June 16, 2006
In Homo Sacer: Sovereignty, Power and Bare Life Agamben treats the concentration camp as spatial evidence of the moment nations declare a state of emergency. In that emergency, nations abandon the rule of law and enter into an exceptional situation in which they are capable of reducing a citizen's presence to "bare life." The concentration camp is concrete evidence of this lawlessness and absolute power.
Leahy
Agamben does not confine himself to World War II camps but extends the principle to assess the United States and its willingness to erode the law in a post-September 11 state of emergency---the U.S. Patriot Act and the suspension of global compacts concerning prisoners of war provide amble evidence. America has declared that the detainees are not legally prisoners of war but that they exist in another exceptional state as on-going combatants. The camps are, significantly, removed from the public eye. Outsourcing interrogation avoids questions about coercive treatment that the U.S. ostensibly prohibits.
This implies that the inmates at Guantanamo Bay have been abandoned by the law and are left facing the violence of sovereign power. The intended purpose of the camp’s location outside the regular territory of the United States is precisely to separate the entire process from normal American legal procedures and constitutional rights. It exists in a state of exception.
The camp produces 'bare' or 'naked life', which Agamben figures in the ancient roman legal category of homo sacer. Someone who was homo sacer could be killed legally, in that the law would offer no sanction against those who took his or her life. At the same time, however, they could not be sacrificed, that is killed according to the rituals of divine law. Homo sacer was thus simultaneously included and excluded from 'the law', and as such they exhibit the same conceptual indistinction that characterises the camp's legal relation to the city.
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