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June 5, 2005
In the second to last chapter of his innovative Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, deals with the significance of the camps in political life. Agamben states his thesis bluntly. He regards the camp:
"... not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are living."
The camp as a space of exception is more than a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order. It is the site or structure in which the state of exception (whereby sovereign power decides a mode of life is to be actively and continuously excluded or shut out of political life) is realized normally.
It is in the camp where human beings are reduced to bare life (a life exposed to death) and which marks the exclusion of this mode of life from the polity as a distinctively human life.
We in Australia see the camp as belonging to history---to the fascist state in Germany or the gulag in the Soviet communist state. Though we Australian citizens see the mandatory detention centres as refugee camps, we do not link these back to the camps of the past. These camps stand on their own, isolated in a political vacuum.
We understand that Australian law requires the detention of all non-citizens who are in Australia without a valid visa (unlawful non-citizens). This juridico-political category means that immigration officials have no choice but to detain persons who arrive without a visa (unauthorised arrivals), or persons who arrive with a visa and subsequently become unlawful because their visa has expired or been cancelled (authorised arrivals). Australian law makes no distinction between the detention of adults and children.
Mandatory detention in Australia, means that when children arrive in Australia without a visa and are seeking asylum, they are required to stay in detention well beyond the period of time it takes to gather basic information about an asylum claim, health, identity or security issues. Both adults and children must stay in detention until their asylum claim has been finalised or a bridging visa has been issued.
The consequence is that children are often detained for months and sometimes for years, many of them in detention centres in remote areas of Australia. We see the refugee camps as anomalies that blight our polity and which bring shame to the Australian nation-state.
Agamben challenges this by arguing that the camp is the very paradigm of the political space at the point where politiics becomes biopolitics and hom sacer (one banned from society and all rights as a citizen are revoked) is virtually confused with the citizen. He says:
The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is...not the hypothetical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings.It would be more honest and ... more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights.
The camp is the permanent space of exception of the politics that we are now living. It is the space where everything is possible.
What has shifted can be seen in terms of the bare life, understood in the sense of being included in the political realm precisely by virtue of being excluded. Once abandoned by the law at the outskirts of the polis, bare life today, argues Agamben, has fully entered the polity in liberal constitutional states in the form of the camp, to the point of rendering outside and inside, life and law, truly indistinguishable from one another.What Agamben is arguing, say Nassser Hussain and Melissa Ptacek in Law and Society Review(2000) is a general thesis:
"...that biological life in the form of bare life has become the object of politics in the modern world and that, perhaps more provocatively, the political realm constituted by sovereignty has as its originary-and thus continuous-aim the very production of this bare life..."
The birth of the camp signals the political space of modernity. To the modernity's trinity of state, nation and territory we can add the camp.
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