Summary
Scholar of the border whose account of the citizen at a border examination Stateless Citizenship (2013) uses in Chapter 6 as the spatial figure for the exclusive inclusion of Palestinian-Arab citizens, in place of Agamben’s camp (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.216-222).
Details
- Salter’s presentation of Giorgio Agamben’s banned figure: “subject to the law, but not a subject in the law” (Salter 2006, 171, 174, as quoted, PDF p.209).
- The border’s “embedded confessionary complex”: border agents and bureaucrats determine “where, how, and on whose body a border will be performed”, and examination institutionalizes “a continual state of exception at the frontier” that performs territorial sovereignty and the sovereign subject in each admission/exclusion decision (Salter 2008, 365, as quoted, PDF p.217).
- The border as a “confessionary machine” creates securitized subjects and the insider/outsider and citizen/foreigner categories, and as the “primary institution of citizenship” “contains, disciplines, and normalizes the passage from the anarchic, dangerous international to the political, safe domestic” (Salter 2008, 374, as quoted, PDF p.217).
- The only ethic governing the border is the “Machiavellian ‘virtue’ of security … [, namely] a narrative of sovereign protection that obscures the running state of exception at the border” (Salter 2008, 372, as quoted, PDF p.223).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Stateless Citizenship, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception