Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp

Abstract

Peer reviewe

The virtualization of security: Philosophies of capture and resistance in Baudrillard, Agamben and Deleuze

“…It is here that the exception becomes the rule. In Homo Sacer Agamben illustrates these limits by pointing to the concentration camp as a space where decisions on who should live and who should die become totally arbitrary: a space where the actualization of the ban encounters the potentiality of abandonment in a completely random manner (see 20 also Edkins, 2000). In State of Exception Agamben finds another paradigmatic example of this zone: the executive order signed by President Bush on 13 November 2001, authorizing 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' (Agamben, 2005: 3).…”

Inside the tent: Community and government in refugee camps

“…The most extreme forms of this interpretation conceptualise camps as 'non-places' or 'abstract spaces' which 'fail to integrate other places, meanings, traditions' (Diken and Laustsen, 2005: 86;Diken, 2004 Edkins (2000;2003), are more circumspect in generalising though she traces the 'form of the camp' through its Nazi incarnation, to famine camps in Africa and refugee camps in Kosovo. In each 'we find people who are produced as bare life, a form of life that can be killed but not sacrificed, a form of life with no political voice ' (2003: 195-6; 2000: 11).…”

Giorgio agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction

“…His ambition is to reveal the true and original nature of the political realm through a three-faceted account of the politics of sovereignty in the West (Edkins, 2000;Hussain and Ptacek, 2000;): literary-historical (Part 1), mythical (Part 2) and 'one as brutal as possible' (Part 3) (Kieslow, 2005).…”

“…Zo8, the biological fact of living common to all living beings (Agamben, 2000), was included through exclusion from the polis and confined to the domestic sphere, oikos (Edkins, 2000) at the same time as bio, 'the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group' (Agamben, 1998, p. 1) became the politically qualified life part of the polis. Western politics is constituted by this originary fissure between zo8 and bios (Wall, 2005) and has not succeeded in constructing a link between the two (Agamben, 1998).…”

“…To begin with, Agamben argues that since the 'production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power' (Agamben, 1998, p. 6), Michel Foucault's claim that politics became biopolitics at the beginning of the modern era (when natural life was included in the calculations and mechanisms of state power) has to be corrected (Edkins, 2000;Norris, 2005). In pointing out that 'biopolitics is not a distinctively modern modality of power' (Gregory, 2004b, p. 804; emphasis added) Agamben is here referring to Foucault's discussion in the first volume of The History of Sexuality on how, in the modern era, 'Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world' and how:…”