June 17, 2006
A review essay of B. Diken, and C.B. Laustsen's The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp, by Daniel McLoughlin in Borderlands.
McLoughlin says that the departure point of The Culture of Exception is the recent work of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer. For Diken and Laustsen, Agamben's diagnosis of modernity is devastatingly accurate, their work following Homo Sacer's claim that the camp has become the "nomos of the modern". The camp, once constituted at the margins of the city as its exception, has now become the rule.
Toles
I willing to grant that the logic of the camp trangresses the discourses of Islamist terrorism and the security policy of the War on Terror because of the detention camps for aslyum seekers and illegal immigrants established by Fortress Australia as part of the Pacific Solution.
However, I'm unwilling to go along with Diken and Laustsen argument that camps "come in twins".By this they mean that the 'logic of the camp' is to be found, not only in spaces we traditionally associate with camps, such as concentration or refugee camps, but in spaces understood as 'liberatory'. On this basis they draw what might be seen as controversial analogies between refugee camps and gated communities (Chapter 4), rape camps and party islands such as Ibiza (Chapter 5).
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Agamben is definitely on to something. There are too many parables that quickly and easily recognized. I guess the problem is wider meaning and more persistent meaning of what it all entails.
Usually books like that are written well and persuasively, so you have to take a step back from the book to run a critical eye at it and make sure the writing isn't what is helping you to make your mind up.
Agamben's books aren't. They are in a clunky style and the translation are in clunky english. Yet when I read it there are a lot of 'click, click, click' moments.
heh