Re: {GEOG 5100} Abridged summary of geog-5100@googlegroups.com - 5 Messages in 1 Topic
Michael Sz
Agamben Homo Sacer(HS) Michael Szuberla
…the importance of life for these problems of political power increases a kind of animalization of man through the most sophisticated political techniques results. Both the development of the possibilities of the human and social sciences, and the simultaneous possibility of protecting life and of the holocaust makes their historical appearance.
(Michel Foucault 1979 Stanford Lectures in Dreyfus and Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p138)
Homo Sacer explores the origin and expansion of sovereign power. Agamben, in a sense, continues the projects of Foucault (biopolitics) and Arendt (“biological life as such” ). HS posits that political life and modernity were founded on a ___ of biopolitics. Agamben presents biopolitics as a common thread running through totalitarianism to democracy and explores the hidden foundations of political life in the state of exception.
Agamben weaves in and out of law, theology and history to illustrate how sovereign power developed and maintained its right to “do anything to anyone”(106). The codification of the rights of man was expected to protect the human being, but in biopolitics it is the sovereign who determines the value or nonvalue of life. This is important to note because Agamben insists that sovereignty originates with bare life and that western politics has been biopolitcal from the beginning. The project of sovereignty involves the attempt to reduce subjects to a state of bare life.
Today, bare life and the state of exception take their material form in the camp. The camp epitomizes biopolitical politics and establishes an ongoing space of exception. I have personally (involuntarily) experienced several manifestations of camps. To give just one example, in September of 2009 I attempted to return to the USA from Canada (Windsor to Detroit). Shortly after providing the border guard with our identification, my passenger and I were ordered to place our hands on the dashboard. I was then told to exit my car with my hands on my head. Homeland Security agents immediately handcuffed me. At this Kafkaesque moment I asked about the charges against me and demanded my “right” to a lawyer.[1] I was told that the “border” (a liminal space) was not part of the US or Canada and thus I currently had no constitutional rights. They moved me to a cell, aggressively searched me and then interrogated me about my dissident activities/affiliations (they had an impressive array of details about my political activities and even managed to refresh my memory). In Agamben’s terms Homeland Security dislocated me into a local state of exception. This process had reduced me from citizen to man. HS notes that the ambiguity related to who has rights even appeared in the title of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (126).
I’ll conclude the story of my little ordeal in the postscript. Here, I’ll point out that the mere existence of the camp serves to intimidate/control the entire population and empower the sovereign. One of my first thoughts upon being put in a cell was related to not wanting to go to Guantanamo. This, perhaps, was not a likely possibility for me, but the potential exists for the sovereign to banish any of its subjects.
My other observation involving this experience relates to part 3 of HS (especially chapters 5&6). How, to use Hitler’s grotesque language, does the sovereign identify and brush off the lice? Also, how is it that western political systems (including parliamentary democracies) are “transformed into a lethal machine” (175)? How do individuals become “living wealth,” “neomorts,” “human material,”[2] or “human resources”? In brief, statistics, calculation, classification and data collection allow the sovereign to deform life into bare life. Thus, through the politicization of life and death many professionals now tread paths where previously only the sovereign walked and democracies discuss openly what the Nazis only whispered in secret (165). During my interrogation I was aware that my captors were driven by computerized protocols -- I was a de-personalized data cluster, they were automatons.
The sovereign will not and cannot deliver the goods of the social contract/rights of man for two main reasons: 1) in this relationship only one party has the right to use violence (thus, the people are unable to enforce their end of the bargain; 2) western politics have been biopolitics from the start and therefore universal rights are outside the scope of what the sovereign can provide. For Agamben the sovereign leviathan becomes a “Frankenstein” that absolutizes the “care of life” into “thanatopolitics.”
Postscript
As Woody Allen remarked somewhere, “tragedy plus time equals comedy” – there was some humor mixed in with my ordeal. My passenger, my reason for crossing the US/Canada border, was Wayne Roberts, director of the Toronto Food Policy Council, one of world’s most famous food policy experts and author of more than a half-dozen books. Wayne’s speech the following day was sponsored by many elected officials including US Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. As they tore my car apart they undoubtedly noticed dozens of flyers for the event with the congresswoman’s seal. When asked by Homeland Security why I had come to Canada, I replied that I was working with Congresswoman Kaptur on “food security” and that Wayne Roberts was our honored guest. Their perplexed reply was something to the effect of – she’s involved in this too?
[1] My mother is a civil rights attorney and I am not a werewolf..
[2] Neil Gregor’s term from Daimler-Benz and the Third Reich.
Group: http://groups.google.com/group/geog-5100/topics
- Agamben, Homo Sacer [5 Updates]
jacquelynjampolsky <jacquelyn...@gmail.com> Oct 27 06:03PM -0700
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 11:31:01 PM UTC-6, galenbmurton wrote:
...more
Eric Reiff <ear...@gmail.com> Oct 27 09:41PM -0700
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 Social Theory, Discussion Paper 7
Giorgio Agamben – *Homo Sacer*
29 October 2012
Agamben picks up with the question I was asking last week concerning where ...more
Lindsay Skog <linds...@gmail.com> Oct 28 03:58PM -0700
Lindsay Skog
In *Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life*, Giorgio Agamben
considers the origins of the modern Western political system as it relates
to the atrocities committed ...more
Ian Rowen <iro...@gmail.com> Oct 28 05:09PM -0700
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
October 28, 2012
Commentary on Giorgio Agamben’s *Homo Sacer*
Agamben takes it upon himself to reveal what is, for him, the ...more
Chandler Griffith <chandler...@gmail.com> Oct 28 06:23PM -0600
Chandler Griffith
Reflection Paper
10/29/12
*Georgio Agamben, **Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life** ***
* *
Georgio Agamben’s *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life* ...more
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