, positing
undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every possibility of signification.
1.6. This is why sovereignty presents itself in Schmitt in the form of a decision
on the exception. Here the decision is not the expression of the will of a
subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents the
inscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority that animates it
and gives it meaning. The sovereign decides not the licit and illicit but the
originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law or, in the words of
Schmitt, the normal structuring of life relations, which the law needs. The
decision concerns neither a quaestio iuris nor a quaestio facti, but rather the
very relation between law and fact. Here it is a question not only, as Schmitt
seems to suggest, of the irruption of the effective life that, in the exception,
breaks the crust of a mechanism grown rigid through repetition but of
something that concerns the most inner nature of the law. The law has a
regulative character and is a rule not because it commands and proscribes,
but because it must first of all create the sphere of its own reference in real
life and make that reference regular. Since the rule both stabilizes and
presupposes the conditions of this reference, the originary structure of the
rule is always of this kind: If (a real case in point, e.g.: si membrum rupsit),
then (juridical consequence, e.g.: talio esto), in which a fact is included in
the juridical order through its exclusion, and transgression seems to precede
and determine the lawful case. That the law initially has the form of a lex
talionis (talio, perhaps from talis, amounts to the thing itself) means that
the juridical order does not originally present itself simply as sanctioning a
transgressive fact but instead constitutes itself through the repetition of the
same act without any sanction, that is, as an exceptional case. This is not a
punishment of this first act, but rather represents its inclusion in the juridical
order, violence as a primordial juridical fact (permittit enim lexparem
vindictam, for the law allows equitable vengeance [Pompeius Festus, De
verborum significations 496. 15]). In this sense, the exception is the originary
form of law. The cipher of this capture of life in law is not sanction (which is
not at all an exclusive characteristic of the juridical rule) but guilt (not in the
technical sense that this concept has in penal law but in the originary sense
that indicates a being-in-debt: in culpa esse), which is to say, precisely the
Inclusive-Exclusion
The inclusive exclusion is the abject between us and
them
Zemblylas, 10 (Michalinos of Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia with
These vital decisions and their effects are at the center of Agamben's
analysis of the inimical effects of a politics centered on sovereignty and
human rights. Below I will outline Agamben's analysis of biopolitical
sovereignty to provide the groundwork for a discussion of his critique of
human rights. To understand the insidious effects of a power that makes the
care of life its central task, Agamben draws on the work of Michel Foucault. Of
particular interest is Foucault's contention that in modernity we see the
emergence of biopower, which differs from the archaic sovereign power that
relies on the threat of death and is instead centered on regulating and
managing the biological life of the individual and species (Foucault, 1988, p.
143; 2003, p. 241). Contra Foucault, Agamben argues that biopower is not
a distinctively modern form of power but is always already
implicated in sovereignty (Agamben, 1998, pp. 6, 9). It is the type of
power at work not only in modern democracies but also in absolute
monarchies. To the extent that sovereignty, in its archaic and modern forms,
always consists in a decision on life, it is indeed inseparable from biopower.2
Agamben starts off his analysis of this intersection between sovereignty and
biopower with the premise that the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power (1998, p. 6; emphasis in the original). As
he works on this premise, he leaves aside Foucault's genealogy, and engages
instead in a logico-formal analysis that aims to delineate what is always
already biopolitical in the permanent structure of sovereignty throughout
Western politics (1998, p. 109). To do this, he draws on Carl Schmitt's
definition of sovereignty as the decision on the exception (Agamben, 1998,
pp. 19, 67, 83; Schmitt, 2005, p. 5). For both Agamben and Schmitt,
sovereignty cannot ground itself in legal norms; it is in need of an
exteriority or factuality to ground itself. To understand the relation between
sovereign law and this exteriority, Agamben turns to the etymology of
exception (ex-capere), which indicates that sovereign exception is not
merely exclusion; it is more precisely an inclusive exclusion, which
signifies a double movement capturing at the very moment of
excluding (1998, p. 21). On the basis of this etymology, Agamben argues
that the logic of sovereignty consists in capturing, taking in, what is outside
of the juridico-political order. What is this exteriority that is captured in
sovereign law? The simple answer is life. Agamben's reading of Schmitt
suggests that law cannot have a concrete meaning without a relation to life
(1998, p. 27). Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Agamben also concludes that this
relationship between law and life always necessitates the isolation of a bare
life that can be killed with impunity. Life can be included in the
sovereign sphere only in the form of an exclusion, or its capacity to
be killed (1998, p. 8). To understand how bare life is produced and to see
how Agamben establishes the continuity of biopolitical sovereignty
throughout Western history, it is important to look at his reading of the
ancient Greek opposition between zo and bios. According to Agamben, zo
refers to the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men,
or gods) whereas bios denotes exclusively the form or way of living proper
to an individual or a group (1998, p. 1). Drawing on Aristotle's Politics,
Agamben claims that this opposition underlies the exclusion of natural life
from the polis and its relegation to the oikos (1998, p. 2).3 It is this
biopolitical division of political and natural life that always produces
remainders and turns certain categories of living beings into bare life.4 Bare
life then is neither simple natural life of zo nor politically qualified life of
bios; rather it is the life produced as a result of sovereign decisions regarding
what is distinctively human (1998, pp. 90, 106, 109). By arguing that the
inclusive exclusion of life has been the permanent characteristic of
biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben contests Foucault and argues that the
novelty of modern biopolitics consists neither in the inclusion of zo in the
political sphere nor in the fact that politics is concerned with life (Agamben,
1998, p. 9). What is distinctive about modern power in this new account is
that natural life, which was confined to the sphere of the oikos in the classical
world, becomes the foundation of politics, and what used to be an exception
bare life becomes the rule and comes to define the life of every
citizen and human being, blurring the distinctions between polis and
oikos, bios and zoe, right and violence (1998, p. 9). As modern
democracies dedicate themselves to the task of taking care of and protecting
zo, they end up subjecting every aspect of life to sovereign power
and turning each political subject virtually into bare life (1998, p.
111). Agamben attributes a significant role to modern juridico-political
innovations such as habeas corpus and declarations of rights in this major
historical transformation, and it is to these that I now turn to discuss
Agamben's distinctive contribution to contemporary debates on human
rights.
Citizenship
The rights of the citizen versus the rights of the human
demonstrate the formulaic exemption of the law resulting
in the camp Sodexho underpaying refugees and
Australia detain refugees demonstrate the paradigm
Wassen, 15 (Stina Wassen, 4-22-2015, "Are There People Outside of
Identity?," E-International Relations, http://www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/arethere-people-outside-of-identity/ //NK)
The sight of the camp is the location of the specialisation of sovereign powe r
within which the production of bare life is transformed from
exemption into rule (Minca, 2011). For Agamben, the juridical-political structure of
the camp be it the concentration camps of the Second World War, the
modern detention camps for refugees and asylum seekers, or the infamous
Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay is the site where the suspension of the
law it reproduced. This suspension allows for acts of immense cruelty not only to be committed,
but also ultimately to go unpunished (Puggioni, 2006). As Agamben has declared , the camp
envisages the structure in which the absolutisation of the biopower of di far
vivere [to make live] intersects with and equally absolute generalisation of
the sovereign power di far morire [to make die] (Agamben, 1999: 83). Importantly,
according to Agamben, once a geographical location is converted into this particular
power structure, a space of exemption, life is per se reduced to bare life,
and its control resides exclusively on the sovereign power of camp
administrators (Puggioni, 2006: 70). The way in which the refugee camp produces homo sacer has
been examined in depth by several scholars. For instance, Blent Diken has shown how the idea of
exception increasingly controls all aspects of the refugees life (2004).
Illustrative is the case of the French company, Sodexho, which, in running a
detention centre for asylum seekers outside of London, is allowed by the UK
authorities to pay camp residents 34p an hour for cleaning and cooking in the
camp. An amount which is far below the legal minimum wage in the UK (ibid).
Another example of how the refugee is reduced to homo sacer, is the way in
which asylum seekers can be arbitrarily relegated to detention. In Australia
for instance, refugees are mandatorily detained as a result of the policy that
all asylum claims are seen as fictitious until proved otherwise (ibi d). Further, as
the interviews with 46 asylum seeking women in the UK in 2012 by Women for Refugee Women (WFRW)
makes evident, detention is very common and can span between a period of a few days up until 11
months. On average, the women interviewed had been detained for three months (WFRW, 2014). As one
woman told the interviewers: The most depressing thing is that you dont know how long youre going to
be here or if youll still be here tomorrow (ibid: 4). In all of the above examples, the position of the asylum
seeker in contrast to the citizen of the host state is telling. As Pointed out by Slavoj Zizek, the question at
if this distinction between refugee and state citizen indicate that what
we are seeing is a return to the differentiation between the rights of the
citizen and the right of the human? (2002). Also, maybe the even more pressing issue is
hand is
not the way in which the people who are inclusively excluded are treated, but rather the fact that these
cases indicate that our most elementary, zero, position is that of an object of biopolitics (ibid: 95).
Impacts
Genocide
State of exception mobilizes genocidal violence in the
name of the law
Rogers, 8 (Nicole of Southern Cross School of Law and Justice, Terrorist v
sovereign: legal performances in a state of exception
http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1054&context=law_pubs)//MEB
There is no doubt that legal contests between the accused terrorist
and the sovereign are occurring with some frequency in the state of
exception which arguably characterises contemporary Western
societies. Their very occurrence could be perceived as an anomaly given the
theoretical parameters of the state of exception as a lawless void. However,
Agamben describes a relationship of mutual dependency in which
the judicial order must seek in every way to assure itself a relation
with this space devoid of law (2005:51). In any event, some of these legal
performances, for instance those staged by the Bush administration in processing the Guantanamo Bay
detainees, are quasi-legal proceedings and not necessarily representative of the rule of law. Fleur Johns
rejects this conclusion and contends that the regime at Guantanamo Bay is, in fact, a profoundly
antiexceptional legal artefact (2005: 615) with no space for option, doubt and responsibility in the legal
bureaucracy
rather than law the sort of murderous bureaucracy which
engendered mass genocide during the Third Reich: the governmental
procedures which apply therein. This 164 Rogers description, however, suggests
performances which are taking place in the contemporary state of exception can be divided into three
categories. In the first category we find the true legal black holes, in which the courts refuse to judge the
actions of the executive. Yet such performances are limited in number. More common are the second
category of legal performances, in which the courts conduct only a procedural review and ignore the
substance of the rule of law (Dyzenhaus 2006: 35). From these performances emerge what David
and the sovereign in which, despite the deployment of biopolitical strategies and an overt display of
intimidatory force on the part of the sovereign, the courts have demonstrated an adherence to the rule of
law and a resistance to the Kafka-esque qualities of the state of exception. In this final category of legal
performances the sovereign is indeed constrained by the rule of law.
This type of structure, which allows for an unseen seer to watch over individuals occupying a given
territory, is nothing new in fact, such surveillance structures have been recorded from as far back as the
Early Bronze Age (3000-2650 BC) (ibid, 78-85). However, these earlier surveillance systems were used in
order to guard a territory against an attack, as with the lookout towers constructed at the top of castles.
What distinguishes the Roman work camp from other ancient surveillance mechanisms is the way in which
is it integrated into, and in many ways the precondition for, the political structure that creates the camp .
concepts and techniques we see at work in the camp are not fundamentally different today, not everything
has remained the same.
The Camp
State of exception creates an omnipresent threat of
concentration camps reemerging the constant security
threat created by the sovereign legitimizes extreme
action
Douglas, 9 (Jeremy, independent scholar, Disappearing Citizenship:
surveillance and the state of exception
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//MEB
In order to understand how bare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the polis,
it is necessary to introduce another concept: state of exception. This notion is derived, by in large, from
Carl Schmitts book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin
and Schmitt concerning the nature of the state of exception .
human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to
investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of
power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of
their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them
could appear any longer as a crime. (At this point, in fact, everything
had truly become possible.)
remembered alongside the yellow star). These VPs were divided into three
groups: one that simply had to abstain from drinking altogether; one that
drank only salt water; and one that drank salt water mixed with Berkazusatz,
a chemical substance that, according to the researchers, lessened the harm
of the salt water. Another important area of experimentation involved
inoculation with petechial fever bacteria and the Hepatitis endemica virus in
the hope of producing vaccines against two infectious diseases that were
especially threatening to the health of German soldiers on the battlefronts,
where life was hardest. Experimentation on nonsurgical sterilization by
means of chemical substances or radiation, which was to serve the Reichs
eugenic politics, was, in addition, particularly severe and painful for subjects.
Less often, experiments were also conducted on limb transplants, cellular
inflammations, and so on. 90 PART THREE: THE CAMP AS BIOPOLITICAL
PARADIGM OF THE MODERN 5.2. Reading the testimony of VPs who survived,
in some cases the testimony of the very subjects described in the extant
records, is such an atrocious experience that it is very tempting to
consider the experiments as merely sadocriminal acts with no
relation to scientific research. But unfortunately this cannot be
done. To begin with, some (certainly not all) of the physicians who conducted
the experiments were quite well respected by the scientific community for
their research. Professor Clauberg, for example, who was responsible for the
sterilization program, was the inventor of the Clauberg test on
progesterone action, which was commonly used in gynecology until a few
years ago. Professors Schrder, Becker- Freyting, and Bergblck, who directed
the experiments on the potability of salt water, enjoyed such a good scientific
reputation that after they were convicted, a group of scientists from various
countries submitted a petition to an international congress of medicine in
1948 so that these scientists might not be confused with other criminal
physicians sentenced in Nuremberg. And during their trial, Professor Vollardt,
a professor of chemistry at the University of Frankfurt, who was not
considered to have sympathies for the Nazi regime, testified before the court
that from the scientific point of view, the preparation of these experiments
was splendid a curious adjective, if one considers that the VPs reached
such a level of prostration in the course of the experiment that they twice
tried to suck fresh water from a rag on the floor. What is decisively more
disquieting is the fact (which is unequivocally shown by the scientific
literature put forward by the defense and confirmed by the expert
witnesses appointed by the court) that experiments on prisoners
and persons sentenced to death had been performed several times
and on a large scale in our century, in particular in the United States
(the very country from which most of the Nuremberg judges came).
Thus in the 1920s, 800 people held in United States prisons were
infected with malaria plasmodia in an attempt to find an antidote to
paludism. There were also the experiments widely held to be
exemplary in the scientific literature on pellagra conducted by
Goldberg on twelve prisoners sentenced to death, who were
promised the remission of their penalty if they survived
experimentation. Outside the United States, the first experiments with
cultures of the beriberi bacillus were conducted by R. P. Strong in Manila on
persons sentenced to death (the records of the experiment do not mention
they had contracted the disease. The only ethically correct position would
have been to recognize that the precedents cited by the defense were
pertinent, but that they did not diminish the responsibility of the accused in
the slightest. But this would have meant throwing a sinister shadow on
common practices of the medical profession. (Since the time of the trial, even
more sensational cases of mass experiments conducted on citizens have
come to light, for example, in the study of the effects of nuclear radiation.) If
it was theoretically comprehensible that such experiments would not
raise ethical problems for officials and researchers inside a
totalitarian regime that moved in an openly biopolitical horizon, how
could experiments that were, in a certain sense, analogous have
been conducted in a democratic country? The only possible answer
is that in both contexts the particular status of the VPs was decisive;
they were persons sentenced to death or detained in a camp, the
entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political
community. Precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights
and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence,
and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a
limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they
were no longer anything but bare life. Those who are sentenced to
death and those who dwelt in the camps are thus in some way
unconsciously assimilated to homines sacres, to a life that may be
killed without the commission of homicide. Like the fence of the
camp, the interval between death sentence and execution delimits
an extratemporal and extraterritorial threshold in which the human
body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in
a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes. In such a
space of exception, subjection to experimentation can, like an
expiation rite, either return the human body to life (pardon and the
remission of a penalty are, it is worth remembering, manifestations
of the sovereign power over life and death) or definitively consign it
to the death to which it already belongs. What concerns us most of
all here, however, is that in the biopolitical horizon that
characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move in the
no-mans-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could
penetrate.
The danger of being declared homo sacer is built into the experience
of life in societies ruled by states. For Agamben, the ability to declare
someone homo sacer is fundamental to the sovereignty claimed by
states. This is shown in the historic concept of the ban. The term ban refers both to the sovereigns
standard (the banner or flag) and to the act of outlawing someone (origin of English ban, banish and
bandit). This shows the deep connection between sovereignty and homo sacer. This kind of practice was
supposed to be stopped in modern liberalism, with ideas such as due process and habeas corpus, but
Mackay said in parliament that gypsies who camp in car parks are scum who do not deserve the same
human rights as my decent constituents. (His own expense fiddling being, presumably, a different matter).
Such cases are for Agamben evidence of the spread of the logic of sovereignty, which was never really
clearest in the kind of emergency powers which states use to suspend normal laws in special
circumstances, such as Britains Civil Contingencies Act. These kinds of laws have been widely used in
Latin American and some European countries to suppress protests and social unrest. States of exception
also exist in other kinds of spaces defined as marginal or outside normal laws .
Cases of prison
camps like Guantanamo Bay, which was asserted by the Bush regime to be
outside American law, and Abu Ghraib, where US soldiers committed abuse
under the cover of military impunity, are straightforward examples of the
state of exception. The theory also tends to be applied to prisons and policing regimes more
broadly, especially when they are apparently lawless or outside normal laws the refugee detention and
that guards provoked the Moorland uprising in an attempt to avoid job cuts. There is also a strong
similarity between medieval outlawing and measures such as ASBOs and control orders, which similarly
define certain individuals selected by the state as outside the rights recognised in ordinary law. In earlier
historical periods, and still today in warzones, there is a tendency for colonies to be treated as states of
Agamben
discusses the denigration of savages and primitives as a means to
relegate groups of people to bare life by rendering them
indistinguishable from animals, which had already been consigned to
bare life.
exception the rights which apply in the homeland dont apply in the periphery.
Holocaust
happened when and where it did for contingent, historical reasons, but
its real causes were the creation of a particular kind of space, the
camp, where people were defined as having lives not worth living,
and as being vulnerable to being killed with impunity.
point of the logic of sovereignty, showing its ontological nature in its realisation: it shows where the
not just about opposing Nazis specifically, but fighting the logic of
sovereignty which generated the Holocaust. According to Agamben, the camp
doesnt just exist in Nazi Germany, or even in totalitarian regimes. The camp exists,
potentially at least, wherever there are states. It is built into the
logic of political sovereignty. It is permanently possible in the spaces
of exception which states constantly create. Whether or not people in these
spaces are actually killed does not depend on any legal protection (which is either nonexistent or
ineffective), but entirely on the whims or ethics of the agents of the state who are exercising its sovereign
power. It exists particularly strongly in contemporary states, because the logic of sovereignty has unfolded
to a certain point (Agamben seems to think of the changes in the state over time as something akin to a
sapling growing into a giant, fully developed tree). Agamben famously claims that the camp is the nomos
of modernity the moment of naming, of recognition and derecognition, which creates the power (and
autonomy) of the modern state. While it is peculiarly modern, the camp also marks the fulfilment of the
internal development of sovereignty.
he dislikes Nazis. There are clear, structural reasons for the parallels he draws. I would argue that, in
historically would prove to be far more porous. It is, I think, a peculiar perspectival blockage of radicalisms
in countries like Britain to confine anti-fascism to opposing small neo-Nazi groups. In contrast, German
antifa have long recognised the parallels between the repressive practices (and even the personnel) of the
It
is only in countries like Britain and America, with no recent fascist past
to compare to, where the existence of a continuum between fascism
and the deep state is something of a public secret, even among
radicals.
current German state and those of the Third Reich; so have radicals in Italy, Spain, Greece and Japan.
According to Agamben, politics is always biopolitics and biopolitics is the centre of sovereign power. In this
light, modernity is not a break with the historical tradition, but it generalizes and radicalizes what was
physical entity surrounded by fences and materiality but it symbolizes the line between bare life and
because the zone does not have to have a character specific to it. The bombing of Roboski as an example
proves it. Heron planes determined the coordinates of the villagers and bombed them. So, every zone can
increasing aggravation of biopolitics in modernity. He says that biopolitics has passed beyond a new
threshold. For example, Nazi biopolitics concentrated on identifiable individuals or specific populations.
(111) The
borderline th at separated individuals and groups in the past is now found in inside the individual body. The
line of separation between political existence and bare life moved inside every human life and every
citizen.
Homo Sacer
Law has abandoned those within the camp their killing
no longer calls for punishment, but just the capacity to be
killed. They have become homo sacer.
Ownbey, Has a PhD in English and works on human rights in
literature within the context of statelessness, 2013
(Carolyn, 4/2013, disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory, The Abandonment of
Modernity: Bare Life and the Camp in Homo Sacer and Hotel Rwanda,
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1017&context=disclosure, accessed 7/6/2015, JAK)
The homo sacer stands outside the law, and is abandoned by it.
Agamben calls the homo sacer simply set outside human
jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law (82).
The homo sacer, external to the law, still, however, remains intimately 19
bound to it. He does not simply have no relation to the law; he relates to the
law precisely through his exclusion from it. Agamben explains this as the
sovereign ban of the homo sacer from the sovereign spherein other words,
as the state of exception. He says, The original political relation is the ban
(the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside,
exclusion and inclusion) (181). Being excluded from the law, the homo sacer
cannot appeal to the law; it cannot protect him. His banishment from the
sphere of law reduces himfrom a politically relevant person, a citizen
protected by the law and within the lawto his bare life alone. As such, as a
creature possessing bare life only, the homo sacer may become subject to
death or punishment at the hands of anyone. Agamben explains that in the
state of exception, human life is politicized only through an abandonment to
an unconditional power of death (90). Using the example of the Jew in Nazi
Germany, Agamben identifies, a flagrant case of homo sacer in the
sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing
therefore constitutes neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but
simply the actualization of a mere capacity to be killed (114). The
Jew in Nazi Germany demonstrates exactly those two traits Agamben has told
us are always present in the homo sacer: his ability to be killed without being
the victim of homicide, and his inability to be sacrificed. Agamben continues,
saying, The truth is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and
giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as lice, which is to say,
as bare life (114). In the same way, the exterminating Hutus, particularly the
group called the Interhamwe, call the Tutsis cockroaches (00:52). The
homo sacer no longer signifies anything beyond his bare life; he has
no political relevance but for his mere existence outside the law,
banished from the law, abandoned by it. Agamben explains, The life
caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred and, in this
sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The
sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right
in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both
lifes subjection to a power over death and lifes irreparable exposure in the
relation of abandonment (83). Being abandoned by the law, and as
such being reduced to bare life, does not necessarily indicate that
the abandoned sovereign subject, the homo sacer, will be tortured,
murdered, or the like (although this is not out of the realm of
possibility, and indeed there always seems to be a sense of danger
haunting the homo sacer). It simply means the law no longer applies;
the homo sacer cannot appeal to anyone for help, not to the law, the
sovereign, or the police.
Police State
The proliferation of policing and surveillance technologies
strips the capacity for social or political identities
security has left the police state as a black hole
Agamben, Philosopher, 2014
[Rational International, From the State of Control to a Praxis of
Destituent Power, http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituentpower-democracy/, 7/5/15, CY]
I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security
apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing
extension to citizens of technologies which were conceived for
criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of the
citizen. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a
function of the social personality and its recognition by others, but
rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any relation
to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in
the double helix of DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes
the decisive factor of social identity, which loses therefore its public
character. If my identity is now determined by biological facts that in
no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the
construction of something like a political and ethical identity
becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my
fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity
without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics
loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While
the classical Greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the
private and the public, the oikos, which is the place of reproductive life, and
the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems rather to
move in a zone of indifference between the private and the public,
or, to quote Hobbes terms, the physical and the political body. The
materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video
surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an
apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons has been extended to
public places. But it is evident that a video-recorded place is no more
an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of
indifference between the prison and the forum. This transformation
of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon that
involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of
biopower holds a special place. The primacy of the biological identity over
the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare life in
modern states. But one should never forget that the leveling of social
identity on body identity begun with the attempt to identify the
recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal
relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by
suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken principle which rules
our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential terrorist.
But what is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as
Violence
Sovereignty inscribes self-preservation as a justification
for all violence within the law it is still naked power, the
violence of the strongest is all that can be produced.
Agamben, Italian continental philosopher, 98 (Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer, p. 35-36)
2.3. The very sense of this opposition, which has had such a tenacious lineage in the political culture of the
important to note that in Hobbes the state of nature survives in the person of the sovereign, who is the
contains its virtuality. The state of nature (certainly in the modern era, but probably also in that of the
Sophists) is the being-in-potentiality [l'essere-in-potenza] of the law, the laws self- presupposition as
Racism
Biopolitical surveillance reduce black Americans to bare
life and enforce the white norm through cycles of
punishment and discipline
Santori 12
Nel lives in the past and presumes that the assimilation of white
values will protect her from the fire of racism. But racism has
changed from a hot politics to the cool, detached study of behaviors
and pathologies. In order to protect herself, Nel should fear water
more than fire; her strategy should challenge, rather than
accommodate, the behavioral expectations of whites. This is
confusing, of course, because the notion that blacks could be the
behavioral equal of whiteswhile long a staple of the black
intelligentsiais seriously entertained by whites only after civil
rights inclusiveness. What once seemed a solution to racial
misrecognition is now the snare of the bio-political state.
Gender Violence
Gendered violence results from invoking bare life
Agamben 98
(Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 78-79, VW)
The pamphlet Make More of an Effort, Frenchmen, if You Want to Be
Republicans, read by the libertine Dolmanc in the Marquis de Sades
Philosophy in the Boudoir, is the first and perhaps most radical biopolitical
manifesto of modernity. At the very moment in which the revolution makes
birth which is to say, bare life into Biopolitics and the Rights of Man 79
the foundation of sovereignty and rights, Sade stages (in his entire work, and
in particular in 120 Days of Sodom) the theatrum politicum as a theater of
bare life, in which the very physiological life of bodies appears,
through sexuality, as the pure political element. But the political
meaning of Sades work is nowhere as explicit as it is in this pamphlet, in
which the maisons in which every citizen can publicly summon any other
citizen in order to compel him to satisfy his own needs emerge as the political
realm par excellence. Not only philosophy (Lefort, Ecrire, pp. 100-101) but
also and above all politics is sifted through the boudoir. Indeed, in Dolmancs
project, the boudoir fully takes the placeof the cit, in a dimension in
which the public and the private, political existence and bare life
change places. The growing importance of sadomasochism in
modernity has its root in this exchange. Sadomasochism is precisely
the technique of sexuality by which the bare life of a sexual partner
is brought to light. Not only does Sade consciously invoke the
analogy with sovereign power (there is no man, he writes, who
does not want to be a despot when he has an erection), but we also
find here the symmetry between homo sacer and sovereign, in the
complicity that ties the masochist to the sadist, the victim to the
executioner. Sades modernity does not consist in his having foreseen the
unpolitical primacy of sexuality in our unpolitical age. On the contrary, Sade
is as contemporary as he is because of his incomparable
presentation of the absolutely political (that is, biopolitical)
meaning of sexuality and physiological life itself. Like the
concentration camps of our century, the totalitarian character of the
organization of life in Sillings castle with its meticulous
regulations that do not spare any aspect of physiological life (not
even the digestive function, which is obsessively codified and publicized) has its root in the fact that what is proposed here for the
first time is a normal and collective (and hence political)
organization of human life founded solely on bare life.
Docile Bodies
Surveillance creates the public space into a prison turns
the human in to docile bodies.
Agamben, Philosopher at The University of Verona, 2009
This, above all, is the source of the peculiar uneasiness of power precisely
during an era in which it confronts the most docile and cowardly social body
that has ever existed in human history . It is only an apparent paradox
that the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies (the Bloom, as
it has been effectively suggested he be called),6 who readily does
everything that he is asked to do, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday
gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his
desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by
apparatuses, is also considered by power perhaps precisely because of
thisas a potential terrorist. While a new European norm imposes
biometric apparatuses on all its citizens by developing and perfecting
anthropometric technologies invented in the nineteenth century in order to
identify recidivist criminals (from mug shots to fingerprinting), surveillance
by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the city
into the interior of an immense prison. In the eyes of authorityand
maybe rightly sonothing looks like a terrorist than the ordinary
man.
Biopolitics
Bio politics turns the state into a killing machine that
annihilates those deemed unworthy.
Thorup, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and the History of
Ideas at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, 2012
Alternative
Whatever Being/Singularity
Whatever being entails a lack of classification as an
individual, giving the individual a belonging to itself
solves sovereign power
Caldwell, Assistant Professor in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Louisville, 04 (Anne,
Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html#authb
io) //MEB
Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects
of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to
he suggests we
take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life
that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all
forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no
deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead,
presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to
be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to
others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive
Alternative Impotentiality
Our alternative is to embrace our impotentiality to restore
our potentiality, we refuse to participate in the modes of
sovereignty or else we will enter a politics of destruction.
Balskus 10 (Elizabeth, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy | University of
AT: Perm
The Perm cannot avoid codifying the exception of bare life
Agamben 98 (Giorgio, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer, pg. 11)
In contrasting the beautiful day (euemeria) of simple life with the great difficulty of political
bios in the passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation
to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics . The 24 centuries that have since gone by have
brought only provisional and ineffective solutions. In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it
more and more to assume the form of a biopolitics, Western politics has not succeeded in
constructing the link between zoe and bios, between voice and language, that would have
healed the fracture. Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is,
as something that is included solely through an exclusion. How is it possible to politicize the
natural sweetness of zoe? And first of all, does zoe really need to be politicized, or is politics
not already contained in zoe as its most precious center? The biopolitics of both modern
totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism certainly constitute
answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a completely new politicsthat is, a politics no
longer founded on the exception of bare lifeis at hand, every theory and every praxis will
remain imprisoned and immobile, and the beautiful day of life will be given citizenship only
either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the
spectacle condemns it.
AT: Cosmopolitanism
The Refugee is symptom of sovereign power, not a
historical problem tied to the nation-state.
Cosmopolitanism (or world government) cannot resolve
the dilemma of the camp.
Larsen, 12 (Signe Larsen, xx-xx-2012, "Refugees, nationalism, and
political membership," Nordicum-Mediterraneum, http://nome.unak.is/nmmarzo-2012/vol-7-n-3-2012/54-conference-paper/352-refugees-nationalismand-political-membership //NK)
Arendts diagnosis of the problem of the refugee (the refugee as the manifestation of the problematic tie
between the nation-state and human rights) is the starting point for Agambens diagnosis of the problem
Agamben agrees with Arendt that the reason why the refugee is
not protected by human rights is that rights can only be attributed to
Man insofar as he is also a citizen. From this we can draw the paradoxical
conclusion that the refugee, in the eyes of the law, is not even considered a
human being (Agamben, 1998, pp. 128-129). Contrary to Arendt, Agamben argues that the
problem of the refugee is best understood, not as a historical
problem born with the nation-state, but as a symptom of the
problematic nature of sovereign power as such. Where the problem of
the refugee in Arendts perspective is a symptom of the problematic historical
connection between human rights and the nation-state, the problem of the
refugee in Agambens perspective is a symptom of the problematic transcultural and trans-historical nature of sovereign power . In Agambens perspective,
the exclusion of the refugeehomo saceris the original and
fundamental activity of sovereign power, and the production of refugees
as rightless human beings is thus not only a necessary implication of nationstates, but of all sovereign power. It is this connection between sovereign power and the
of the refugee.
rightless men that is the primary inquiry in Agambens homo sacer project[8], to which I will now turn. The
starting point of the homo sacer project is the sovereign paradox: The paradox of sovereignty consists in
the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order (Agamben, pp. 1998,
15). The sovereign is outside the juridical order in the sense that he has juridical immunity (the law does
not apply to him) and he is inside the juridical order in the sense that he is the fundament of the juridical
order. The structure of the sovereign paradox is the structure of the exception, in the sense that the
sovereign is only included in the juridical order by his exclusion from it: the sovereign is the exception of
the law, in the sense that the law applies to the sovereign by no longer applying (Agamben, 1998, pp. 15,
18). The core of state sovereignty lies in this exception: the sovereign is not defined by his monopoly to
legislate but by his monopoly to decide whether the legislation applies or not.[9] The sovereign has the
power to declare a state of exception, that is, the suspension of all laws. The state of exception, Agamben
argues, is a threshold between inside and outside, between a normal situation and chaos, where the
boundaries between law and violence become indistinguishable and everything becomes possible (1998,
pp. 37-38). The state of exception is the originary and formal structure of the juridical relation, in the sense
that the sovereign decides what is included in and what is excluded from the juridical order (Agamben,
1998, pp. 25-26). The state of exception is the principle of the law because it opens the very space of
juridical order. The exception as the structure of sovereignty is the originary structure of law, in which life
is included in law by being suspended from it. This relation is named ban, that is, ban from the political
sphere. The person who is banned is by his exclusion from the political sphere still included in the political
sphere as an exception or an exclusion; he is abandoned at the threshold of society in a zone where the
boundaries between law and life, inside and outside, disappear (Agamben, 1998, pp. 28). In this zone of
pure ban, Agamben argues, the law does no longer prescribe anything, and it is oddly enough in this zone
that the law affirms itself most rigorously, because literally everything becomes possible (1998, pp. 49-50).
The pure ban is the zone where the law has no content and therefore the possibility of prescribing
in the political sphere only through his exclusion from the political sphere; he
is abandoned on the threshold of society where the boundaries between
violence and law become indistinguishable. Homo sacerliterally the sacred
human beingis a figure from Roman law: he is the man no one can sacrifice,
but everyone can kill without committing homicide (Agamben, 1998, pp. 71). At first
glance, as Agamben points out, the definition of homo sacer seems to be a self-contradiction: if he is
sacred why can everyone kill him without committing homicide? (1998, pp. 72) The question is in what
does the sacredness of the sacred man consist? In order to make sense of this, Agamben states, one must
recognize that sacredness is ambiguous: it is both something holy and something damned or tabooed;
something unclean that has to be banned from the religious sphere (1998, pp. 77, 79). The ambiguity of
the ban, i.e., the inclusion through exclusion implies the ambiguity of sacredness: the tabooed is included
in the religious sphere by being excluded from it. Homo sacer, Agamben concludes, is not a holy man but a
Homo
sacer, Agamben continues, is banned from both religion and society;
from heaven and earth (1998, pp. 81-82). He is banned from ius humanum because everyone
cursed man; homo sacer is banned and tabooed; he is an outcast, a Friedlos (1998, pp. 79).
can kill him without committing homicide, and he is banned from ius divinum because the sacrifice would
be a purification rite and not strictly speaking a death penalty (if homo sacer was sacrificed he would be
purified and thereby included in the religious sphere). The sacratio of homo sacer is then a double
exception; homo sacer is excluded both from the ius humanum and from the ius divinum; he is excluded
both from the sphere of the profane and from that of the religious. We must understand that it is this
double exclusion and not the ambiguity of the sacred that constitutes the core of homo sacer; homo sacer
is a product of the sovereign ban, the product of earthly, human action. Homo sacer is the human being
who is trapped in the double exclusion; he is trapped in a zone where the distinction between sacrifice and
homicide disappears. This zone of indistinctionthe inclusive-exclusion from both ius humanum and ius
divinumis the sovereign sphere: The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill
without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred lifethat is, life that may be killed but not sacrificedis the life
that has been captured in this sphere (Agamben, 1998, pp. 83). The life of homo sacer, bare life or
sacred life, is the first content of sovereign power, because the sovereign ban is the originary activity of
the sovereignty, and the bearer of this ban is homo sacer. For this reason the problem of the refugee points
towards the originary activity of sovereign power. In Agambens perspective, sovereign power is founded
upon the exclusion of some human beings within the sovereign to whom the normal rules of the state do
not apply. These human beings, the homini sacri, are a mirror of sovereign power as such because they are
the exception that allows the normality to endure. The refugees, as homini sacri, are a locus where the
truth about sovereign power as the sphere in which it is possible to kill without committing homicide
discloses itself. In the modern nation-state a new space comes into existence, i.e. the sovereign sphere as
the zone of indistinction where homo sacer is kept and where everything becomes possible discloses itself:
this new space is the concentration camp. The camp is not defined by its geographical boundaries but by
its juridical placement outside the law; the camp is not born out of ordinary law but out of martial law, that
is, out of a state of exception (Agamben, 1998, pp. 167). An important transition of sovereign power in the
modern nation-state is, in Agambens perspective, the tendency towards declaring a state of willed
exception, (2005, pp. 3; 1998, pp. 169) or the permanent state of exception. By this Agamben means that
the state of exception becomes a paradigm for government: the exception is used, not out of necessity,
but as a political tool of governmentality (2005, pp. 1, 30-31). The state of exception is willed because it
is an extremely effective tool to carry out political actions that could not have been carried out under
normal circumstances, that is, outside the exception of martial law. An example hereupon is the laws in
Germany between 1933 and 1945. In 1933, when the Nazis took power, a state of exception was declared
by the decree for the protection of the people and State (Agamben 1998, pp. 168; Agamben 2005, pp.
2). This decree remained de facto in force until the end of the war and in that sense Nazi Germany can be
understood as twelve years of state of exception, that is, a permanent state of exception, a state where
the exception has become the rule (Agamben 1998, pp. 168-169; Agamben 2005, pp. 15-16). The
concentration camp is the space where the permanent state of exception is in full power. This means that
the concentration camp is excluded from ordinary legislation and for this reason anything can happen
within the camp: there are no laws within the camp except the law that no laws apply. This is the meaning
of Agambens cryptic formulation that the law in the permanent state of exception is in force as the
Nothing of Revelation (1998, pp. 51): the law does not prescribe anything but that does not mean that a
sphere of freedom is created; the camp is, on the contrary, the space where the highest possible control of
human beings is possible. In the camp, the law is in force without signifying anything. This space of the
camp has become, in Agambens perspective, the nomos of the modern, meaning that the camp as a
juridical space not only exists in concentration camps but potentially everywhere: in airports, in public
areas and in outskirts of cities in which we live (1998, pp. 175). In modernity, the state of exception
becomes a latent possibility everywhere, and it is thus always possible to reduce human beings to the
naked life of homo sacer: the willed state of exception signals the permanent possibility of violent
government without juridical control. What is truly radical about the homo sacer project is the notion that
the society we live in today is a permanent state of exception and that all of us (citizens and refugees
alike) in all present-day societies (authoritarian and so-called democratic) are reduced to the naked life of
homo sacer: If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we
all are homini sacri (Agamben, 1998, pp. 115). In State of Exception, Agamben presents a theoretical and
historical introduction to the juridical notion of the state of exception. What becomes clear from his
analysis is an inner relation between the laws in Germany between 1933-1945 (Decree for the protection
of the people and State) (Agamben, 2005, pp. 2) and the USA Patriot Act from 2001, which was passed to
protect the national security of the United States (Agamben, 2005, pp. 3): if you are suspected of
endangering national security, your constitutional rights are de facto suspended. With the USA Patriot Act
as a role model, terror-laws have been passed in most of Europe and at least to that extent it is
understandable why Agamben understands the permanent state of exception as the new paradigm for
government (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1-4). It is for this reason that Agamben argues that all present-day
societies (totalitarian and so-called democratic) are ruled by a permanent state of exception where the law
discloses itself as the pure Nothing of Revelation and where all human beings (citizens and refugees
alike) can be reduced potentially to the status of the homo sacer and where all spaces can be transformed
Aff
Permutation
The perm solvesinstitutions already account for the
critique and the idea of sovereign autonomy is a selfserving construct
Chandler, IR professor at the University of Westminster,
10
[David, October 2010, The Uncritical Critique of Liberal Peace, Review of
International Studies, Volume: 36, p. 10-13, YGS]
the assumptions held to be driving liberal peace
approaches are very much in the eye of their critical beholders. The
It would appear that
most obvious empirical difficulty is that international policy regarding intervention and statebuilding
seems to have little transformative aspiration: far from assumptions of liberal universalism, it would
appear that, with the failure of post-colonial development, especially from the 1970s onwards,
international policymakers have developed historically low expectations about what can be achieved
through external intervention and assistance. The lack of transformative belief is highlighted by one of the
key concerns of the policy critics of the liberal peace the focus on capacity-building state institutions
liberal rights frameworks are often considered problematic in terms of the dangers of exclusion and
extremism. Todays illiberal peace approaches do not argue for the export of democracy the freeing up
of the political sphere on the basis of support for popular autonomy. The language of illiberal
institutionalist approaches is that of democratisation: the problematisation of the liberal subject, held to
be incapable of moral, rational choices at the ballot box, unless tutored by international experts
concerned to promote civil society and pluralist values. In these frameworks, the holding of elections
serves as an examination of the population and the behaviour of electoral candidates, rather than as a
process for the judgement or construction of policy (which it is assumed needs external or international
held that civil society was necessary to ensure that the population learnt civic values to make democracy
classical International Relations (IR) theorising. Under the internationalised regulatory mechanisms of
European Union (EU) statebuilding, explicitly based on a sharing of sovereignty, or consider other
statebuilding interventions, such as those by the international financial institutions in sub-Saharan Africa,
institutionalist discourse of intervention and regulation is not one of liberal universalism and
transformation but one of restricted possibilities, where democracy and development are hollowed out
and, rather than embodying the possibilities of the autonomous human subject, become mechanisms of
everything on the assumed meaning and stakes involved in the critique of the liberal peace.68
illiberalism of the subjects of intervention. Roland Paris, for example, argues that there is no logical
requirement for international agencies to resurrect failed states as states, rather than [as] some other
type of polity, and argues that this is the latest chapter in the globalisation of the Westphalian state,
where this state form is being propped up despite its failings.48 Paris argues that just as the non-liberal
Other cannot deal with the liberal state form, they are similarly ill-suited to handle electoral democracy,
warning particularly against the holding of elections in post-conflict situations. It is asserted that holding
elections when societies are still divided or segmented will be counterproductive, often giving enhanced
legitimacy to warring parties and bolstering the legitimacy of the forces successful in conflict.
Often
the solutions advocated by the policy critics are along similar lines
with regard to both sovereignty and democracy: the need for
greater international engagement in the state institutions, under
the guise of guaranteeing that no voices are excluded and the need
to constrict the autonomy of elected authorities. Under the rubric of
the critique of the liberal peace, these critics of the liberal peace
often advocate the reform of policy interventions away from the
focus on liberal rights frameworks and electoral democracy. Dominik
Zaum, for example, through a series of case studies, argues that the aspirations of the technocratic
approach of international statebuilding fails to appreciate that the liberal discourse of self-government
undermines the authority of external interveners and enables local elites to assert pressure and
influence.49 These liberal normative commitments mean that international interventions are limited both
in time and scope and therefore find it difficult to resist compromising their initial goals through giving
greater authority to local actors.50 Other authors have a similar perspective, explaining the failures of
international intervention as a product of external actors assuming that liberal models can merely be
exported, rather than understanding the contradictions involved in bringing liberalism to non-liberal
societies. Michael Barnett and Christopher Zrcher, for example, have sought to analyse why liberal
interventions tend to be no more than surface, on the basis that elites at both national and subnational
levels can capture and compromise peacebuilding leading to the reproduction of state-society
relations and patrimonial politics.51 Some of the policy critics argue not merely that these Western
models are perverted by the power of the non-liberal Other but that the attempt to export Western
models to non-liberal societies is inevitably going to fail to bridge the gulf between liberal and non-liberal
state-society forms. Noah Feldman, for example, suggests that these non-Western states and societies are
so alien to Western liberal interveners that the high failure rate strongly supports the basic intuition that
we do not know what we are doing.52 Feldman suggests that we need to continue to provide external
assistance but should reject the idea that our comparative advantages of wealth and power [give] us any
special ability to identify the institutional structures that will succeed in promoting democracy.53
Michael Ignatieff similarly argues that we do not actually know how to make states work in non-liberal
societies that are poor, divided on religious or ethnic lines or lacked a substantial state tradition in the
has also been central to the shifting discourse of development. While some commentators suggest that
little substantive has changed in the shift from the modernising frameworks of the liberal Washington
Consensus to the post-liberal, post-conditionality, New York Consensus focus on pro-poor policy making,
more radical critics of the liberal peace. There is a danger that liberalism is
criticised not for its inability to universalise economic growth and overcome the problems of combined
and uneven development, but for the aspirations of development itself. For example, Michael Pugh asserts
that rather than the economic rationalism of (capitalistic) entrepreneurship, other, non-liberal, values
need to be taken into account. Following the work of those critical of liberal development models, such as
Alt Fails
The structured resistance to biopolitics recommended by Agamben and his
migration studies followers portray fails to fundamentally alter the structured
materiality of modern liberal juridical order.
Lee 2010 [Charles, Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,
Womens Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Agambens transhistorical call notwithstanding, to what extent is the space of camp (and by
implication, the largely suppressed agency of bare life caught within the camp) an adequate
depiction of the social condition of undocumented migrants? Examining the workspace of private
households where female migrants work as domestic workers and where labor laws and regulations
are indefinitely suspended, in this essay I argue that, while these laboring spaces relate to camp as
the undocumented workers are stripped of juridico-political rights and reduced to a state of
exploited bare life, the con ception of camp lacks a dynamic account of power relations to address
the complex agency of migrant subjects as they negotiate their daily workspace. Significantly, what
begins for Agamben as a space of interstitiality posited in campa zone between life and death,
inside and outsideultimately slides into an immobile binary between the political beings of
citizens and the excluded bodies of bare life. Yet if the space of camp is interstitial in nature,
what preempts the possibility of the abject manifesting an agency that is also interstitial in
character? If the sovereign power occupies a space that is simultaneously inside and outside
the juridical order, so does the undocumented in navigating a terrain of resistance/negotiation
inside and outside the normative arrangement of citizenship. As I will argue, this negotiated
resistance does not fundamentally alter the structured materiality of modern liberal juridical
order and the political economy of irregular migration that Agamben and his migration
studies followers so powerfully portray. However, at the point when Agamben declares the
death of citizenship life for the bare subjects, he omits a crucial spectrum of ambiguous and
interstitial practices mounted by the abjectmediating between the two extreme ends of
political and nonpoliticalthat actually extends and reanimates the life of citizenship from the
very margins of abjection.
Their critique overdetermines citizenship and reinstates the divide between political
life and bare life, destroying agency
Lee 2010 [Charles, Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,
Womens Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
In the following, I will first address the relevance of Agambens work for studies of undocumented
migration. Two elements in his conception of camp are particularly compelling for the condition of
refugees and undocumented migrants: the immanence of interstitiality and the depoliticized state of
bare life.1 In turn, I look at how critics have problematized Agambens thesis and its connection to
unauthorized migration by raising issues such as location and agency in an effort to resurrect the
political for the abject. In particular, they point to acts of refugee antideportation campaigns
and undocumented-worker protests as counterexamples of acts of citizenship or noncitizen
citizenship that defy the image of camp as bodies of victims. Yet while chronicling such
resistant acts constitutes an urgent political intervention that counters the state of abjection, by
understanding citizenship as solely visible and audible political acts, this line of critique
actually falls into Agambens rigid binary that divides humanity into political life (citizenship)
and bare life (no rights, nonparticipation)with the only difference being that the latter, by way
of her citizen-like political acts, can now transform and elevate into the position of the former.
Importantly, both Agamben and his critics alike have yet to extend his analysis of the
interstitiality of sovereign power to examine the corresponding, interstitial agency of the
abject that sidesteps the binary of bare life and citizenship life.
Virno 2 (Paolo, Revolutionary, General intellect, exodus, multitude, Archipelago n54, June//shree)
Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then, when
Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological
category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrongheaded. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of
labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly
government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical;
I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real
commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As
soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the
living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential . Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt),
on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of
the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a
discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be
transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for
confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a
word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of
fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the
child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a
serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a
consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of
work and not propaganda words.
Law Solves
Politics is possible through the law even in the camp,
questions of law and administration are possible
Huysmans, Professor of Security Studies, 8 (Jef Huysmans, The
Jargon of ExceptionOn Schmitt, Agamben and the Absence of Political
Society, p. 179 -180 //NK)
Looked at from this perspective, debates about the reconciliation of liberty
and security, for example, are not, as Agamben argues, an ideological
practice that hides the fundamental break down of the dialectic between law
and anomie that has been central to modern politics (Agamben 2003:144
148). Rather these debates insert questions of and challenges to the role of
law and generalized norm-setting in highly charged biopolitical governance of
insecurities. Instead of collapsing the dialectic between law and anomie,
contestation of the protection of civil liberties, demands for re-negotiating
balances between liberties and security are neither simply to be taken at face
value as a matter of the necessity of balancing and rebalancing nor to be
seen as the endgame of the validity of legal mediations of politics and life.
Rather they open up a need to revisit the particular kind of work that law
does and does not do in specific sites (Neocleous 2006), such as camps, and
what the practices possibly tell us about if and how the dialectic between law
and anomie operates in biopolitical governance. Fleur Johnss analysis of the
camp in Guantanamo Bay is one such example (Johns 2005). She argues that
the camp is penetrated by a form of norm setting, thus implying that a
dialectic between norms and anomie, political transgression and law is not
absent from the organization and governing practice in the camp. Unlike
some other analyses that focus on constitutional transgressions and battles in
the constitutional courts, Johns emphasizes the importance for biopolitical
governance of the detailed and in a sense banal regulations that seek to
structure the everyday practices of the guards, the administrators and the
prisoners. The norm setting is thus not primarily constitutional but
administrative. The important point for this essay is that analyses like Fleur
Johns unpack the contemporary predicaments and political stakes in a site
like Guantanamo Bay by taking the practices and governmental technologies
at face value and interpret the specific work they do for making camps
possible within democratic polities. The understanding of the camp
transfigures from an absolute limit that defines the fundamental nature of
modern politics to a phenomenon that is constituted and contested by
various banal practices and governmental techniques. The question becomes
how these practices and sites we call camps are rendered within and through
modern democratic governance in a biopolitical age. Such an approach does
not read the nature of politics off of its limits but through the multiple
relations that are shaped by means of objectified mediations and the
struggles over them.
with the current development and proliferation of biometric technologies, these issues are given renewed
importance, rendering the body once again a central point of discussion and bringing the problematic
bifurcation of information and materiality into sharper focus. Some of the seminal works in this area relate
to studies of Irma van der Ploeg (2003a, 2005a) in which she seeks to rethink the entire normative
approach by which the confluence between body and technology is understood and conceptualized, and
reveal the extent to which the distinction between 'embodied identity or physical existence [...| and
information about (embodied) persons and their physical characteristics' can be sustained (lbid.: 2003a:
The ways by which the body is transformed into processable, storable and
retrievable information are numerous and among the most notable ones are
the techniques of genetic fingerprinting, DNA typing and the growing field of
bioinformatics. In all of these techniques, what is enabled is the process of
acquisition, storage and analysis of biological information via algorithmic and
computational methods whereby new forms of knowledge production are
generated and in which the notion of 'body as information' is salient. This
ontology of body as information construes the body itself in terms of
informational flows and communication patterns} exposing the porous and
malleable nature of body boundaries . And when the body is viewed beyond its somatic and
58).
material contours, what ensues is a problematisation of the very distinction between materiality and
immateriality and, with it, the distinction between the 'material' body and the body as 'information'. This,
in turn, poses a challenge to 'issues previously considered self-evident' so much so that the 'presumed
dematcation of where the body itself stops and begins being information will subtly shift [and] moral
had legal vocabularies available will no longer suffice' (ibid.: 67 ).
also present in Alterman's (2003) analysis of biometrics' implications vis-a-vis embodiment and identity. He
con- tends that the spread of our bodily 'representations' across networks and databases entails a
fundamental 'loss of privacy, and a threat to the self-respect which privacy rights preserve' (ibid.: 143).
Gender Turn
Agambens politics of potentiality fail to discuss the
prerequisite, the I can, and erases sexual difference
Ziarek 10
(Ewa Plonowska, Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the State
University of New York, Buffalo, Project Muse, Feminine 'I can': On Possibility
and Praxis in Agamben's Work,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.ziarek.html,
Accessed: 6.5.15, VW)
If we approach the politics of potentiality from the perspective of
bare life, the most urgent issue is not only the distinction of
possibility from will but the difference between impotentiality (the
enabling capacity of "not to," which for Agamben is the source of
freedom) and powerlessness or impossibility. Although barely legible in
Agamben's paradigmatic figure of potentiality, namely, Bartelby's famous
formula "I prefer not to," this task is at stake in another example of
potentiality, which makes only a fleeting appearance in Agamben's work, and
which thus far has been almost completely ignored by Agamben's
commentators.20 Let us recall that Agamben begins his essay "On
Potentiality" with a brief reference to the Russian poet, Anna
Akhmatova, who, standing outside the Stalinist prison in Leningrad
to hear the news of her imprisoned son, utters "I can" instead of "I
prefer not to." Agamben does not pursue in greater detail this
feminine inflection of possibility proclaimed in the face of the
suffering of others and political terror. Not only does he eclipse the
subtle difference between the (feminine?) "I can" and the
(masculine?) "I prefer not to," but he generalizes the singularity of
Akhmatova's utterance into "everyone's" experience of potentiality:
For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this 'I
can," which does not refer to any... specific capacity that is,
nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this "I
can"... marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and
bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality21 By
glossing over the specificity of her case, by equating her experience
of Stalinist terror with the experience of possibility encountered by
"each of us," Agamben misses the opportunity to interrogate the
relation between potentiality, powerlessness, and gender. What is
then the difference between Bartelby's "I prefer not to," uttered in response
to the juridical machinery of the liberal state, and Akhmatova's "I can,"
proclaimed in response to another woman, also subjected to the political
machinery of intimidation and terror? Although Bartelby's formula
challenges the power of the law and the will, it does not necessarily
express the systematic destruction of the potential of subjugated
people - the destruction, to which Akhmatova's poetry bears
witness. Nor does it show how powerlessness can be transformed
into possibility. Akhmatova's "I can," cited by Agamben, comes from her
1957 preface, which she added to her most famous collection of short poems,
Biopower Good
Biopower key to preserving all life improvement of
condition, welfare, longevity, happiness
Ojakangas, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2005
[Foucault studies No 2, pp. 5-28, Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power,
http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/social2/docs/Foucault.3.pdf, 7/9/15, CY]
In a sense Agambens analysis of Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence in Homo Sacer reveals quite well
his reluctance of admitting or perceiving the nature of modern biopower. In the article, Benjamin
defines two forms of power, namely, the lawcreating and lawpreserving mythical power and the law
destroying divine power. Mythical power is, by Benjamins definition, bloody power over mere life for its
own sake,64 based on the production of mere life. (Without mere life, there exists no rule of law over
the living.65) In this sense, mythical power corresponds well both with Foucaults conception of the
sovereign power and with Agambens definition of the structure of the sovereign ban. What is divine power
then? Agamben, who writes extensively on Benjamins article in Homo Sacer, quite surprisingly claims that
Benjamin offers no positive criterion for its identification.66 Contrary to Agambens claims, however,
Benjamin does indeed offer positive criteria for the identification of divine
power. First and foremost, divine power is the antithesis of mythical power in
all respects.67 It is not bloody power over mere life for its own sake
but pure power over all life for the sake of the living .68 Instead of
making and preserving the law and thereby producing mere life, the
purpose of divine power is the same as that of biopower, the
producing and preserving of all life, life in general. Admittedly,
Benjamins concept of divine power is by no means as simple as presented here.69 However, if
Agamben would have taken into account Benjamins basic definition (pure
power over all life for the sake of the living), he perhaps would have
recognized the link, not between the sovereign mythical power and biopower,
but between the latter and divine power. He would have recognized that in addition to
divine power that stands outside the law,70 biopower also stands outside the law even outside the law
which is in force without signifying. To say that biopower stands outside the law does not yet mean that it
stands outside state power. On the contrary, as we have already noted and as Foucault himself has shown,
biopolitical methods
extensively for the care of individuals and populations. Undoubtedly, the original
purpose of these methods was to increase state power, but its aim has also been, from
the beginning, the welfare of the individual and of the entire
population, the improvement of their condition, the increase of their
wealth, their longevity, health and even happiness71 happiness of
all and everyone (omnes et singulatim): The sole purpose of the police, one of
the first institutional loci of the nascent biopower, is to lead man to the utmost
happiness to be enjoyed in this life, wrote De Lamare in Treaty on the Police at the
it was precisely the modern sovereign state that first started to use
beginning of the eighteenth century.72 According to Foucault, one should not, however, concentrate only
on the modern state in looking for the origin of biopower. One should examine also the religious tradition of
the West, especially the JudeoChristian idea of a shepherd as a political leader of his people.73 Although
Foucaults studies of JudeoChristian political ideas were merely initiatory, he was nevertheless somewhat
convinced that the origin of biopolitical rationality can be found in the JudeoChristian tradition of pastoral
power. What then is pastoral power, especially in its original Hebraic form? Foucault addresses this
question by juxtaposing it to the Greek and Roman conceptions of power and governance, claiming that it
is something unknown in those traditions. Firstly, Greek and Roman power was power over land, whereas
the shepherd wields power over a flock. Secondly, the main task of the Greek political leader was to quiet
down hostilities and resolve conflicts within the city, whereas the purpose of the shepherd is to guide and
lead his flock. Thirdly, it was sufficient for the Greeks that there be a virtuous Greek lawgiver, like Solon,
who, once he had resolved conflicts, could leave the city behind with laws enabling it to endure without
him. Instead, the Hebraic idea of the shepherdleader presupposes the immediate presence of the
shepherd, who has only to disappear for the flock to be scattered. Fourthly, whilst the aim of the Greek
leader was to discover the common interest of the city, the task of the shepherd is to provide continuous
material and spiritual welfare for each and every member of the flock. Fifthly, the measure of success of
the Greek leader was the glory he won by his decisions. By way of contrast, the measure of the shepherds
success is the welfare of the flock: Everything the shepherd does is geared to the good of his flock. That
is his constant concern. When they sleep, he keeps watch: The shepherd acts, he works, he puts himself
out, for those he nourishes and who are asleep. He watches over them. He pays attention to them all and
scans each one of them. Hes got to know his flock as a whole, and in detail. Not only must he know where
good pastures are, the seasons laws, and the order of things; he must also know each ones particular
needs.74 Of course, these are merely themes that Hebraic texts associate with the metaphors of the
shepherd and especially the ShepherdGod and his flock of people. Moreover, the ultimate purpose of the
shepherds kindly care of the flock is not so much mundane happiness but the salvation of souls. In other
words, Foucault does not claim that that is how political power was wielded in Hebrew society. However,
what is important, especially from the perspective of modern biopower, is that Christianity gave these
themes considerable importance, both in theory and in practice.75 To be sure,
For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions
oriented toward the care of individual life was something puzzling: It is one of the central antinomies of
power and biopower are reconciled within the modern state, which legitimates killing by biopolitical
arguments. Especially, it can be argued that these powers are reconciled in the Third Reich in which they
seemed to coincide exactly.111 To my mind, however, neither the modern state nor the Third Reich in
which the monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized are the syntheses of the sovereign power and
biopower, but, rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe, what Foucault
meant when he wrote about their demonic combination. In fact, the history of modern Western societies
a form of power
which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing peoples lives. The
effectiveness of biopower can be seen lying precisely in that it
refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these
would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists
demands would derive from the demand of justice. In bio political societies, according to Foucault, capital
punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the
monstrosity of the criminal: One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to
others.112 However, given that the right to kill is precisely a sovereign right , it
can be argued that the biopolitical societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely biopolitical. Perhaps,
there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely biopolitical. Nevertheless, the fact is that
presentday European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer
exceptions. It is the very right to kill that has been called into question. However, it is not called into
question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of biopolitical
thinking and practice. For all these reasons, Agambens thesis, according to which the concentration camp
is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The biopolitical paradigm of
the West is not the concentration camp, but, rather, the presentday welfare society and, instead of homo
sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the biopolitical society can be seen, for example, in the middleclass
Swedish socialdemocrat. Although this figure is an object and a product of the huge biopolitical
machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact
that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest crime against the machinery. (In biopolitical societies,
death is not only something to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing
of all.114) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional
without biopolitical
considerations of health and happiness of individuals and
populations, as it has done until now, it is possible that our entire
existence will someday be reduced to bare life , as has already occurred, for
political society. And to the extent that globalization takes place
instance, in Chechnya and Iraq. On that day, perhaps, when biopolitical care has ceased to exist, and we
all live within the sovereign ban of Empire without significance, we can only save ourselves, as Agamben
suggests, in perpetual flight or a foreign land116 although there will hardly be either places to which to
flee, or foreign lands.
Rights Good
Human rights are goodthe alternative is totalizing and re-entrenches domination
Deranty 4
to
all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers
against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneths reminder that struggles for social and
political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse
(Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture
in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious
strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of
human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise,
critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it
purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against
oppression.