Summary
Giorgio Agamben’s term, as David Lloyd presents it, for the condition of those concentrated in the camp, the State of Exception’s exemplary space: an internal zone of exclusion holding people reduced to bare life, deprived of rights to the point that any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.15-17 / printed p.73-75).
Details
- As Agamben seeks to materialise the topology of the exception, it is the ‘camps’ – the extermination centers of the Holocaust – that appear as its exemplary instance, “sites where an internal zone of exclusion concentrates those who have been reduced to what he terms ‘bare … life’” (PDF p.15-16 / printed p.73-74; the quotation spans the page break).
- Lloyd’s genealogy against Agamben’s singularity: colonial and plantation law had long furnished the means by which colonised and enslaved populations were ‘so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime’ (PDF p.17 / printed p.75, quoting Agamben, ‘What is a Camp?’, p.40; note 41 adds Colin Dayan’s demonstration of the genealogy of modern law and carceral practice from slavery).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Achille Mbembe