Notes to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
PART THREE: The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern
§ 1 The Politicization of Life
§ 2 Biopolitics and the Rights of Man
§ 3 Life That Does Not Deserve to Live
§ 4 ‘Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People
§ 5 VP
§ 6 Politicizing Death
§ 7 The Camp as the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern
Threshold
§1
- Michel Foucault> Biopolitics>politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.
- Concentration camps are the laboratories in the experiment of total domination, for human nature being what it is, this goal can be achieved only under the extreme circumstances of human made hell. Camp>the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space, paradigm of the political space of modernity.
- Contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian state.
- “The ‘right’ to life,” writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, “to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienation,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’ – which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending – was the political response to all these new procedures of power”
- Modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it.
- “law’s desire to have a body”>democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.
- “Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called political part” (De homine)
- The absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West.
§2
DECLARATION>“The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.
- Nation come from nascere (to be born).
- The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien régime are now irrevocably united in the body of the “sovereign subject” so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted.
- When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe’s geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision.
- “What is French? What is German?”
- One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside.
- Refugees> break the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the modern sovereignty in crisis. Every time refugees represent not individual cases but – as happens more and more often today – a mass phenomenon.
- Publicity campaigns t gather funds for refugees from Rwanda> human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life – as life that can be killed but not sacrificed – > object of aid and protection. “Imploring eyes” of the Rwandan child>contemporary cipher of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need.
Forgotten Refugees
Sadomasochism and Sovereignty>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.
§3
Binding>
- unpunishability of suicide>suicide as the expression of man’s sovereignty over his own existence.
- The fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity in favor of euthanasia.
- “life unworthy of being lived”>applies first of all to individuals who must be considered as “incurably lost” following an illness or an accident and who, fully conscious of their condition, desire “redemption”.
- The new juridical category of “life devoid of value”corresponds to the bare life of homo sacer
- Hitler> Euthanasia>mass extermination>program was linked to economic considerations
- The concept of “life unworthy of being lived” is clearly not an ethical one
- biopolitics necessarily turns into thanatopolitics.
- In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.
- This is why the problem of euthanasia is an absolutely modern problem, which Nazism, as the first radically biopolitical state, could not fail to pose.
- integration of medicine and politics>
§4
The paradox of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task.
Eugenics: the bio social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of an population usually a human population.
Eugenic legislation: example>
“After national X-ray examination, the Führer is to be given a list of sick persons, particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich Health Law . . . these
‘ Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People’ 87
families will no longer be able to remain among the public and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer” (quoted in Arendt, Origins, p. 416).
Human heredity-human discrimination.
For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity.
Nazism determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political space
§5
Versuchspersonen, human guinea pigs. (VP). People, condemned to different levels of punishment according to the Law, are used as guinea pigs for experimentation.
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 consistent practice in the United States was to have the sentenced person sign a declaration. A “voluntary consent” is simply meaningless for someone interned at Dachau, even if he or she is promised an improvement in living conditions.
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.
In a space of exception, subjection to experimentation can, like an expiation rite, either return the human body to life or definitively consign it to the death to which it already belongs.
- Debate about the medical experimentation using human subjects:
Prisoners Should Be Used For Medical Experiments Without Consent?
There are people to say Yes
“They (prisoners condemned in death) lose their right to life, and therefore, cannot be discussed in the same realm as other prisoners. While we still protect many of their rights, they are the easiest group to target for medical testing without consent because we have already decided they do not have the right to life….prisoner’s guaranteed right for protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The medical testing on prisoners is not a punishment to them in the first place. It is a way that our government gives those death-penalized prisoners a chance to pay back the society. Medical experiments on prisoners are not cruel or unusual.”
Others to say No
“The harm of violation of this principle is not only directly linked to prisoners as individuals, that they are not given their lawful protection or being maltreated, but also linked to the whole society–that this will turn the society into a ZERO torlerance society with no room of restoritive justice. Why? Because the policy is sending a strong message that it’s not only legal but also moral to infringe prisoner’s right, that it’s ok and right to treat them as guinea pigs for medical experiements, that they don’t deserve a basic right at all once they become criminal.”
- Lecture about the Human Guinea Pigs
§6
coma: loss of relational life functions (consciousness, mobility, sensibility, reflexes)
coma dépassé: a coma in which the total abolition of relational life functions corresponds to an equally total abolition of vegetative life functions”.(Mollaret and Goulon)
overcoma: the full fruit of new life-support technology: artificial respiration, maintenance of cardiac circulation through intravenous perfusion of adrenaline, technologies of body temperature control, and so on.
systematic or somatic death: is surprising that the champions of brain death can candidly write that brain death “inevitably leads quite quickly to death”.
“neomorts”: legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of possible future transplants
§7
*Telos of the Camp : http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/152/270
Camp is not a thing of the past but a ‘hidden paradigm’ of the political space in which we live.
- CAMP:the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized.
- Campos de concentraciones : Cuba in 1896 >to suppress the popular insurrection of the colony
- “concentration camps” : English herded the Boers toward the start of the century.
- Schutzhaft : Prussian law of June 4, 1851> individuals to be “taken into custody” independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state.
- Konzentrationslager für Ausländer at Cottbus-Sielow, 1850>Eastern European refugees. Maybe the first camp for Jews in this century.
– The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space.The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable.
– Only because the camps constitute a space of exception is everything truly possible.
– The camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.
– The camp is the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them.
– structure of the nation-state: land, order, birth.
– Schmitt observes concepts like “good morals,” “proper initiative,” “important motive,” “public security and order,” “state of danger,” ar “case of necessity,” in connection to the juridical rules.
– biopolitical body: twofold appearance >as Jewish body and as German body, as life unworthy of being lived and as full life.
-Führer : , a nomos empsuchon, a living law.
-Camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens.
– The camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to – and so broken – the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land.
– Concept ‘‘people” in Western politics. It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total, state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve – court of miracles or camp – of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated.
– Bare life (people) – political existence (People), exclusion – inclusion, zoē – bios.
– Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself.
THRESHOLD
1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.
-Homo sacer: homo sacer, or of the bandit, the Friedlos, the aquae et igni interdictus, which are in many ways similar. He has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate in the rites of his gens, nor can he perform any juridically valid act. Anyone can kill him without committing homicide;
-The Führer has, so to speak, a whole body that is neither private nor public and whose life is in itself supremely political. The Führers body is, in other words, situated at the point of coincidence between zoē and bios, biological body and political body. In his person, zoē and bios incessantly pass over into each other.
-The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power.
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ARTISTS political engaged
- Gullielmo Gomez-Penya
http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/bios.htm
- Santiago Sierra
http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php
- Waafa Yasin: performance artist who use her body as a means of political and poetic expression.
Perfromance: Aesh (Livelihood) (2008). The performance is an interpretation of two Al-Jazeera interviews: an Iraqi prisoner describing his time in jail during the 1990s, and a description of the journey by boat taken by Moroccan and Algerian immigrants to France. Her physical position evoked the prisoner, while her literal movement suggested the immigrants’ journey.
- Orwell. “Animal farm”, a novel that adresses the abuse of power. Gradually as the pigs gain more and more power they find it harder to resist temptation. A political satyr against totalitarianism.