As Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben have argued in different ways, humanitarianism and the human rights ideology that supports it presupposes and legitimates the dispossession and abjection of the human person to the point of the animality of a naked life in which people are kept at the border of death and have the sole right, in principle, to be kept alive. An absolute of dispassion and poverty. This is the condition of the concentration camp even when it is not explicitly designed to annihilate but merely to congregately useless bodies that cannot be profitably employed. The reduction of people to this state and their actually being murdered are in broad terms different forms of the same thing, both conditioned upon the fact that they are refuse. Israel here declares a will to humanitarianism that actually requires the preceding act of absolute dispossession and an effort to make sure that the economy is minimal so that there is no kind of prosperity. In the condition of naked life, one has no opportunity and there are no goods to be enjoyed. Not books, or records, or videos. People living in refugee camps often have lives not unlike homeless people in American cities. You must spend much of your day trying to secure the things you need to stay alive, like food and shelter, or in some camps, running water. What Israel clearly wants to do to the Palestinian people is destroy them, in one way or another. The logic of their position is genocide, even if in its pure form this represents a limit that has so far not been approached very closely. The practice of solitary confinement in American prisons is similar. There you are deprived of all social contact, as well as all reading matter and anything you might make use of to keep yourself from being bored and losing your mind. You might think, America being such a right-wing country and the Christian religion being a principal alibi and ideological proper of this tendency, and the implicit, though often cynical, reliance of the police, judicial, and penal authorities on invocations of a punitive moralism, you might think a prisoner in solitary would be given or allowed a Bible to read. No, because knowledge empowers even when it seems or is allied with a superegoic agency. The purpose of solitary confinement surely is derived from its function, which is to destroy a persons mind or soul. Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain has argued that the purpose of torture is to use pain, usually bodily pain, to destroy a persons world. Often torture is a little bit like rape, where one experiences world being violated by the tottering individual. In solitary confinement it is destroyed by an institution and its architecture in all their anonymity. One of the curious things about solitary is that it is often used not, ostensibly, as punishment, but as protection, particularly for those judged mentally ill. Thus the most vulnerable people emotionally are singled out for spiritual annihilation and wastage. The Nazis were only explicit in sending the mentally ill to the camps, as they proclaimed that the strong should rule and annihilate the weak. We have something not unlike Nazism but without its messy ideology. The prosecutors and judges who send people to these hells are not fascists but conservatives or conservative liberals; they are mostly gentlefolk who dont hate anyone. Their relationship to the people who are made to suffer is rather like that of the British, French, and Belgian upper classes to colonial subjects in Africa; they could not have hated them because they were a different people located elsewhere. The jailers are often violent and they do express hatred, often supported or justified by a simple-minded moralism that is in fact little more than a hatred one believes in. The people put in these cells are refuse. Society has no use for them. It does not think it important to offer them anything, except the right to be kept alive, much like a zoo animal for animal rights lovers. Although if you were on display you might say things. Locked up in this total way, you are deprived of all possibility. Thus, when Agamben writes that there is a tendency towards turning the world into a concentration camp, he is right, and this is not much of a metaphor. But we must not forget: the humanitarians do care. So they will put you in a tiny, feces-strewn cell where there is nothing you can do except go out of your mind more or less painfully, and everyone agrees it is very painful indeed. But no matter: You will be given food, and drink, and preventing from fatally banging your head against the wall. Or do they care about that? And does it matter if they do or not?
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:24:41 +0000
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