1. We reviewed the first two parts of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Part One was mainly on the paradox of sovereignty; Part 2 was on the figure of homo sacer, the life that can be taken at will, the person that can be killed but not sacrificed, the life that is abandoned and returns to its bare form. We then focused on the third and final part of the book, “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern.” The idea that the camp has become the biopolitical paradigm of modernity, namely, that we are virtually all homines sacri, people that can be eliminated for no reason whatsoever, just like in the Netflix series Squid Game, which we used as a powerful illustration, seems to be a perfect description of the enhanced control society, the society of enhanced surveillance, in which we live, at the global level. Here biopolitics, the politics which includes biological life, bare life, as one of its main concerns, also becomes thanatopolitics, the politicization of death. We also noted how the notion of the camp as a paradigm is also a way of recasting and refining Michel Foucault’s notion of the prison extended to society as a whole. The reading of this book by Agamben allowed us to engage in the type of complex thinking this FIG is about. The complexity of our global societies, looked at from the viewpoint of extreme violence, also offers pointers to reflect on the importance of the radical imagination. Is there an exit (perhaps an ethical exit) from the biopolitical paradigm of sovereign and extreme violence, or what some have called exterminism? Hopefully, we will take up this question again in the next semesters by way of engaging other complex and illuminating texts.
-Bruno Gulli
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2. We discussed section 3 of Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Among the themes of our discussion were:
–Agamben’s use of and response to Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem, in particular); unthinking application of law by functionaries.
–Applications of Agamben’s concept of the camp to various films, including those about the Nuremberg trials, as well as films by the Japanese filmmaker Fukosaku.
–The application of Foucault’s concept of normalization to Agamben’s chapter “The Camp as Nomos.”
–Potential for the development of two learning communities courses: Philosophy and Literature and Philosophy and Film.
-Tony Iantosca
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