people

all quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

". . . the technico-scientific problem of resuscitation: at stake was nothing less than a redefinition of death. until then, the task of determining death was given over to the physician, who made use of the traditional criteria that had remained substantially the same throughout the centuries: the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing. overcoma rendered obsolete precisely these two ancient categories for the assessment of death and, opening a no-man's-land between coma and death, made it necessary to identity new criteria and establish new definitions as [mollaret and goulon] wrote, the problem expands 'to the point of putting the final borders of life in question, and even further, to the determination of a right to establish the hour of legal death.'"

"the hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. and since it is precisely a question not of a natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer (the comatose person has been defined as an intermediary being between man and an animal), what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide."

"the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. in the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order."

"if this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. . . an apparently innocuous space (for example, the hotel arcades in roissy) actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign (for example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d'attente before the intervention of the judicial authority).

in this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. it is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the state) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the state decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. if the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced not in the two aspects that constituted it according to schmitt. . . but rather at the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth that thus become nation) within the two of them. something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. it is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens - not only the nuremberg laws on citizenship in the reich but also the laws on denationalization promulgated by almost all european states, including france, between 1915 and 1933. the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. the growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities."

"every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern european languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. one term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.

in common speech as in political parlance, the italian popolo, the french peuple, the spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and late populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in 'the italian people' or 'the people's judge') and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione popolare, front populaire). even the english word 'people,' which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves the sense of 'ordinary people' in contrast to the rich and the nobility. . .

such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the 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, and 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. in this sense, a single and compact referent for the term 'people' simply does not exist anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts. . . 'people' is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes."