ATHENA ATHANASIOU Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity ism if not also the worst Today politics knows no value (and, in the history of technology? consequently, no nonvalue) other can serve as a rhetorical quali- than life, and until the contradictions fication of “moment,” which may not be that this fact implies are dissolved, restricted or an indication of closure. Nazism and faseism—whieh trans. ‘The worst moment in the history of formed the decision on bare life into technology may not have an off switeh, the but only a —Ron .preme political principle — ing on, will remain stubbornly with us. Agamben, Homo Sacer 10 nodality of b Technologies of the Human at the Limit of Representation A does one reckon the technologies of the hu there is no such thing as the human. Instead, there is only the d multiplicity of the cut human, the human body as i bly cut, fra tured. In the clefts of history and at the limits of representation, the cut body of humanity tells the story of the indeterminability that haunts the dreams and nightmares of the “fully there.” In this essay, my inquiry concerns technology and the human, though not technologies that humans use, invent, invoke, hail, or deploy 1 order to overcome the limitations or shortcomi s nature. | propose, r I propose a meditation on the technologies that define, cireum wermil gs tied to the human body and i her, to set out in the opposite direction; scribe, constitute, and reconstitute the very intelligibility of that which is ‘This will, I hope, lead us to look at technology not as an organic instrumental totality of fulfillment or alienation, but rather as a condi- tion of the human and the fractionings that form the searred horizon of its cultural signification. In its multiple registers of ontological and huma Copyright 2003 by Brown Universityand @ if Fe re ac © 4: AloumalofFeminst Cultural Studies 4:126 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity topological genealogy, namely, the demand for the genesis of the new, the ngering specter of trous contamina- promise of eternally renewing metamorphosis, the I the catastrophic eschaton, or the always emerging mon tion, technology is related to birth between life and death, with reproducibility as a pulsation animating its workings and unworkings. What follows, then, 1 which “technology” and the “human” determine and in-determ! other as conditions of possibility in the disciplinary realm of biopolitic where the very intelligibility of life/non-life, as well as body/non-body, is supposedly managed in late modernity. nd death, the intercorporeal tension a reflection on the ways ne each What will centrally concern me here is the aporia at the heart of technomediated representation, this supplement of presence (parousia) and authority (eousia) that stands in for the body in the absence (apou- sia) of the body. In the proper sense of the word, if presentation is modeled on the vestigial fluctuations of essence (ousia) between presence and absence, rupture and substitution. In the wake of the endless finitude of the human that exceeds an ional ical mass death, representation assumes es a rhetoric uch a thing exists, approp n the age of po a special connection to the figure of death and thus impl of limits, an e7 I attempt to read the conto igency of terminal symptoms. and it tions, of representation, sovereignty, technology, annihilation, and the ntersee~ human in the context of the return, or perhaps pi sovereignty in the contemporary world. Inevitably, then, this essay touches not only upon the insurmountable aporetic rifts that define the splits of the human in relation to the Other body (in particular, the persecuted, injured, or slain body) and the limits of human relation to the death of the Other, but also upon the relation of such splits and limits to language, in their very being-in-language. I ake my cue from Judith Butler's significant for- ion of the inevitable co-implication—“chiasmic relation”—between language and the body: istence, of biopolitical mula The body is given through language but is not, for that reason, reducible to language. The language through which the body emerges helps to form and establish that body in its knowability, but the language that forms the body does not fully or exelusively form it. (“How Can I Deny” 257) stion the technologies through which the bio- ity entails bringing into question ‘To bring into q al body is fabricated in late moder politidiffere the technologies through which bodily entanglement among—and dis- entanglement from—the singular ultimately, our Other selves—is effected in di the question of deconstruction. To be “touched by deconstruction,” se of the term, is to ventu to touch the pulsations of the limit, the haptic s home and legitimate paternity) that the limit of signification is. As Jean Lue Nancy puts it: “Writing, reading: matters of tact” (24). Our critical task entails tracing the ¢ bility of what cannot be said and what should be said that ineluctably exposes the problematic of the articulation of language and silence, an articulation without origin, transparency, or guaranteed purity. A taut articulation, indeed, sinee all constituent parties—language, silence, muteness, ery, and the long chain of their in-between multiple and incomplete tonalities—remain untotaliz- ble and other to themselves, out of sight, out of touch. It is the dilemn or double bind of undertaking to put the undecidability and elusiveness of signification in touch with political responsiveness, in shifting contexts of social suffering and affliction, political death and displacement, where life reaches its limit, Of course, it is the limit that er that is the necessary condition for the experience of life. ies of the various Others—including, This is also, largue, cour in what might be an utterly improper se hifter (without proper ‘otic and pained pall Les the event of life, My theme here is the political engagement with the technoper- formati ity of biopolities in the age of genocide and in light of what Gio 0 Agamben has c; led the Nomos of modernity—the concentration camp and its spectral echoes in Europe and the Balkans. Martin Heidegge critique of technology will provide the basi ch to addre develop my questions: What happens to the language of representation when it encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken, abandoned, dismembered human corporeality onto the body of the text? How does unrepresentability o he representable? I attempt to trace the tech- noperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits, designated as they are by the palpable and yet ineffable—at once all too represented and radically unrepresentable—corporeality of deported, tortured, raped, violated, detained, dismembered, quarantined, annihilated, and surviving bodies. It is on the ethicopolitical force of such engagement that rests the s on wh . responsibility to face up to the exigency of thinking and responding, eve! if there can be no question of knowing what it means, even if one cannot the marked Other as s/he stands before the totalizing nomos of the power over naked | living death, before biopolitic uniform and sense what it would be like to suffer the pain | sovereignty and its demand fo 137Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity unil ied body po unfixable mal structure of mere n ct of responding, mediated as it may be by the eds the for- ming or re-membering. It even exceeds bearing possibility of shifting, evading, or disrupting this limitation, this irrepara to othering the self and selfing the other; a movement of reckoning with the radical inealculability of the possibility of perverting the limits of this, impasse, even though—or rather, because—there can be no ques! fully overcoming it; and even though—or rather, because—language will always fail us. ‘The coercive monologis that brings the body into History by means of the hegemonic cod ognizable splits of gender, sex, and race, the Ur-media of representation, is perturbed by the quivering humanity of the barely livi pain and in pleasure—bodies resisting, differing, sexing, living, aging, and dying, touched and touching otherwise, elsewhere. The coming polities of this “new body of humanity,” to borrow Agamben’s phrase,! haunts and exceeds the ontology of representable institutional conditions of social belonging, ing, counting, measuring, naming, recordi g that the medical, legal, and demogi me of the social bond. mantic nd performative forces of language, exc witness. It is, above all, a movement of imagining the neces: ion of m of an all-encompa sing body politic sand rei the apparatuses of captu appropriating, and hail establish in the ni ‘The problem, then, remains how to seek out the impossible and yel necessary possibilities: how to think representation (cultural, political, textual) without the ontological presupposition ilarian self-pre: ence; how to think the body beyond the “ontic,” beyond the representa- tional presuppositions of the birth to presence; how to think the political beyond sovereignty; and, finally, how to think the language of the political beyond denomination, Facing this multifaceted proble ils taking the sk of facing and witnessing the bodily self'and hum ity in ways not assimilated or submitted to the representational epistemes requi by the metaphysics of presence—in spite of and yet with(in) Heidegger's engagement with technology, language, and metaphysics. In what respect does the venture into that risk involve us in a possibility of theorizing the limit, or theorizing at the limit? of autho nent 7 n Soci edaitte In the Realm of the Camp: Reading Heidegger's Questioning of Technology Politically a guiding thought experiment for the problematic in ques- tion, | have taken Heidegger's aphori the 1953 lecture “The Ques- tion Concerning Technology”: “The essence of technology is nothing technological.” Heidegger has defined his notion of “essence” as Hesen in Introduction to Metaphysics, but also in On the Way to Language. Rather than eternal and universal pe “essence” has for Heidegger the temporality of g to presence within the framework of an epochal historicity (i.e., the modern epoch): “As the es: technology, Enframing is that which endures” (*Question” 31). Taking Heidegger's diacritic definition seriously, it i m manene nduring” in comin nei impossible not to think about that which in technology opens up to the political. My ensu ng discussion of the political question of the relationship between technologies of life gnty seeks to further such thinking. In order lo allow the question of the inte ge, representation, nodern Western philosophy’s relation and technologies of sover lations of langu and modern biopolitics, | discus: to technological ‘The task for political thinking, I suggest, is to bring this writ- ing back to the critique of the Western metaphys s to the archive of future radical rearticulations of such eritique. Mo important for our purposes is to try to read the political specificity of Heidegger's thought and to transgress its internal limits in ways that would point toward a future antifascist ethics and politics of responsiveness and esponsibility that would block the premises of subjection and overcome the foreclosure of Western political ontologies and technologies of sentation. (Beyond repr ys Heidegger, lie think tion.) Such performative reading, such political approp h or unfaith—would entail a diffusion of the contingency of the autho- rial proper name and signature. As Avital Ronell puts it: on in the light of annihilation. tradition as well e repre- gand reflec~ entation, sa n—beyond To the extent that we continue to be haunted by National Social- ism and are threatened by its return from the future, it seems necessary to open the question of politics beyond a proper name that would displace thinking to a subjective contingenc) less curious about Mr. Heidegger's fantasy of becoming the Fiihrer’s Fithrer—he momentarily wanted to teach and inflect “destiny”—than compelled to recogni Tam ¢ in Heidegger's thinking of ng330 ‘Technologies of Humianness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity the ineluctable signaling of democracy’s demise. Heidegger failed democracy (the way a teacher fails a class, but also the way one fails a task, an Sufgabe) on the grounds of technology. C-8) In Heidegger, being and technology are inte! physies, representational think cussion is the s writing on the extermin: tion of technology. related in a critique of meta- y. The focus of our di le of the political and the biopolitical within Heidegger's ‘amp @ propos of his delving into the ques- ng, and modernil ion ‘The biopolitical technology of the concentration camp has been widely construed and represented as defining the constantly recast and renegotiated limit of philosophical as well as poetic reflexivity, the limit of discourse, of represent Y, of imagination, of humanne: and of the Enlightenment promise. The camp has rightly been seen the place where the very narrational or testimonial capacity of language is compromised and where aporias are confronted at several levels. Per- urately, not a moment or a site, but rather the very limit of y zone,” to borrow Primo jenced in ils most intense and—at n. Paul Celan and Primo Levi mination as the death of poetry, of representation, of death; in Celan’s case, language itself d “Silence,” then, does not necessarily signify complic absent from Michel Foucault's work, for instance, des and political interest in carceral spaces of discipline and despite the anti- sovereignty of his writings and his political enga to the American edition of Deleuze and Guatta ates that thinking through Auschwitz has become an imperative for all European intellectuals. Certainly, Foucaul’s genealogies of discipline, biopower, and governmentality have opened the way for a discursive and political engagement with the aporias of modern biopolities. On the other side of the spectrum, thematic appropriation of the concentration camp should not be taken as an unproblematic sign of fascist politics. The Silent Scream, a notorious right- ion lobbies in the U.S., highlights ion, of poet Ss haps, more ac these two, and between the two, a zone (“the gr Levi’s phrase) where language is exper the same lime—its most impossible dimen: have seen the ext ed in the extern’ ination camps. emained theoretical \y. The camp pite hi ement. In his preface Anti- Oedipus, Foucault democratic or ant wing propaganda film made by anti-abor this point: the echographic representation of the fetus’s alleged bodi emotional reactions to its abortion is punctuated by evocative images of Nazi concentration camps.' The signifier of with demagogie potential as well, as it ha ‘azi extermination is loaded all too often been displayed,a manipulated, lo legitimiz ing, and normativity. The use of this master signifier of the biopolitical sovereignty that marked the twentieth century mobilize: ggle over the very definition and representation of “life” and Shumanness” and thus requires a politics of positioning. In this struggle over poli d appropriated as an ethical and judicial alibi in order ° and routinize ideologies and pri clices of coercion, suffer- sl ical representation and its discursive , and counterdesires, the ta practices, claims, imagery, desi k is to per- ntation, for to move toward the anarchie difference na rad ‘al gesture loward an alternative vision of repres! nt of a better term. The task i that cuts loose from and exceed sentation, in other words, the inappropr! presence, presentation, a No guarantee of normative intelligibility can be evoked here. Does this imply the possibility of novel representational spaces beyond the pre es of the ontopological logic of representation?’ The question, bility of interrupting the force of rep esentation’s being in fore the carceral logic of refer able and unforeseeable other of on: the language of the Other, lial repre- nd re-preseni ne list prem a question of the pos: the rep sentation, or , must be lefl in suspense. Heidegger's essential questioning of technology can give us an interesting cue, however. Technology for Hei to an end and an assemblage of equipment—as the “uncannily correct” instrumental definition of technology maintains, according to him (*Ques- tion” 5) —but also truth and ng, the very mode of Being’s manifesting of itself. In the Heideggerian idiom, legger is not just a me: ns mode of revea ng, a desi ning of Be esthetico- nt modern technology is in force in the vanishing figures of a material arsenal of artifacts: the chalice, the ancient temple, the pe shoes. How does the extermination camp enter this enchanted sem phantasmagoria? Is there a way to refocus our atten asa nd move beyond iona Heidegger's intentions and disavowals, and recognize in his philosophical thinking “on the grounds of technology” the conditions of intelligibil- ity by which the biopolitical technology of modernity seeks to mark off unthinkable/unlivable life from possible/recognizable configurations of human life? The operation of this technology cannot be captured, as the following remarks attempt to show, in a construal of language as authoriz~ ing and authenticating self-identity. One would need a more shaded and oblique poetics of language as difference, politic in order to start thi Other—ultimately dis and uninvited, | as much as psychic, king the question of how the body of the effaced posable and transposable—emerges, albeit obseur n Heidegger's language. 3132 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity The (Uninvited) Emergence of the Camp in Heidegger's Questioning of Technology Let us consider the question of taking up a sign—in particular, the inju- of iterability—in Heidegger's writings on technology. Heidegger delivered a cycle of four lectures on the subject of technology al Bre rious possibilitie men in 1949, In the only one that remains unpublished, he wrote: {griculture is now a motorized food industry, ils essence as the production of corpses in the ga the e. reduction of countries to famine, the facture of hydrogen bombs. (gtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe 34)% ‘he same thing in chambers and ‘termination camps, the same thing as blockades and the same thing as the manu- this gesture of repudiation, wherein usness of the Heideggerian text a paradeigma (etymologically a ated with what is para- [beside or |, What is subsidiary to diction {pointing out in words}, -deiknynai [to show, to prove]). This oblique reference to the extermination camp—as an example, an instance, and a paradigm agricultural production, and both to a certain indirect sense of ‘nframing that underlies the essence of modern technology for Heidegger. s to conneet temporally the two realms of the formu- jitude’s gime of caleulative-representational thinking: in a word, the time of Technik. What concerns me in this scene of being-in-technology is precisely this: that Heidegger’s language manifests the camp in the context of calculative and objectifying technology and in its ambiguous proximity with tech- nologies of agricultural production; at the nology his text comes to be haunted Several things deserve not Nazi death emerges in the consi a ac relates mass annihilation to dust ‘The “now” thal serve jgnals a point in time that heralds the Other of human fi lation and event of the me, the “brink of a precipitous fall,” the adve me time, as Heidegger turns his attention to the problem of tech by a for author’s writerly intention and control, namely ce arguably exceeding i the historical specificity of the dead oth Heidegger's fugitive illustration of the bodies of the camp a meditation on the loss of “the human? and its originary en as a hint but lapse. Is Heidegger an give its hint so mptom or signal as well as a symbolic pulling into play his own notion of the hint? “A hint c simply,” he writes, “|. ..] that we release ourselves in its direction without equivocation, But it its hint in such a manner that it refers n alsorre us [. ..] back to the dubiousness against whieh it wa of Language” 96). Heidegger's “hint” (der Hink) eme scribes itself in the precarious flickering between prese! is us” (“The Na es as a shadowy ce trace that i velation and and nonpresence, evidence and nonevidence, and above all, r dissimulation in the topos of textual represent present phenomenal actuality by and to prolife to the very spectral nature of referential representation, its incomplete nd dism lion. This opening up of Ling suggestion alludes bered texture and structure. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Heidegger's writings on technology i # lechnology can- not be posed or thought apart from the question concerning the tradition of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's questioning of technology should be seen within the context of his critique of the way in which metaphysics has construed—or not—the problematic relation between Being between Being and time, And yet, Heidegger’s questioning appears to be indelibly marked by a residual investment in a pa r metaphysics whereby the deter on of essence is knotted together with autho- rial disengagement; the disarticulation of the thematized “production of the conviction that the question concern d beings, nati a corpse: m any authorial or political response becomes the very cond tion under which the extermination becomes posable and nameable in the Heideggerian textual body. In a text that asserts the preeminence of the question, the camp and the author’s relation to it remain unarticulated, ked, unaddressed, and unquestionable, the very limit to (Heide own) questioning. Questioning, then, the piety of thinking in Heide ns (“Question” 5-35) becomes not only a master modality but authoritative means of avoiding the polities of address.’ Ina similar v it is instructive to read Heidegger's deploy- ment of the trope of analogy through the lens of his special relation to metaphoric language (which he mixes with technical language), a relation consisting both in identifying metaphor with metaphysics and in putting metaphor into play. On the one hand, there is an experience in language and with language that entails the tropological reinscription and disin- scription of metaphor; on the other is Heidegger's a un le an jbivalent elaboration on the divestiture and overcoming of metaphysies as an alternative mode of conceiving the real, beyond the calculative-rep) incited by modern Technik. The role of metaphor in envisaging or creating novel reality through redescription signals the point at which motorized agricultural production and the mass obliteration of lives in gas chambe and concentration camps are posed in tandem, esentational frame 334 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity But what makes the extermination camp a si Heidegger's critique of technology? What logic of originary familial linearity between the natural and the political generates this tes ity tual carrying-over? And further, bec dy given me or displacement, what is it that the appl redefines or conju ing dissimul ground of technological mass production along with that of industrial griculture sets in play an uneanny convergence, a point of resonance and ability between two disparate inflections of “production”—a production, indeed, embedded, through analogy and difference, in the dystopic realm of Technik. use metapho snot merely about translating between alr nings, but also about reformulation, tion of this textual technique wh does this unveil- es here? In Heideggerian tern je? The metaphoric gesture of embedding the camp in the Spo and motor e and motori ‘The passage fuses the massive ed technical pro- duction of human food with the ma: d technical produc- tion of dead human bodies. Ma ihilation is articulated in terms of anical economy in the age of technical reproduction; the concentra mp is cast, at a stroke, as an assembly-line of decorporealization, | project whereby the natural world is reduced to a“stand- g-reserve” of raw material. In Heideggerian terms, both these realms attest to an apothea 4 technics Enframing (Ge-stell); they both stand for a technologically mediated and mass-produced eventual the process Is and crops, the “produced” corpses) enclosed—or thrown—within the mastery of a moribund “thereness.” ‘The neuralgic point (or catheeted spot) that Heidegger's formu- lation discloses is a certain politically neutral conception of technology as a paradigm of the modern condition of Being, a paradigm a priori inimical to humanity. To the instrumental and dehumanizing use of technology, he opposes the classical Greek fechné and its relation to poiesis, the bringin, forth of truth (aletheia) and essence. An essent esis connotes a “bringing-forth” of what is present for human encounter and handling. Heidegger, we should bear in mind, distinguishes technol- ogy—its various actual manifestations—from what he calls its “essence, which is ging-for ‘The essence of modern technology,” he argues, sal mech tion ate hnologi of of the instrumental and objectify 'y of thingness (ultimately broken organicity: ed anim. synonym of physis, poi- not itself technological, not a bri hin the sense of the ‘k techn “shows itself in what we call Enframing,” Ge-stell: the setting up and hunting down of nature as standing-reserve, the ordering and challeng- al itself (*Question” 23). Samuel Weber translates ancient Gr ing of nature to uncone:Ge-stell as “emplacement, to placing whieh is p: enon.” Weber also sugge: suggestions, that the translation by He explains: “F place, the less proper those places tu in order to retain the reference to place and mount in Heidegger’s discussion of the phenom- keleton” would not be the more technology seeks to put things in thei eable n out to be, the more displa everything becomes and the more frenetic becomes the effort to reassert the propriety of the place as such” (124). | would add that the t by the word “skeleton” would not be inappropriate for another r well: it echoes the corporeal implications of it signals a claim upon a crumbling and p —the very remains of those ing-reserve, deemed unfit to live. Despite Heidegger's somewhat neutral employment of Enframing, his notion is itself charged with strong impli tions of the biopolitical propriety underwriting the forth beings and things, to challenge them forth within the configuration, the “Frame-work,” of modern technology.” In Heidegger's questi edibility and extermination are interlaced, an¢ emplaced—within the regime of I planning and technology. The pilation of human bodies and the mass production of the mea sub: of technological Enfram- lated—through Heidegger's framing device of analogy—as echnologies of amassing, clearing, crashing, and becoming-waste."” Man, plant, and, most crucially, the animal—the other of man in Western metaphys' whose ontological distinctions are blurred and collapsed at the horizon of modern technology. With the obsolescence of the (nostalgic) aletheic essence of Shandling™ in non-human) are figured as final products, mere effects, of a technological inevitability, vestigial (or skeletal) residues of physis in the topos, or better, in the thesis, of the factory and the camp, the wastelands of modernity. ‘The emphasis on this essential operational affinity occludes or brings to light precisely by “writing out” of the sel re tropologi- cal space—the singularities and temporalities of the hum nslation son as enframing; more specifically, ed stand- rished corporeality, evident by—or, rather, revealed duced to keletal power to body ning (understood as a will to essence), s such, are inseribi ndust mass ann of human ing, ar neces of the modern istence logether usher in the ¢ inst es—emerge a essential categories favor of mechanical means, bodies (human and awa an/non-huma a spectrum: those whose labor and time are consumed and exploited in the automated assei nbly-line of human food agriculture; those who feed their ally produced agrieul- . by virtue of their assigned biogenetic and human living mortality by consuming the industri tural commodities; those who 135136 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity morphological status as non-human animals—are susceptible to being confined to motorized frameworks of human “handling”; and those, naked who were not only forced into slave labor but reduced nol deserve to live” by the biopolitical technology of the and anonymou to “life that doe: Nazi exterm ation camp. These disparate singularities remain unac- knowledged—bound to d ucible of Enfr precluding certain kinds of questions and foreclosing the possibility of different kind of questioning but also absolving the philosopher from the “task” of responding differently to the pa In the Heideggerian text, the agricultural ation camp thus become the exemplary delimited spaces of modern ming, where the spectrum of technomediated “mere life” is delin Hits limits, continuities, and discontinuities. In the exchange of examples,” “para-deigma-ta,” the regime of Enfram- 1 is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve,” is ‘olve in the ¢ z—not only mi digm of extermination, factory and the con- typical instances, ing, where “nm fused with technological execution whereby the naked body is left bare of any subjective content, standing before the sovereign power that consti- tutes and obliterates it as such. Heidegger’s reference to the concentration camp gives an example as much as it sets an example: it brings to light the ked body o ies of modernity as indistinguishable from ntimate limit, and the word soma thus resumes its Homeric Greek ing body, a “corpse.” But it the eponymous subjectivity of 1 bodies, reducing them to a faceless and nameless mass of “by-products. a way that undermines any involvement with bility for the Nazi realm of Enframing, a regime of decimat- ing Jews, homosexuals s, all precluded from the 0 the technolo; i limit-desigi doe ion of fallen or thrown noi Les so, however, in a way that obliter those non! It does se response- and commun! . Gypsies re Im of humanness and, as such, put to death. ‘The subjugation of human life and death to biopoli cignly comes to be what is at stake in modern technology; it also ret tain sense, the force ical sover- ns to ke haunt Heidegger's questioning of technology. Ina ce of subs tution encapsulated adustrial agricultura 1 Heidegger's use of the correspondence | production and the industrial production crificial offer ene of the “holocaust,” which between of corps ly with the scene of sa (in its particular ins the s 's “burnt offering”). And thus, absolved from the form of political es here r sonates uni sanet oned as the racial purgation of “the human,” the system- redolent with the innocuous al flames of ation of the crematoria becomes ficial pyre. In the illuming on of the sacrsymbolic exchange and fust take the upper hand; bounda Land repla jes bleed and Limits are tested between the cement on, the forces of displaceme: living and the dead, subject and object, the natural and the social, the sacred and the profane, inclusion and exclusion, humanity and divinity, human form and animal form, animate and inanimate matter, the saved and the lost, the edible and the discarded, killing and purifying, and kill- ing and eating. “Bare Life” and the Return of the (Other) Body in Heidegger's Language Organic “1 Heidegger's physis, is thrown back to the homos of its theological foundations. Only we are now in the terrain (“emplacement”) of the eminently political relationship between life and stinguishability of life from Law (as neither in the realm of religion nor in that of juridical order, but rathe biopolitics in its form as the “state of exception” (Agamben, Homo Sacer).'The actual- ization of “bare life” in the figure of the sacred living figure emerges from the order of biopolitical sovereignty. As Agamben has shown, the Na centration camp is the zone of exclusion and exception that not only r in the heart of modern sovereignty but also or; then, a relation of “exclusionary inclusion” betwe and “ba sovereign power, the ind: well as of physis from nomos); we ar n that “zone of indistinction” that i con- jes. anizes its Law. There the sovereign power life”: bare life is excluded at the moment of juridical “inclusion, itution of the body politic, and is “included in the state of exception. Centered on exercising control over life, death, and the human body, this manifestation of power dictates who may enter the realm of recognized human life and who must not; it determines f whom the body politic ought to protect itself; it determines and forcibly materializes the location of the border of “humanity.” of life, ions, is all too commonly deployed that is, at the moment of pm ‘The discourse of the sacredness 1 both its ontotheo idical-polil ibi for the violence of modern biopolities, as a strategy of contain- ment by which the eminently political character of biopower is neutralized, Itis significant from this perspective that the Nazi extermination of Jews, homosexuals, and Roma has been ar ed through the sacrificial reg- ister of the “Holocaust.” But no sacrificial figure of rite, consec: divinization can redeem the political death to which bare life As Agamben puts it al connd logical and ju asan ation, 01 7138 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term “Holocaust” was |...] an irresponsible historiographical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case ofa homo sacer in the sense ofa life that may be killed but not sacrificed |. ..J. The truth—which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is that the Jews were exterminated not ina mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, “as lice,” which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolities. (Homo Sacer 114)" In Heidegger's analysis, “man” is one, “the orderer of the stand- ing-reserve” posturing as the “lord of the earth”: Is soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, pre- cisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impress il that ev construct. (“Qu jon comes to prev thing man encounters exists only insofar as it is his tion” 26, original emphasis) ‘The essence of technology is the standing-r at the disposal of human Being. What escapes Heidegger is precisely the political and politically uneven nature of technological sovereignty, which the politically neutr to grasp. In his endeavor to po that is (bio)poli neces: evealing of nature erve 1 apparatus of “modern technology” does not suffice it an “essence” of technology, an essence ally unencumbered, Heidegger cannot address the -y presence and force of a polities that sets up “beings” as stand- ing-reserve in the regime of modern technology. He fails to ask how death (the “throwness” toward death that is at the core of Dasein’s temporality) and Being belong together not essentially, but rather, through the dying body of the subjected Other. In positioning “human” subjectivity as an “Ek-sistent essence” separated by an abyss from plant and animal," homogeneous force a ig upon and setting up the “worldless” natural atte world, he cannot add ures of the Shuman ‘ess the biopolitical cuts and frac distinetion as they are exemplified by the body of the sovereign and the unsacrificeable body of homo sacer. Lack~ ness-versus-inhumanness’ ing any notion of the politics of difference, he cannot address the camp’s regime of the “human” consumption of objectified otherness; neither can he reckon with the historical and cultural condition of becoming-less- human and being treated as such. Heidegger alludes to the figure of the ed agricultural industry—to convey the “inhumanness” of modern technology, but without addressing the politics of subhumanity in the order of Technik. Metaphors of animality as morbidity played a centr construction and representation of the Jew as Other in late-nineteenth- century Europe. Suffice it to consider the Nazi tropes of Jews as mice, icons of contamination, or itic living—both connoting, in popular imagination, unbridled proliferation. Hitler used the m of “lice” to dehumanize Jews—not just any figure of non-human animal, but that of lice, the i bject: insidious imper- ceptible, inappropriate(d), almost unnoticeable but all-pervading. The lice-figure also maintains a special connection to the “hosting” body by virtue of its vampiric quality of living parasitically on other bodies and ucking their blood, indeed a figuration of living death that served crucial trope for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century association of Jews and vampirism that Gilman reminds us, attained its literary culmination in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922 (158). The Lion camp as such remains in the penumbra of Heidegger’ text; it emerges only as a mere instance of modern lechnodystopia, as one her than as the biopoliti- edible beast—emplaced in a moto! I role in the s lice, icons of pai phor facel -figure of the v a nde Nazi concentr mor representation of the loss of the human, cal nomos of modern Western humanistic logos. But is it not impossible to pose the question concerning mod- ern technology without also posing the question cone ug biopolitical technology i iopolitical turn of modern technology? By virtue of the very ilerability of the sign of annihi modernity, or the ation, Heidegge es the Na: inadvertently addres factical life and death, a biopolitical and thanatopolitical technology that seeks to put humans and non-humans in their proper place —allowed to live or put to death." Heidegger's emphasis on “facticity” denotes precisely the “throwness” of the material being-there-and-then that is proper to Dasein; the aprioricity, the “alreadiness” of Being’s bodily advent and appropriation to the primal “fact” of language. Implying what in Being is extermination as an “emplacement” of 39140 Technologies of Humanness, Apor of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity both already given and brought to experience and though ity” is the “destiny” of Being in a world inhabited by beings thal are involved with and revealed—albeit in a veiled way—to “Dasein” (openness-for-Being). Self-presence and self-inquiry are bound together in Dasein’s essential facticity. In Being and Time, fact 's understanding of ils existence as present at hand, as a fact: it implies that “an entity ‘within the world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world” (82). Being a questione Technik is a destiny of facticity, In racing the affinity of Heideggerian ontology with Nazism, Agamben suggests that Heidegge ad through the prism of his understanding of in the mode: involvement with National Socialism ie” nd Lask (Au/fgabe) of facticity. Follow- ns”), he traces the analogies between this ontology distinguishability from its actual situation and the philosophy of be as an actual dete mination and ing Levinas (“Reflect ofl Hitlerism. Indeed, in Heideggerian ontology, human life is always already politics; life and politics form an immed ing politics in a very broad sen: 8 a bodily exposure to a certain materiality of human historicity and sociality than a reflective engage- ment in processes of accountable appropriation and d Science and knowledge belong to the life of the polis. For Heidegge! “purest form of thinking” is “the highest doing,” according to the ancient Greek experience of bios thedrétikos, where bios receives its determina- tion from thedria, the “consummate form of human existence” (“Ques- tion” 164). Human essence always already cont that constitutes “man” as Dasein, as a political and historical Being-there but also Being-open, emplaced in and enframed by the polis, taking into ion that the camp—« cluded in the pol sphere. As Aj nee ential experi e's i © nd indissoluble unity (tak- more ins immediately the force the camp's exclusion from the polis—is ndeed, a constitutive part of the polit amben puts i For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity. Man is not a living being who must abolish or transcend himselfin order to become Auman—man is not a duality of spirit and body, nature and poli. ties, life and logos, but is instead resolutely situated at the point of their indistinction. (Momo Sacer (53, original emphasis)”The camp m text as the “hidden paradigm” of modern technology, echoing Agamben’s ds: “[T]he cal space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception) —will sal space of modernity, whos guises we will have to learn to recognize” (Homo, Sacer 125). The rep ional use to which Heidegger’s text subjects the “production of corpses” bespeaks a textual coming to light of the body a arcerated and slain a propos of modern technology. The textual subjec- of disintegrated corporeality takes form in the figure of the soma of the Shoah, the body that is entirely exhausted in perished bare life, “life that is unworthy of being lived.” And all this despite the fact that, as Nancy us, Heidegger considers the body as “extraneous to his project” (ata. in Nancy 252). It is through the prism of Heidegge H “production of corpses” that we should then read Nancy's disclaime “There has never been any body in philosophy” (20). But what concer machinery of extermination emerges in Heidegger's textual apparatus of his questioning of Ge-stell. Technology becomes the the body's “emplacement” in language, or to contami- anguage by the body. At this moment of difference in the Heideg- se, the textual affil essence is performed in a way that disrupts that very coming-to-pres- ence. Language cannot be sheltered from the eruption of difference, Heidegger's work itself has shown; difference is an irreducible dime of language: the difference between the extraneity of the body and the manifestation of the body, between essence and nonessence, between “concealing” and “withdrawing,” between a body and a cadaver, between political killing and sacrificial offering, and finally, between the animat- ing and inanimating forces of language. In the realm of the body, the determination of the signifier’s essence falters and fragments, haps necessarily so. How does the body—undesirable and “extr philosophy—return, however furtively, to a language that plication with it? In her treatment of the kes its appearance in Heidegger's philosophical wo mp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolit appear as the hidden paradigm of the polit sand d\ metamorphos si reminds technologie s our analysis here is that the holocaustic anguage within the occasion to expo nate gerian discou ation of the coming-to-presence of elation between figuration and mate- riality @ propos of the encounter between language and the body in Descartes’s Meditations, Butler addresses the neces the body in language: any effort to exci ary implication of e the body from the text is bound 1442 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity to fail, because the body always returns in the form of spectral figuration, inguistic effort to capture i and at the same time. eludes every Language itself cannot proceed without positing the body, and when it tries to proceed as if the body were not essential to its own operation, figures of the body reappear in spectral and partial form within the very language that seeks to perform their denial. Thus, language cannot escape the way in which it is implicated in bodily life, and when it attempts such an eseape, the body returns in the form of spectral figur implications undermine the explicit claims of disembodiment made within language itself: Thus, just as the effort to determine the body linguistically fails to grasp what it names, so the effort to establish that failure as definitive is undermined by the fig- ural persistence of the body. (“How Can I Deny” 258) 8 whose semantic Butler's formulation of the inescapable co-implication of language and the body resonates with the spectral eruption of the body in Heidegger's lan guage of essentially defined and determined technology. The “extra-ord nary” return in Heidegger indeed not only a performative cl it, an undecidability absence, neither ine! exclusion, Although it belongs in between the living d the dead, the limit-figure of the specter has the outward appearance of a dead being precisely as the body returns to Heidegger's ulation in the form of the cadavers of the undesirables. The extermi- nated body, or rathe der, is there but not addr is there like a passing shadow, its political specificity as bare or fo “the body”—has. language of “the body aracter but also a spectral quality about it were, in that the spectral is neither presence nor on no sed as suc Iterity—as life that does not deserve to live—not being answered to; under our eyes. and yet nonmanifest, close at hand and yet elusive, revealed and yet dis- simulated. But does not such doubleness cha th offi n problem mulation become the very way in which Heide; its rem; ‘acterize the euphemisms so ey killing,” and Also, does not the unheimlichkeit of Is—*euthanasia,” “mi common among Nazi hi “solution” to a humanit the f late le toa ald from Nazi biologism and naturalism?" The spectrality and partiality that permeate the polities and poetics of language/body evoke the archiving us of iterability, of repetition and alterity, that perturbs and r icu- ndeed, “in spectral and I form”—his ethicopoliti tance appa’ any authorial or authorized force to expel or flatten difference.differences 143 Ambivalent Biopolitics: Bearing Witness to the Postmodern Condition of the Human ‘The concept of people always a contains within itself the f biopolitical frac bbe ineluded in the whole of which itis apart as well as what c the whole in which it is always already included, Agamben, Means 52 ‘This lasts tion is a meditation on the divergent appropriat of the “human” and the “inhuman” in the contemporary order of Technik, the fundamentally ambiguous Technik of the “here-and-now.” | would like to extend Heidegger's in alled Ge-stell—an apparatus occur of reason—to stimulate a rethinking of the pol omediated globalization that many want to consider “postpol posthistorical.” This reimagining of the political ought to accord special significance to the biopolitical incarnation of the poli , to the installation of epistemic and political technics through which human life” emerges, and future regimes in which human intelligibility and normativity are shaped. Such technics include organizations of life, fertility, birth, illness, death, and the concept of “people”; the intertwining of nativ nd nationality; the transfiguration of human agent as national subject; conceptions of desire, sexual alliance, and the bedy; population, demography, territory, resources, migrancy; and organizations of lempo- rality. All seem to converge on the aim of furnishing cultural fields and rational models of what counts as human and what counts as inhum ‘The question | mply th of the “political” in the age ofnew and renewed biopolitical technologies: atus he ights on the technoscientific appa g under the regime of the principle al in an era of uneven eal” aise here is s : what is the meaning Among the many effects of this reformu 1 discu tion of “polities,” I sh only one: the new humanities and inhumanities emerging from the tech- annihi- meant by the political, here, engages the question ience of identifying, devaluing, abandoning, controlling, and lating the Other. Wha of addressing the other’s “emplacement” at the irreducible limit of human intelligibility, speakability, and livability, of addressing the disappropria~ ion of the other’s humanness by the discourses and practices of the Same. In contrast to foundational and ontopological modes of already installed subjectivities, comm ‘s, identities, and truths, this sense of the political144 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity 8h y bears on the conditions of being inscribed in the soc and finding—or not finding—pla refusing to stay in place (and here we might also recall Heidegger's eflections in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”); this sense of the political cultivates the praxis of deterritorialization. Heidegger wrote about the and solitude of dying; he also took being-unto-death to be constitutive of what it is to be human, what humans, in their raw corpo- reality, b to-death beyond the ontological sphere of the same (Being), beyond the existe analytic of human finitude as originary, beyond the horizon of “our com- 10n humanity” as being-one and pertaining evenly to all. At the horizon of contemporary global biopolitics and thanatopolitics, dying alone and massively, within and outside the (human) community, assumes—again— an infinitely crucial political meaning. Despite and against Heidegger's meditation on the loss of “the human” and its originary authenticity in the time of modern technology, I suggest the necessity of reinseribing the order of Technik in a historical and discursive horizon of humanity that exceeds it. In other words, the technology of the camp is not to be taken as a radical break in humanity's humanness, but rather as a politically and culturally invested techy ing sovereignty that continues to haunt the very al field, being placed re in the world, placing in reserve, and singular’ y ve in common. He failed to address, however, being- tial ology of atta’ terms in which the intelligibility of the human order is summoned and sustained at both the “local” and the “global” levels. In the current context of neoliberal post-r ization, wherein geopolitical changes in Burope have upset the ter and demographic map of the continent, biopolities provides a protocol for the construction of bounda alienation, “home” founding duality of the modern biopolitical technoscience is that between modernity’s fascination with the promise of futurity and, at the same time, the impulse to subject the future’s contingency to the order ofa calculable and intelligible archive. It is upon such boundaries and fractures in pro- cesses of archiving the future that | would now like to focus. The challenge, following Foucault, is to rethink “technology” ngularly constituted and reified instrumentality, but rather as a plural, dispersed, and discontinuous engagement as it is enacted in the fol: on-state global- orial ies between sites of affinity and sites of and its “other .” as well as human and its others. The notas asi ters: lowing regi political technologies, whereby an archive of pol ral jonalities, knowledges, discourses, and practices seek to govern both the individual human body and the welfare of populatior of the body, whereby a technologies Be norable i jake is not (or is not only) the meitre of Foucault's publicly tortured “body of the condemned” in Diseipline and Punish, but rather the management of the desiring body’s life and agency; and technologies of the self, which permit individuals to act upon them- selv As Foucault has tec hnology i is their pe and constitute themselves as (intelligible) self-governing subjects. technological about such modalities of bility to incite into discourse, to call forth sand prohibitions, and to bring intelligible figu Livily into being. As Ronell puts it, technology has produced man as subject and world as his object (217). The globalized political invest- ment in subjects does not wipe out the modern histories of differentiated subjects as viable or disposable according to certain standards of intelli- gibility, including class, economic resources, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. If there is anything “new” about the technoscience of Western postmodern biopolitics, it would be that it complicates, decentralizes, proliferates, and intensifies the differentiation of power involved in the definitions, images, fantasies, and representations of “humanity” and its thinkable demar adoxically, biopolitical discipline tends thu be less visible, more subtly dispersed and systematically integrated in the discreet banality of cultural fabric, despite the prol lectrc vy 1, digital, and other technologies This a essarily less authoritative v shown, what formative ions of human ‘ations. Pi sto feration of ic, ofs Hance and visual medi: ury ils nec- ies enta persion does not imply that contemporary biopol plence, but rather that it involves a multitude ecognized and misrecognized techniques of violence through which n intelligibility and livability are instituted and confirmed. In the horizon of post-cold war biopolitics, the conceptual and political disti and symbolic violence, welfare and warfare, as well as between fatality and legality, are brought into ¢ mode that I look at the constitution of dentifications, discourses, disciplinary techniques, a practices in the Europe of modernity and postmodernity, in the of humanism, inhumanness, and posthumanity. By epitomizing cr ables of the mode: quantitative forma ions of hum, ons between crimina is. Ivis ina “genealog: episteme: nd power: vari vidence, facticity, such as transparency and self- ation came to be indispensable to the emergence of national “population” in the European eighteenth century as a thematized zed through the phenomena of birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, object of scientific inquiry and administrative control, governmenta patterns of hygiene and habitation. Made possible by the late-nineteenth- and earl antificatior twentieth-century epistemological emphasi the authority of referentially anchored calculative and 145146 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity classificatory logic r I nor- malcy is a crucial characteristic of any ema which numeric tate worthy of the name, ‘The contemporary instances of obdurate enmity between the s (disenfranchised ethnic, (demonized st tional expr ns part of an imaginar’ nation nation-state and its Others, whether in religious, or other *minorities”) or outsider foes) ought to be viewed, I suggest, not as i primordial sentiments, but as political phenomena grounded in modern rational collective imaginations deeply concerned with—technologically mediated—biopolitical enumeration and ascription. Not only the highly mediatized explosion of ethnic conflicts in the “post-socialist” Balkans during the past decade (such as the recent shambles of Kosovo following Yugoslavia’s demise and the disastrous involvement of the international coalition of “the West”), but also the smaller-scale and anonymous “ever day crimes” of xenophobic animosities against guest-worker and immi- grant populations in various European capitalist democracies expose the enduring logic of categorical objectific ‘ifie nin the age of transnational time-space flexibility and unboundedness. The ethnonationalist polities of rape, the ethnic cleansing and bloodletting during the war in Be na, but also the anti-immigra politics p easingly if unevenly integrated “pos ngers or ions of innate tion and taxonomic nia-Herzegov guing an inci Europe are expressions and mutations, but not aberrations, of th ful truth regime. ‘The 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo and the sys of Bosnia by Serbian nationalists; the dislocation of populations in the lerritories of the former Yugoslavian Fede in 1999, when about 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were driven from their homes and hundreds were killed by Serbian security forces; the swell of asylum-seek- ing people passing through the headquarters of the United Nations High ion on Refugees ‘ana to apply for refugee cards during the Kosovo war and after its conclusion in July 1999; the “local communities” in Southeast European towns who protested against the adulteration of ny” “illegal” immigrants; the preoccu- on” of the so-called nationally sensitive border- email destruction ‘ation; the Kosovo wa a Comm, auth tic locality by “too ma jon with “depopulat and and the ens: eas ng cultural stigmatization of non-procreation and also of alternative figurations of relatedness and kinship; the racist stereotype of the ostensibly inordinate reproductive urges of the “others”: all, | believe, have to be seen as inscriptions of biopolitical subjection that enact late modernity’s encounter with its precarious limitdifferene AL the limit of cultural signification of legality stands the tech- nology of the shadowy non-place wherein liminal subjects of European late modernity, those not carrying crucial preconditions of globalized intelligi bility such as full citizenship and legal subjecthood, ordered, restored to a proper legality. The order of the political is haunted by these sociopolitical non-places of emp r diffe technological inser to be placed and jacement (at once disciplinary and “humanitarian”), the nt manifestations and metamorphos refugee camps s of the former Yugoslavia, centers of reception in Balkan and European cities, or even zones dattente in their various ptions—whether nd e itori nps of detention in the ter international a Paris Internation: immigrants from various parts of the former French empi ved, but were not allowed entry, so they ¢ trans idotti has put it well: “Once, landing at occupied by ; they had mped in these luxurious Airport, I saw all these in between area zones . waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the margins and nonbelonging can be hell” (20). From the proce: naturalization or repatr emerged as a “limit-concept” of late modernily’s exclusio! of recognition as human, along with a fragmentary multitude of other limit-representations of the human: the homosexual, the transgendered, nentally ill, the displaced, the es of ion, assimilation or expulsion, the refugee has ry discourses the 111V-positive, the poor, the elderly, the dispossessed, as well as the populations of the so-called Third World. Little wonder that, by means of the pe specifically, the poli there were suggestions in the Bu mative power of discourse and, ‘al relevance of the contamination model of alterity, ope of the 1980s that HIV-pos patients be held in concentration camps. Indeed, contemporary homosexual p: everyday practices of sexual othering, and phobic discourses about Ais not only remind us that sex has been “placed on the agenda for the future” (Foucault, History 6), they also bring forth once again the limits and boundaries of the cultural intelligibility of the human. This fraught relation between human life and power of tion is crucially addressed by Butler: itive people and At ecogn Indeed, how are we to grasp this dilemma of language that emerges when “human” takes on that doubled sense, the norma- tive one based on radical exclusion and the one that emerges in the sphere of the excluded, not negated, not dead, perhaps slowly dying, yes, surely dying from a lack of recognition, d) “47148 Technologies of Humanness, Ap ias of Blopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity indeed, from the premature circumscription of the norms by which recognition as human can be conferred, a recognition without which the human cannot come into being but must remain on the far side of being, as what does not quite qualify as that which is and can be? Is this nota melancholy af the public sphere? (Antigone 81) ‘The categorical and numerical order of cultural identific and difference is also echoed in the mnemonic residues of the spaces of demarcation and estrangement of European late mode camps of ethnic rape in the former Yugoslavia, dark biopolitical impulse to expose the body to subjection and to normalize the body politic aecording to the prevailing norms of patrilineal reproduction, kinship, and “life,” are one such example, one that urges the parallel: Omarsk ife of Auschwitz?*" Judith Magyar L on, an Aus. rvivor, attests to the radical significance of ge: and sexual difference in the face of biopolitical subjection when she states that her greatest fear in the concentration camp was not death but rape (Kremer).2! ‘The enforced naked thingness of the subjected Being-toward-death is vd ns tio acs de painfully sexed and gende ‘The nation-state is, and not merely by virtue of etymological nked with birth: “The fiction that is implicit here i that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there y, ineluctably may not be any difference between the two moments” (Agamben, Means 21). As a technology of giving bir future, the camp serves as a means for the inscription of calculable and h to the nation’s cleansed and pure quantifiable life in the nation-state and its attendant biopolitical regimes of the normal. 1 population through managing n inci Phe Nazi concentration camp was, indeed, about normal- umbers and controlling ¢ gly shown, the concentrati i ategorical boundaries. As Agamben has cor has been the paradigmatic space in which the biological body, to which the inmate stripped of every political status is reduced, came to function as a political criterion; it is the site, biopolitical par excellence, “in which cal life and biological lif n camp become rigor- 2 public and private events, poli (Means 122). When seen in the light of such a Lis, in light of the invention of the al solution,” political demography as the episteme of systematic categorizing, counting, and rei- fying of bodies acquires a differently informed meaning. It will then have ously indistinguishable inaugural biopolitical technoscience, th “Jewish question” and the implementation of there to be conceded that there can be nothing politically innocent or anody about an epistemic regime that monitors the sta minute and intimate aspects of the life of the national popu power, in its multiplicity of postmoder ved in the refugee camps i es, the state-sponsored “reception s” and “transit eamps” “illegal” immigré lemporar- he stadium in the Italian town of Bari, ies in 1991 concentrated all 1g them back to the biopolitics > bounded “ee-topias” retaining or “host- ing” the of the new ambivalently and anxiously “borderless” s of deten- n, those sociopolitical spaces bespeak the constitutive sciplinary incarceration on the one hand, and technocratic-humanitarian management of public safety on the other. The transient inm: management of the ation. modalities, is European ci 1 whi center ts a ily deta for instance, into which the Italian “illegal” Albanian immigrants befor (Agamben, “Camp”). A reflect discontents cannot ignore thes ed before deportation: uuthor! send r country nd ils jon on modern Europes edundant and burdensome others European order. Lying in the interstic tion and protec complicity between d es of such interstitial spaces, whether refugees, immi- , expellees, or m-seekers, are construed as redundant and polluting, a sheer “matter out of place, the same time, as vietim- ized “human beings” in need of humanitarian sheltering and compassion. ‘The spatial discipline of those distinctly—albeit ambiguously—demareated sites requires a thinking through of the ambivalences of biopolitical disei- pline, especially in a context of both postnational exaltation and residual or resurgent nationalist politics in Europe. ethnographic narratives of bounded field and static location are placed ‘The camp of late Eu of welfare with technologies of discipline, emerges as a grant sy and In such sites, the founding under considerable str ing technologie eminder, the! biopolitical condition To realize that, having spawned subtler technolo s of nor. malization, the concentration camp of extermination is not the reigning order of the day, is to complicate one’s understandings of contemporary Juropean biopolitical technoscience, in both its chilling similarities with and its incommensurable differences from the absolute horror signified by augural site of modernity.” In exploring the multiple and s configurations of modern biopolitical violence and legality, we mii find that we ought to rethink the boundar larity” and “dif ference nd “rupture.” Ifthe pean modernity, eonjoin- of the anxious ambivalence underlying the late modern the es between in .” as well as between “continuity” oncentra~ tion camp can be taken as the icon of a deadly hygienic or sanitary opera- 149Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity lion that works through massive and centralized tactics of subservience and a violent stripping away of any notion of personhood, the late modern disciplinary technoscience of biopolities works at the more life-affirming iviti re about the body and its level of a proliferation of highly respected epistemic discur s, such as demog materiality through ad life planning, life expectancy phy and biomedicine, which produce 1Y, procreation, sexual hygiene, longevity, and public health. Late-twen- is performed nd epistem inis ering fertili tieth- and eart: primarily through the production of human subjectiviti of life, through self illance and self-normalization; it is valorized in terms of ‘e for propitious sexual and reproductive health and for the future of human life; it is experienced in terms of individual respons ibility, self-determination, technological enablement, free choice, and free flow of information. Through such biopolitically invested epistemes of subject- d human welfare, recognizable humanness is constituted by ions along power differentials of class, ity, and ethnicity, moment would I claim, however, that the historical lleled order of the concentration camp is defin over, or that the neoliberal democracies of late modernity provide immu- > Quite the contrary, | would suggest that, if Foucault was right that “power is tolerable only on condition that it tial part of itself (History 86), the eventuality of the death resurgence might very well be the remainder that the biopolities twenty-first-century Western biopolit Irv formation means of demar race, gender, sex Not fi specific and unpa ely udescene nity against its r mask a subs camp’s of late modernity needs to cynically mask in order to purchase legitimacy and affirm viability. In fact, the recent history of conflict in the post-cold war era has provided ample evidence to suggest that echoes of the Shoah manifest themselves in contemporary fascism, as much in the residual ly 1 racism as in the atrocities of ethnic rape, unwanted pregnancy, and the abjection of the nongenerative, “degenerate” ilized “other” within, an abjection also known as homophobia. In Burope, technologies that seek to determine which figura- lions of the human attain full cultural signification and which do not sist, albeit in increasingly differentiated articulations, in the all too nnies of xenophobia pe common contemporary politics of pogrom and expulsion, disdain and exclusion. Although Foucault has written convincingly about the histori from the society of incarceration to the society of control, cal transitic the current biopol coexistence of these two modalities of power, The cynical apathy with ical technologies attest to the enduring and complexrre which the exis! Europe: cartoon strip that the Greek Anti-Racis Swiss Caricartoons Evil: Two men are chatting in an obviously mirthful tone; in the background, the camp: rows of military ced area located in the outskirts of a bustli 1) nding outside of the fence scrutinizing the camp, expresses a professed puzzlement: “1 don’t understand what tha them, after all. Don’t we go camp- ing when we travel abroad?” The border separating the campsite from the city is not about a mere concentric, tranquil “homely” cohabitation between host and guest but rather signals litigious circumseriptions, as contaminated and bleeding boundaries of sameness and alterity, A woman refugee from Bosnia y.in February 1995: ence of refugee n cities was widely received was acutely observed in a political mps on the periphery of Southeastern Calendar 2001 reprinted from the e lies what app. lo be a refugee tents stand within a fe modern ci One of the two men, who are sta yand unlivability, home and exile les about her new “home” in Germ: Liry to read the German newspapers as infrequently as possible now, but every once in a while I buy one and take a look. There are so many stori es about how Germany is flooded with refu gees, especially those refugees from Bosnia. I read about why we are a danger, why we should be kept out. Meanwhile, I, the one with the college education, take care of their children and clean their houses. Never before in my life did I ever step foot anywhere where | was not wanted. I do not recognize what I have become. (qtd. in Mertus et al. 122) ‘The baleful echoes of Na: of nationalisms, foreed d violence against “foreign vism in the contemporary resurgence placement of populations, and eruptions of are found in another cartoon strip from Exil, where the military-like strators protesting against the influx of “foreigners” form the shape of a . Such instances of ironic critical commentary confirm that biopolitical subjection is by no means reducible to its efficacious or felicitous real ultimately haunted by its inealculable limits and am! necessary possibi dis e cannot appropriate and regulate, and that constitute, when all is said and done, “the only guarantee we have acism” (Copjec 22). Biopolitics, in the sense of poli zing human life, has always been int ‘anks of demon zation; rather, it is alences. It is such, ent that can prove to be disrup- tive in ways biopolit against ical power concerned with ‘ately interwoven with than- mana 15152 ‘Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity atopolitics, the episteme of speculation on and rationalization of death: from the obsessive fear of epidemic disease in Europe after the cholei epidemic of 1852 to the sinking of the Titanic throu, u onted with its own death,” in Slavoj Zizek's words (qtd. in Doane 235); and from the establishment of the canonical list of death eauses still in effect i parts of the world (..e., William Farr’s nosology and nosometry)** to the technologies of risk such a y. Even the technological “production of corpses in the gas chambers and the exte mination camps” that Heidegge of technology in 1949, even th in the name of It is impossible, | have suggested here, to read Heidegge questioning of technology outside the history of modern biopolitics. In light of the biopolitical violence over socially and culturally sanctioned hordes marked the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, we need to move beyond clichés of horror as mere Kk in spite of—and yet within—Heidegger’s questioning: what nt by ’s humanness, the loss ry authenticity, as Heidegger saw it h which Europe at ¢ beginning of the century found itself*cont those used by economists and the insurance indus ummoned in his lectures on the subject ed at technoscience of annihilation oc S. and claims to “humanne of humanness that ha rupture anda if, instead of an abe: of the human’s origi evil we all disown in exultant abomination—we recog camp in its inherent continuity with the history of humanity and with the political rationality of s the nomos of the political space of the modern rather than a scandalous episode of anomie. Such a line of questioning would certainly be not only in spite of but also in accordance with Heidegger's own account of modern technology, for Heidegger's own Lion of technology allowed for an under- n akdown in humanit stead of an e the annihilation ‘our own” world a non-instrumental conceptual standing of technology as a phenomenon that, Western history. But this would not be all, Wh mere suspension of modernity’s avowed humanness, we recognize the camp as a place, a discursive realm, and an episteme where what essentially “revealed itself” (Lo use Heidegger's language of veiling/unyeiling) was the very idea of sovereignty through the demarcation of human intelligi- bility in Western modernity, W fascism, what identifica yday manifesta n “humanity's” revulsion at the unspeakable evil of Nazism and the Shoah, the so-called Lthe backdrop of Heidegger's “piety of thinking,” I conclude this essay by evoking Gillian Rose’s ques- tioning of what sh ‘To argue for silence, s essence, determines if, instead of a sms of Lemporary microe: ons with its eves aled ions, are cone! nil of representation? Again 8 dubbed “Holocaust piety”:a tre Notes pr ness of ‘ineffability, | because we fear thal 1h what we « r, the banishment equally of poetr: «| isto mys and knowledge, in short, the wit- tify something we dare not understand, it may be all too understandable, all loo continuous human, all too human” (43, emphasis in original). I would like w give special thanks to Elizabeth Heed for her insightful suggestions. For helpful discussions and comments on an earlier draft of this essay, thanks also to Mary Ann - Lynne Joyrich, Ellen Room and Elena Ts ATHENA ATHANASIOU Is a Social anthropologist. She teach ology, and Social Anthropology, in Gr biotechnologies, Arps, and anthropological theory. She is currently working script about the anxious biopolitic Deparimentof History, Arel polities, gender fon a book man 1 Agamben elaborates on the nov elly of the coming politics of the “whatever singularities,” the sin larities that form communi without affirming a recognizable and representable identity: Whatever singular ity, which wants to appropriate belonging: itself, us oun being: in-tangswage, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these sin gularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will bea Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (Coming Community 87) 2 In Derrida’s reading, @ propos is a modality that signifies “eithe a link of organie, internal, and orelse, superficial associ comparison—bj signifiers” (“Typewriter Ribbon” 282). As the following analysis suggests, Heidegger's writing on the extermination camp d propos of his delving into the question of technology resituates the duality constitutes the polities of the Hechno-body of/in E ind all the participants in the Pembroke Genter Seminar 2002). 1wish, finally, to thank Steve Caton, Veena Das, Mariella Pandolfi, Rayna Rapp, Lepis for engaging earlier versions of my written work on biopolitics. es at the Univei ity of Thess ‘ce. She writes om bi ly, rope, thetor I mode of @ propos (i.e. either a link of organic necessity ora fortuitous and metonymie space of seman Ina similar vein of exposing the limits of the poetics of trauma, Jean-Lue Godard proclaimed In his film King Lear (1987) “No more Shakespe Chernobyl!" “No more .. . after : ealastrophe appears to be marked by a certain paradoxical temporality—a temporal limit that signifies the unprecedented and unparalleled singularity of the moment of the strophe (i.e. ‘urn”)—that cannot be replaced or overcome by the will to “rep- resentation,” or transmitted in entational, aes! a repr speech act, Shosh argued tha opened up a “radical historical crisis in witnessing” (201), and Cathy Caruth has addressed th unrepresentable nature of t by theorizing trauma (especially that of the Holocaust, but also any event of massive trauma) as the failure—and defiance of all representation. Such unavail ability of trauma for witnessing Lion bespeaks a 153154 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity politico-ethical limit certain political concep of limit. This limit, wh ‘epresentation of catastrophe engages performatively with the catastrophe of representation, comes to be what is at stake in the poeties of disaster. As Maurice Blanchot wrote in The Writing of the Disaster: “Phere isa limi al which the practice of any a becomes an affront to the afflic tion” (85), 6 In William Brennan’s book The Wbortion Holocaust: Today's Final Solution, abortion is juxtaposed with the “final solution,” fet with Jews, Nazis with *aborti nd Adolf Hitler's “Mein 1° with Boston Women’s One could erous examples of deployment of the ‘eof the Hol Kamp! Body Health Collectiv: invoke nun such strategi rhetorical dev caust—as a commonsensical fornt of analogy. a comparandum, or a commodified stereotype of “human tragedy"—in the pron ind anti-abortion discur of the European movement for the “respect of life." In Ger for in: he inaugural manifesto of the “pro. life” organization Europdische trsteaktion (Action of European Doctors) had the title “Auschwitz der Ungeborenen” (The Aus: chwitz of the Unborn). In the discourse of the French anti abortion or tion “L les-vivre,” the abortion pill RUIS6 is presented as “the new Zyklon B,” and abortion as “the Holocaust of France asm” of the nation: state, of sovereignty, borders, and nationalisms of native soil nd blood, Derrida addresses the ontopotoxy—the intricate associa tion of ontology with topology— that this conceptua how supposes: “Bi uidated in the very ontopology by tele-technic dislo- cation? (By ontopology we m an axiomaties linking indis- ological value of being to its situation, to ible and presentable deter- 1 of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general)” (Speeters 82). In commenting on Heidegger's formulation, Lacoue-Labarthe calls it“seandalously inad- eau Itis not inadequate because it relates mass extermi nation to technology. From that point of view, itis indeed abso: lutely correct. But itis seandatous + and therefore lamentably inad- equate because it omits to mention that essentially, tn its German version, [...] mass extermination was an extermination of the Jews and that this is incommensurably different from the economico-miti lary practice of blockades or even the use of nuclear arms. Not to speak of the agricultural industry, [J The fact that Heidexaer was nut even able, nor probably even wished to state this difference is what is strietly—and eternally intolerable. (oJ In the Aus chwits apocalypse, it was nothing less than the West, In its essence that revealed itself—and that con. Linues, ever since to reveal itself And it is thinking that event that Heidegger failed to do. G4-35, emphasis in original) Lion of question is fundamental to Heidegger's overcoming of meta- physies, his involvement with ihe university, his nostalgia fo “the Greeks.’ and his critique of representational thinking and modernity. My remarks abot Heidegger's privileging of theferences question refer to his writings on technology. It is in “The Nature of Language” that Heidegger chal lenges the primacy of the ques: tion by asserting the preeminence of language and address. Here is Heidegger commenting on the closing sentence of *The Question Concerning Technology”: Atthe close ofa lecture catted “The Question Con- cerning Technology,” given some lime ago, I said: “Questioning is the piety of thinking.” “Piety” is meant here in the ancient sense obedient, or submissive, and in this case submitting to what think ing has to think about. One of the exciting experiences of thinking is that at times it does not fully com- prehend the new insights it has just wained, and does not properly see them through. Such, 100, isthe ‘case with the sentence just cited that questioning is the piety of thinking. The lecture ending with that sentence was already in the ambience of the realization that the true stance of thinking cannot be to put questions, but must be to listen to that which our question. ing vouchsafes—and all question- ing begins to be a questioning onty in virtue of pursuing its quest for essential Being. (The Nature of Language” 72) ‘The “question of the questio in Heidegger has drawn much attention among students of his philosophy. Does Heidegger ever question the privilege of the question—“the remnant of Aufildrung which still slumbered in the privilege of the question,” as Derrida puts it in Of Spirit? (151). Although Derrida offers a negative answer to this question. he supplements and compromises his response when, in the long footnote appended to OFSpirit, he examines Heidegger's reference to language's priority to ques- tioning. For a very interesting treatment of the “possibility of address” in relation to the Holo- caust and the loss of the sense of the Other, see Dori Laub's work on surviving Holocaust trauma She writes: There was no longer an other to which one could say “Thou” in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject, of being answered. The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possi bility of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another. (Bearing Witness" $2) In her ingenious deconstructive study of the history and polities of telephonic communication technology, The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell translates the Ge-Stell as both “emplacing’ and “Frame-Work.” As the term Isintended to suggest, modern technology is a “challenging claim” that enframes (ie. both assembles and orders) everything that it summons forth. Heidegger points to an Seerie” employment of the word beyond its “ordinary age” as “apparatus” or “skel eton.” As he puts it: "We dare to use this word in a sense that has been thoroughly unfamiliar up to now. [...] Cam anything be more strange? Surely not” (*Question” 19-20) In his introduction to The Ques tion, William Lovitt writes: This challens: ing summons, ruling in modern technology. is a mode of Being’s revealing of itself Yet in it, also, Being withdraws, so that the sum ‘mons that thus “enframes” Is all but devoid of Being as empower ing to be. Compelted by its claim, ordered and orderer alike are denuded. All that is and man himself are gripped in a structur- ing that exhibits a mere skeleton of their Being, of the way in which they intrinsically are. Ceri, emphasis added)156 10 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity ‘The relevance of “waste” to the Western lechné is echoed in Labarthe’s definition of Auschwitz as “the useless residue of the Western idea of art, that is to say, of techne” (46), ‘The hand is particularly unique and proper to the human, its obsolescence signi ng the loss to Heidegger (“The Nature of Lan- guage”). Derrida examines the role of the hand in Heideggs What Is Called Thinkin, essay *Gesehleeht Il: He Hand.” For the important relevance of “sacred life” and “homines sacri” to the political power of manage of social subjects' bodily life, see Agamben, Hono Sacer, “Homo Sacer,” asa me formulation, bespeaks the biopo- litical moment at whieh hun life is sacralized at the same time that itis threatened by the forces of sovereign pow. the mom h exception and rule become indistinguish- able and modern democracy and totalitarian regime meet each other in the realm of blopolitics. As Agamben writes, “Only when these events [the deportations to the eampsand the nation] are brought back to their ' ‘humanitarian’ context ean their inhumanity be measured” (150). Veena Das is right to emphasize that the Holocaust signified the end of traditional theories of iB theodiey. Ifthe Jew is “the privileged nega. Live referent” of the Nazi biopo litical sovereignty, s/he Is by no means the only one. An event of, particular relevance to the under- standing of Nazi biopolities was the creation, in 1934, of a special department of the Gestapo for the n of homosexuality and two major “internal enemies” of th according to the offic socialist discourse, Normative procreation of human life”—in the form of the reproduction of apur legral body poli tie—was absolutely essential to the Nazi biopolitical operation. On the far side of human intelligi bility, but also of the official his- tory of Nazi atrocities, gay people have been considered for decades unworthy of being included in the ‘official” list of Nazism’s victims ind thus deemed unqualified fo any sort of compensation. Those abject referents of biopolitical sovereignty—others of the Other— were condemned to nonrecogni tion, relegated to the fringes of humanity. As “Joser K.” submits in Men with the Pink Triangle, the 1947 Austrian law for the protec- tion of Holocaust vietims referred only to those prosecuted for racial, political, and religious ré sons (Heger). When in 1988, ¢ Green Party and the Homosexual Initiative (Host) requested tha people be included among the vietims of Nazism, the Austrian Parliament rejected the request and so did the three officially r« ognized associations of victims of Nazism, See “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “Plant and animal likewise have no world. |...) The peasant woman, on the other hand, has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings” (250), ‘ouicault first alerted us to the interweaving of “biopolitics,” the management of human life, with “thanatopolities,” the epistemic ration admil sovereignty by mea ireumscribing, and exereising control over life and death is fundamental to the modality of subjection that Fo ‘ault called “biopower.”differences 19 I would be interesting, L think, to read Agamben’s critique of Heidegger's emphasis on “factic- as a concept that denotes the “throwness” of Dasein in conjunction with Luce Irigaray’s reading of Heidegger in The For: getting of Air in Martin Heidegger In her meditative engagement with Heidegger's work, Irigara critiques Heidegger's emphasis, on the element of earth as th ground of life and speech, In her words, “perhaps one must remove from Heidegger that earth on which he so loved to walk. To take away from him this solid ground, to rid him of the ‘illusion’ ofa path that holds up under his st fit goes nowhere— and to bring him back not only to thinking but to the world of the pre-Socraties” (2). A question springing from such a discussion of Heidegger's omission of air and prioritization of earth would be: how does technology's metaphysi- cal emplacement relate to the fac- ticity of life in Heidegger's work? And further: how does Irigaray’s remembering of air relate to Derrida’s remembering of spirit Heidegger? Such an “elem "line of critical reading, how- ever, ought to include Heidegger's own critique of the loss he saw Platonic philosophy (for him the inaugural moment of Western, metaphysics) of a pre-Socratic Insight into being as physis. See also Gayatri Spivak's “Response to Jean-Lue Nanc inth volume (52-51) ‘The word “unheimlich” becomes a term of art for both Sig- ‘mund Freud and Martin Hel- degger (Being and Time). The term—translated by Strachey as “uneam eud—denotes the state of unfamiliarity, the sense of not-being-at-home. Dasein Is unheimlich, thrown as iti into the world as “not-at-home” 20 387 (Being and Time 521). This notion ofthe “unhomely" assumes a special significance if considered in relation to Heidegger's thought, where Enframing is taken to be the signature effect of modern technology. Samuel Weber has alerted us to the fact that place and placing are paramount in Heidegger's discussion of mod- ern technology. The relevance of pl placing, or emplace- ment to the Heideggerian ren dition of modern technology is ambivalent, however, as the very effort to put things in their proper place requires—and recognizes— a certain displaceability of things as well as a certain impropriety of place. The rhetorical unheimlich eit of the Heideggerian analogy between the Nazi exterminal and the agricultural industry ambivalent in that respect as well: the more Heidegger's anal- ogy seeks to place things properly (in language), the less proper those places (and interplace ments, e.g., extermination camp/ agricultural factory) turn out to be, Heidegger's parallelism ca be seen, then, as a political move to reassert the propriety—h homeliness, as it were—of such eremplacing. In the notorious Serb detention camp of Omarska (located in 4 former mining complex near the town of Prijedor) in Bosnia Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslim and Croat women and men were interned and si tortured by their Serb captors. Women were sexually assaulted nd foreibly impregnated and kept in rape camps until the eighth month of pregnaney to be prevented from attempting an abortion, Whereas Serbian war crimes in Kasovo were unequivo- cally deemed “genocidal” among international officials, in the case of Bosnia, the term *zenocide” was carefully avoided. The very158 a Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity nomenclature of political anni hilation as genocide—i.e., killing of the genos (offspring) —is com- pelled into referential crisis and the sexed and gendered character of biopolitical management of “Life” is exposed in all its war: Vike and deathlike implications. (leidexger’s meditation on the uration of tech- nology as fechne—Le., as bringing forth and “giving birth”—assumes here, im the rape camp, an ambig uous meaning of produeing— and de-producing—lile” and “humanness.”) Due to the brave efforts of rape camp survivors, in June of 1996 the United Nations International Tribunal for the first time in history recognized rape as a war crime and a crime against humanity In a different contest of political trauma, that of the hibakusha ( erally, atom-bombed persons) in Japan, Maya Todesehini offers a sensitive ethnographie look at the role gender and sexual difference play in the experience and appro- priation of trauma, showing how Female bodies are constructed as memorials to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (102-56), ch *reception-camps” op te under the aegis of either the Departments of Health and Wel fare or the Red Cross. European governments typically appeal to the Red Cross to open or super- vise temporary shelters “to get the refugees off the streets.” Such is the ease of Lavrio, located in an underprivileged area in southern, Attica, but also af “centers” of ambiguous legal status such as the one housed in an old prison in Mytilene on the borderland island of Lesvos, in Greece. Anotiier such “camp” is the Sangatie camp, in Calais, France, where unpapered refugees (people from Kosovo escaping the former Yugo slavia before the Dayton peace accords in early 1999, Roma flee- ing discrimination in Eastern Europe, and currently refugees and asylum-seekers mainly from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq) make their last stop before facing the considerable risks—180 m.p.h. winds, electrocution, squash: ing at the banks—of crossing the Chunne! to England, riding under or on top of the luxurious Euro- slar passenger train, Red Cross officials take pains to explain the ‘camp's “open-door policy” and to clarify that the razor-wire fene- ing around the shed is intended to “protect” the refugees by repel ling unwanted intrusions into the camp. Interestingly enough, such definitional clarifications and reassurances are often articu lated in diacritie relation to the “concentration camp.” As the president of the French Red Cross DULit: “After all, itis not a concen tration camp. These people have traveled thousands of miles to get here, and it is impossible to make them believe they ean’t go the last 52 miles” (New York Times Maga zine, 14 Apr. 2002, 40). Such specters return aceasionally to haunt the life of our Western dem typl- cally happens through a stra recourse to a “corpse-polities,” 4 politics revolving around sym- bolic appropr death: In 1985, c dent Ronald Reagan visited Bit- burg cemetery, where forty-nine Nazi SS officers are buried. One year after that notorious symbolic gesture, Reagan had to take the Tace-saving measure of making the U.S. a party to the Genocide Gonvention, which ealled for contracting parties to take action nder the Charter of the United lations for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Even then, there were so many reservations by Republican se lors attached to the Am signature that the U.S. accession to the convention would not be le societies. Thia ference meaningfully binding. In May 2002, the George W. Bush admin- istration decided to formally renounce any involvement in a treaty setting up a permanent international eriminal trib designed to prosecute individuals for genocide humanity. Thi diation of the International Grim- inal Court involves the *unsign- ing” of the treaty signed—albeit not ratified—by the Clinton In Europe, the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s extreme-right Front National, won seventeen percent of the national vote in April 2002. In his pre-election campaign, Le Pen called for France to shut its European borders, and sug gested that illegal immigrants be put in “transit camps” and then deported —language recog. nizable as an echo of the Third Reich, In his public appearances, anti-immigration statements are combined with overt anti-Semi- n, racist pu remarks about the “inequality of the races,” and homophobie state ments, In 1987, he likened aps patients to lepers “sweating the virus through their pores” and stated that he was “not thrilled at the idea of Arab boys having sex with girls from Strasbourg” (New York Times 6 May 2002, A8). In April of 2002, the prime minister nd the cabinet of the Netherlands igned in response to a report that pointed to the responsibil- ity of the Dutch “peacekeepers” rebrenica, a macabre epilogue to the history of German “terror. ism” was written by the recent revelation that the brains of three members of the so-called Baader Meinhof Gang (Andreas Baade Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe) have been lost and possibly destroyed and discarded. It was evealed that, after the prisoners 159 “suicide” in Stammheim prison in 1977, their brains were removed from their bodies in order to be forensically examined. The brain of Ulrike Meinhof is still in the hands of the author il going to be delivered to Meinhof’s daughters, who intend to bury it with the rest of their mother’s remains. Meinhot’s brain had avowedly been removed in order scientists to determine the fat tors accountable for her “person ality change"—from a bourgeois journalist to a terrorist (Vima 20 Nov. 2002). For an interesting eth- nographie treatment of what I call ere “corpse-polities,” see Kath rine Verdery’s excellent analysis of “how dead bodies animate t udy of politics” (25); see also Achille Mbembe’s *Necropolitics” on the question of How the rela tion between resistance, sacr nd terror is reconfigured in the cercise of control aver life and death. Derrida has posed thi the explosive tension between the ethic of hospitality and refugee and asylum rights in relation to the question of the “open cities,” where migrants may seek refuge from persee jorture, and exile in the contemporary world How can we continue to envision, he asks, a new status for the con temporary city as “city of refuge”? (On Cosmopolitanisi 5) problem of William Fare (1807-85) helped institutionalize British vital sta listies and the classification of diseases (nosology); he devised the term “nosometry” (“disease measurement") to describe his own contribution to the field a new system of recording and analyzing vital statistics that encompassed not only classifica tion but also systematic enumera tion. For more on the role work played in the institution of probabilistic laws in the western world, see Hacking.160 Works Cited Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community: Trans. Mi nesota P, 1995, chael Hardt, Minneapolis: U of Min- Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. janford: Stanford UP, 1998. (Originally published as Homo Sacer: Il Potere Sovrano e la Nuda Vita, 1995). ‘he Camp as the Nomos of the Modern.” Violence, Identity, and Self. Deter: mination. Fa. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. 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