![]() ![]() But the product of these factories is not death but, as Arendt puts it, a mode of life ʻoutside of life and deathʼ. One speaks of the Shoah as industrialized mass death, and of the camps as ʻfactories of deathʼ. This is the Muselmann as described by Primo Levi in If This is a Man. The bare life that is produced by this abandonment by the state is not biological life ʻnot simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political elementʼ. The Lager is a threshold in which human beings are reduced to bare life and the torture this life suffers is nothing else but its exclusion from the polis as a distinctively human life. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.ʼ The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |