The Politics of Asylum (아감벤) 시험대비2

Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and Bare life

Homo Sacer: The body of homo sacer is bare life.

"In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. "

nation-state 라는 시스템에서 sacred and inalienable rights of man 은 the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state를 절대 가져갈 수 없다. 또한 어떠한 보호도 보장하지 않는다. 

"The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man."

"Declaration of rights must therefore viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished." 

"Once zoē is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis-and this much has, by now, already happened these thresholds pass, as we will see, beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man." 

조에(zoē)는 사실, 아무에게나 죽어도 되는 존재이다. 왜냐하면 어떠한 곳에도 속해있지 않으며, 정치적 보호를 받지 못하기 때문이다. 이에 비해 bios는 정치적 보호를 받는다. 따라서 bios는 

(IMPORTANT)"If refugees represent such a disquieting (동요하는, 불안한) element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition (예상) of the political domain -bare life-to appear for an instant within that domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly 'the man of rights', as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the refugee so hard to define politically. "

"Citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship for the sake of the supposed representation and protection of a bare life that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity."

아렌트가 Charity와 Rights의 구분으로 얘기했던 것처럼..charity의 개념으로 refugees를 도울 수는 있지만, rights 를 주는 개념으로  공동체에 포함시키려고 하지 않는다. 

"The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations- which today are more and more supported by international commissions-can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life- which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed-and that only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The 'imploring (애원하는) eyes' of the Rwandan child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who 'is now becoming more and more difficult to find alive," may well be the most telling contemporary cipher (하찮은 사람) of the bare life that humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry (대칭) with state power, need. A humanitarianism spread from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp-which is to say, the pure space of exception-is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master. "

"The concept of the refugee must be resolutely (단호히, 결연히) separated from the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt's claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-states are bound together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other."

"Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being."

"The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order."

"The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space."

"Hannah Arendt once observed that in the camps, the principle that supports totalitarian rule and that common sense obstinately refuses to admit comes fully to light: this is the principle according to which 'everything is possible'."

"If the person entering the camp as a Jew, he had already been deprived of his rights as a citizen by the Nuremberg laws and was subsequently completely denationalized at the time of the Final Solution. "

"The bare life into which the camp's inhabitants were transformed is not, however, an extrapolitical, natural fact that law must limit itself to confirming or recognizing. It is, rather, a threshold in which law constantly passes over into fact and fact into law, and in which the two planes become indistinguishable." 

THRESHOLD

THREE Theses have emerged as provisional conclusions in the course of this inquiry.

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction -구별없음 between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 

2.The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary 원초적인 political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.

3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. 

The first of these theses calls into question every theory of the contractual origin of state power aid, along with it, every attempt to ground political communities in something like a 'belonging.' whether it be founded on popular, national, religious, or any other identity. The second thesis implies that Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning, and that every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is, therefore, in vain. The third thesis, finally, throws a sinister (사악한, 해로운 불길한) light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today re trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world's cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life (even if it has been trasformed and rendered apparently more human) that defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.

<Bio-politics/ bio-power>

생체정치학/ 생체권력

1.The extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of the population (인구를 이루는 신체적 정치적 신체에 대한 국가 권력의 확장을 의미한다.)

2.Modernity: Death is no longer a permanent fact of life

3.Social control over the population

-Birth Control

-Healthcare, vaccinations etc

-Housing quality

4. Ever more subtle and sophisticated means of controlling bodies, and the movement of bodies in space.

Schmitt & Benjamin

1. For Agamben biopower is not new, it has always been a part of sovereign power, it is integral to sovereign power. (아감벤의 의하면 생체권력은 새로운 개념이 아니다, 항상 주권의 일부분이었고, 주권을 통합하는 것)

2. Schmitt: The Sovereign as he who decides on the exception. (예외를 관장하는 것)

3. Benjamin: We live in a permanent state of exception. (우리는 영원한 예외 상태에서 살고 있다)

4. The camp: the ultimate in biopower, control over life.

Exceptionalism (예외상황)

Exceptionalism- removing an issue from the sphere of normal politics. At the same time, you grant the sovereign a power that is beyond the law.

이슈를 일반 정치 범주에서 제거시키는 것을 의미. 동시에 최고결정자에게 법 위에 있는 권력을 주는 것을 의미한다.

Think about exceptionalism in relation to the current refugee crisis in Europe. How can this help us to interpret/ critique the political response?

Exceptionalism이 현재 난민 사태와 어떠한 연관이 있는지…

The ban (금지)

1. An explanatory device: If someone is ‘banned’ from a political community he or she continues to have a relation with that group: there is still a connection precisely because they are outlawed.

(어떤 사람이 정치적 사회에서 차단당하면, 그 사람은 그 그룹과 계속 연관이 있다. 그들이 법의 보호를 받지 않음)

2. The figure of the banned person complicates the simplistic dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion.

(포함과 제외 사이의 단순한 이분법을 복잡하게 만든다.)

3. “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men.”

(서구 정치에서, 벌거벗은 삶은 인간의 도시에서 발견된 제외라는이상한 특권을 갖고 있다.)

The Ban Cont.

1. Sovereign power relies on the ability to decide on whether certain forms of life are worthy of living. (주권은 어떤한 형태의 삶이 살 가치가 있는지 결정하는 능력에 의존한다.)

2. This produces an expendable (소모형의) form of life that Agamben calls ‘bare life’. (이것은 아감벤이 부르는 ‘bare life’이라 부르는 소모형의 삶의 형태를 생산해낸다.)

3. The sovereign decision bans bare life from the legal and political institutions to which citizens normally access. (최고권력의 결정은 ‘bare life’를 법적 그리고 정치적 기관으로부터 어떠한 시민들을 일반적으로 접근시킬지…)

4. This ban renders bare life amenable (잘 받아들이는) to the sway (흔들림, 장악, 지배) of sovereign power and allows for exceptional practices such as indefinite detention, torture etc.

Bare Life

1. Bare life is neither natural life (zoe) nor political life (bios). It is a zone of indistinction between the two.

-What does this mean?

2. People not reduced to just their natural state, since they are denied freedom and since they have a place in political life. BUT at the same time they have no political identity (beyond their status as bare life) or freedom.

The Refugee

1.  The ultimate political subject.

2.  Included through exclusion

3. They can be regulated and governed in a permanent state of exception outside the normal legal framework.

4. Reduced to bare life- humans as animals in nature without political freedom, but also without real freedom in nature.

5. Q: What is political freedom?

Abject Spaces (비참한/ 절망적인 공간)

The (concentration) camp - the reduction of life to bare life (수용소- 삶에서 벌거벗은 삶으로의 환원)

“Those who were sentenced to death and those who dwelt in the camps are thus in some way unconsciously assimilated… to a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide… the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes.” p.159

(사형선고 받은 사람이나 수용소에 거주하는 사람이나 무의식저긍로 비슷하다.

The state of exception

Consider the extract on page 174.

Do we live in a permanent state of exception, if the state of exception is always immanently possible?

Political Belonging

1.The point is not (just) a critique of the situation of refugees.

2. Idea is that if we fully comprehend the significance of refugees we may be able to entertain new ways of political belonging.

3. Now we know about the extent of sovereign biopower we can ask what are the limits and possibilities of political community in the future?

Critique of Agamben - any ideas?

Totalising reading of sovereign biopower

-produces total abjection (비극양산?)

-those in the camps denied agency or voice and resistance is precluded.

Biopolitical exercise of sovereign power dehumanises people but people nearly always fight back.