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April 4, 2005
This article by Eric L. Santneron on the University of Chicago Press website links Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception to the Abu Ghraib prison tortures and the Terri Schiavo case.
With respect to the situation of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay Eric says that:
"It is now clear that at Abu Ghraib as well as numerous other detention centers, the problem of prisoner abuse---including clear cases of torture and murder---has not simply been the consequence of a handful of rogue soldiers living out sadistic fantasies on helpless victims. But nor has the problem been one of isolated and contingent miscommunications down the chain of command. The real problem has to do with the legal status of the prisoners themselves and of the sites where they are being detained. With respect to Guantanamo Bay, to cite the most obvious example, the Bush administration has argued that the detention centers there effectively occupy a lawless zone, a site where a permanent (if undeclared) state of exception or emergency is in force. The prisoners have been stripped of all legal protections and stand exposed to the pure force of American military and political power. They have ceased to count as recognizable agents bearing a symbolic status covered by law. They effectively stand at the threshold where biological life and political power intersect. That is why it is fundamentally unclear whether anything those in power do to them is actually illegal."
Places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay represent sites where life, lacking all legal status and protection, stands in maximal exposure to pure political power.
And Terri Schiavo? Eric says that the law passed by Congress that was intended to keep her alive represents:
"... the paradox of an intrusive excess of legal "protection" that effectively serves to suspend the law (the judicial process running its course in the Florida courts) and take direct hold of human life. A law designed to lift a single individual out of an ongoing judicial process is essentially a form or caprice, law in its state of exception (a sanctioned suspension of legality)....To put it simply, if an act of Congress were to lead to the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, it will not be only water and chemical nutrients that enter her system; it will also be the invasive force of political power."
Are we not standing on the threshold between the human and the inhuman?
In chapter One of State of Exception Agamben says that there is a difference in legal traditions between those who seek to include the state of exception within the sphere of the juridical order and those who consider it something external or essentially political. He says that it better to consider it in terms of a threshold or zone where inside and outside blur into one another.
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