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Title: The Camps Under the Heavens Author: Adonide Date: 2000 Language: en Topics: Diavolo in corpo, democracy, human rights, citizenism Source: Retrieved on July 4, 2012 from http://feartosleep.espivblogs.net/2012/07/02/the-camps-under-the-heavens-by-adonide-diavolo-in-corpo/ Notes: From Diavolo in corpo #2, May 2000
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception in
which we live is the rule. We must achieve a concept of history that
corresponds to this fact.
— Walter Benjamin
The concept of Rights is a huge apparatus that creates exclusion, that
is based on exclusion, and yet the chorus of protest against every sort
of exclusion merely demands rights, hoping that the heaven of Rights
extends itself to newer and newer lands. In fact, democracy is conceived
as this progressive conquest of newer and newer spaces. This is why it
is not only defended, but also exported. The of legal acknowledgements
must cover more of the possibilities and aspirations of individuals
every day. An individual who has his rights is a citizen, which is to
say a being who has the right of citizenship in the democratic City.
With the most varied intentions, many are waiting for a renewal of
democracy.
From the peak of the ruins of the metropolises, one can see what is left
of the so-called community of citizens. Political categories have been
overturned by the events of the past century. The general will,
nationality, the sovereignty of the people, all this is collapsing
together with the nation-state that was its basis. The trinity,
order-nation-territory, has been broken. The paid theoreticians of
democracy have realized that it is necessary to dissociate the concept
of citizenship from that of sovereignty. Sovereignty is still a sort of
divine ordination, and the individual subjected to sovereign power is
always a subject, while democratic ideology requires a secular power and
authentic citizens. Since ancient Roman times, the sovereign is the one
who can decide on the state of exception, i.e., who can create and
suspend norms. He is the one who defines the political space that
establishes and rules the norm, as well as the field in which this is
temporarily approved (a temporariness over which he himself has the
decisions). That this state of exception – of “extraterritoriality” with
respect to Rights – is an essential component of sovereign power is
shown not only by the fact that every city has its barbarians (its
foreigners), but also by the opposition between the people and the
population. The political is not the space that welcomes all those who
inhabit it (or who are born in it, in accordance with the etymology of
the word nation), but rather the zone of the subjects of the sovereign,
of those whom the sovereign (and later the state) considers as its
political body legally represented. The others, barbarians, foreigners,
undesirables, live apart (within other borders or in wandering). They
participate in Rights as its reverse side, as the Norm suspended (and
yet material in the form of walls and fences). When democracy passes
from the polis of adult, free and male citizens – as in classical Athens
– to the model of sovereignty as representation of the masses (in the
17^(th) century), only the internal colonies where those excluded from
democratic universality, from the heaven of its rights, will change. The
“people” will become the subjects of the nation-state (power itself, in
the act of self-legitimization, will receive the investiture of “popular
sovereignty”), still forming the mass from those who simply submit to
power. The concept of the people has always had two distinct accepted
meanings: it means both the political body, i.e., the citizens of a
state taken as a whole, and the poorer classes (those which someone has
called “ the toiling classes, the dangerous classes”). These two
meanings can even blend in expressions such as “the Italian people” and
“popular justice”, or “man of the people”, “popular quarter”, “popular
uprising”. As the class that came to power due to a revolt of the
masses, the bourgeoisie has based its entire ideology of popular
sovereignty on the identification of the two meanings of the word
“people”. It’s no accident that the universal declaration of 1789 is
concerned with the rights of Man and of the citizen (in the sense that
the first can only exist if he is recognized by the state as an
inhabitant of its nation). The poor, excluded from all real decisions,
are represented as subjects of rights. The legal fiction of the unity of
the political body is opposed to the division of social reality. If in
ancient Rome, for example, a clear separation existed between the people
and the common people (plebeians), legally quite distinct; if in the
Middle Ages as well inhabitants were divided on the basis of profession
into the “common people” and the “great people”; with the bourgeoisie,
the people – without distinction – became the sole depository of
sovereignty. The life of the poor that, in its nakedness deprived of
legal tinsel, was once entrusted to god, would later be included, in its
basic exclusion, within the political body of the state. All forms of
capitalism, in the west as in the east, have tried to make the real
poverty of the people (“the people, the unfortunates, applaud me,”
Robespierre used to say) disappear behind the mask of the People.
Unfortunately, this ambiguity was accepted by the workers’ movement. The
ugliest results were first the Leninist theses on oppressed nations and
imperialist nations, and later the social nationalist ones of all the
stalinisms (the Resistance of the Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
people, the governments of popular unity). Power has always known that
the merging of the people with the People can only point to the end of
both, i.e., the end of Rights. Well prepared by the laws that, from the
time of the first world war, most European states enacted in order to
de-nationalize a part of their citizens, the terrain on which nazism
built was the radicalization of the distinction between human and
citizen. The NĂĽremberg laws of 1935, which divided Germans into citizens
with full rights and citizens without political rights, were anticipated
by those of France in 1915, of Belgium in 1922, of Italy in 1926 and of
Austria in 1933. From the naturalized citizens of “enemy origin”, to
those responsible for “anti-national” crimes, to those “unworthy of
citizenship”, one would reach the citizens who threaten the health of
the German people (and to the Jews as a parasite people on the People).
The concentration camps originate under the sign of “protective
detention” (Schutzhaft), a legal institution already present in Prussian
law and applied in a massive way in the first World War. It is neither a
question of the extension of ordinary law, nor of that of the prison,
but rather a state of exception and of a preventive application of
martial law: in short, a police measure. When in March 1933, during the
celebration of Hitler’s election to the chancellery of the Reich,
Himmler decided to create a “concentration camp for political prisoners”
at Dachau, this was immediately entrusted to the SS and, thanks to the
Schutzhaft, placed beyond legal rights. The only document that attests
that the genocide against the Jews had been determined by a sovereign
organ is an official record of a conference in which a group of Gestapo
functionaries participated on January 20, 1942. The extermination was so
methodical precisely because it was realized as an immense police
operation. But “anything was possible” against Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals and subversives, since they had previously been deprived of
civil rights and, before the extermination, of mere German citizenship
as well. They did not belong to the People. As Robert Antelme wrote,
they were solely naked members of the human species that the legal order
refused to recognize as citizens.
Concentration camps – as the extreme expression of the state of
exception and thus of sovereign power – is not a nazi invention. Nazism
not only exploited the terrain that Stalinist counter-revolution
prepared (social-nationalism that becomes national-socialism), but also
expanded an institution of democracy into a technique for the production
of death. The first concentration camps (actually described as campos de
concentraciones) were constructed by the Spanish state in order to
suppress the insurrection of the Cuban population in 1896. Concentration
camps created by the English in the war against the Boers at the
beginning of the 20^(th) century followed quickly. Moreover, the legal
formulation was present (and applied against subversives) in the
constitution of the Weimar republic. The camp is a zone of exception
that Legal Right creates inside itself. The rule of the camp
participates in the Law under the form of absence. Nazism transformed
the state of exception into a normal and permanent situation; it pushed
the opposition of the concepts of people and population to the extreme
in a process of differentiation, selection and extermination that led
from citizens to subhumans, from these to inhabitants of the ghettoes,
from prisoners to deportees, from internees to “Moslems” (this is how
deportees who arrived a step from the end were described in the jargon
of Auschwitz) and finally to figures (as the nazi machine, using
bureaucratic euphemism, called corpses). Nazism wanted a Europe of
peoples, of inhabitants worthy of citizenship.
And yet it never enters the minds of the democratic defenders of the
rights of all the excluded that Legal Right itself might be the source
of the exclusions, that the citizen will always have his reverse side in
the barbarian, in the undesirable. Still distinct from nationality (from
the registration of birth in the space of a sovereign power),
citizenship can only exist beyond concrete individuals. And this does
not change when the people with its sovereign will is replaced by the
public with its opinions. The old identities and the old beliefs
collapse under the weight of a social atomization produced by media
domestication and bureaucratic administration (it is not mere chance
that the concept of public defines both consumers and spectators), but
the political body has increasingly restrictive and detailed norms. For
the poor, citizenship is the uniform of the police or the card of the
social worker. Their misery is only the other face of the existence of
citizens, i.e., of voters and consumers.
If power comes into play in the relationship between regulation and
localization, between coordination and territory; if the camp is the
materialization of a state of exception that encloses men and women to
whom only the naked membership in the species remains; then the stadiums
in which refugees are crowded before being sent back home, or the
“centers of temporary residence” (here it is again, the bureaucracy of
euphemism at work) for undocumented immigrants; or again the “waiting
zones” at French airports in which foreigners who petition for
recognition of their refugee status are parked are camps as well.
Besides, increasingly certain outskirts of the great metropolises are
camps. All these zones (like others in which the wandering of misery is
locked up) are non-communities of humans without quality, in which
private and public life are undifferentiated under the sign of
dispossession. The world of these enclosures without guarantees and
without humanity frightens the democrats. They would like to see it
under the heaven of Rights, covering that exception with the Norm that
only lengthens its shadow.
Now that the wandering of the de facto stateless is again a mass
phenomenon, the democrats would like to redefine the rights of
citizenship. In the name of humanitarian politics, they would like a new
status for refugees, ignoring the fact that all those that have existed
up to now (the Nansen Office of 1921, the High Commissariat for Refugees
in Germany in 1936, the intergovernmental committee for refugees in the
same year, the International Refugee Organization of the UN in 1946, the
High Commissariat for Refugees in 1951) have only caused the drama of
millions of fugitives to be transferred into the hands of the police and
the humanitarian organizations. That these two rackets are increasingly
connected is shown by the official propaganda in times of war. If the
state is taken literally when it describes the [1991] bombing of the
Iraqi population as an “international police operation, in the same way,
the havoc wreaked recently on Serbian and Kosovar populations must
become “humanitarian operations”. The refugees in whose names the
military intervention was justified are still forced into wandering or
reconsigned (like the deserters from the Serbian army) to the police.
The humanitarian organizations grow rich – one need only make one’s way
into Albania to be finally convinced of it – in the shadow of poverty
and extermination.
The democratic states now find themselves in need of rebuilding their
political body without the parameter of nationality. But being citizens,
even if in a redefined territory, will be the condition of a new People
that harbors within itself increasingly technological projects of
extermination of the poor classes. In the rule of the Economy and the
State, entire populations are reduced to their bare membership in the
human species, mere raw material for every sort of experimentation
(productive, bacteriological, genetic, etc.). The power conflict
provoked by the economic, administrative and scientific machine is that
of appropriating – even legally – their own survival. The rest are
entrusted to the police and the marketplace of humanitarianism.
It is on the scale of the entire world – and in the course of history –
that democracy and its citizenship are judged. One will then see that
the camps of infamy extend further and further around the Cities. Their
exception is already the rule, their enclosures are the authentic face
of the present.
Will the only solution indeed be that of raising our eyes toward the
heaven of Legal Right again? Maybe opposing to the Europe of commodities
and ID cards a “Europe of citizens and peoples”?