October 4, 2005
From this review by a Dr. Tony Simoes da Silva in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.
To this extent Agamben's State of Exception actually builds on the earlier texts, and reveals Agamben's formidable powers in an analysis of politico-juridical frameworks that have allowed successive state governments to create and apply the necessary conditions for the existence of the phenomenon that is Guantanamo in the present moment.
States of exception are in this sense hardly anything new. What has changed, as Agamben proposes via Walter Benjamin, is that it is precisely through their ability to persuade their citizens that these conditions are indispensable to the recovery of a golden age when the state of exception truly was the exception that governments such as those of the USA and the UK are able to perpetuate a growing erosion of public liberties.
We in Australia have been so persuaded. The figure of the refugee is now central to a range of concerns with the nation, nationalism and the right of asylum as well as governance. The political right has made some ground towards controlling the inward flow of peoples and expelling those it deems undesirable.
Tony Simoes da Silva says that in his essay "What's a Camp?" in 'Means Without End: Notes on Politics' (1994) Agamben :
'...again epitomises this prophetic quality with disturbing insight; in the context of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Bellmarsh and Woomera, "the camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live, and we must learn to recognise it in all its metamorphoses".... Tracing its history to the Spanish-dominated Cuba of 1896 and the Anglo-Boer War, Agamben shows why the camp has become such a crucial political category, and insists that we understand its function as the pre-eminent political categories in the exercise of power today. Once upon a time a place of exclusion only minimally adopted, "The camp, which is now fairly settled inside [the modern city], is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet"... Here as in all of his other essays, Agamben shows how a careful understanding of past political structures neatly proves the point that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat its mistakes.
What is needed is a critical rethinking of the categories of politics within this new sociopolitical and historical context.
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