On Monday 21 May the University of Malta’s WIPSS seminar hosts Francois Zammit, who will give a seminar entitled The Camp and Modernity. The seminar will be held between 18:00 and 19:00, followed by discussion in the Faculty of Arts Library, on the third floor of Old Humanities Building, University of Malta Msida Campus at the end of the corridor next to Room 301.
Students are encouraged to attend. The public is cordially invited.
Students are encouraged to attend. The public is cordially invited.
Francois writes:
‘Agamben’s political work (Agamben 2005) revolves around the figure of Homo Sacer, sacred life, the embodiment of bare life (vita nuda), as the ultimate representation of the sovereign power of the state. Sovereign power manifests itself by creating bare life through the divestment of political and legal rights of targeted categories of human life; persons or groups are placed in a state of exception.
The state of exception is maintained through complex political frameworks that uphold the sovereign power of the state but ultimately its most identifiable feature is the camp. The camp, like Auschwitz, or a refugee camp, is in itself a space of exception; a physical space in which the rule of law and the rights of man are removed. Agamben defines the camp as the nomos of the modern - manifestation of a concrete social order imposed on a population through laws and social conventions. The camp is a unique institution that is representative of modernity. Whereas ancient and medieval periods contained forms of camp like military camps or slave camps, it is only with the rise of modernity and biopolitical technologies that the concept of an organised and isolated territory becomes a social reality imposed on whole categories of the population.
This paper argues that the camp needs to be read in terms of the modern obsession with hygiene and sanitation, thus the camp is a form of quarantine or isolation zone. Concentration camps may be defined as zones of containment for diseased populations; a means of preventing the spread of contagion among the healthy population. From a racial perspective, non-European races are identified as displaying hereditary weaknesses that have to be contained and not assimilated by the healthy white population. Thus the camp is the means used by colonial powers to control and maintain order. This colonial model was later exported to the metropole and inside the very borders of the imperial powers reached its apex with the Nazi death camps. However, this model not only remained a constant throughout the twentieth century but is still prevalent now. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip, and the universalisation of refugee camps/reception camps, should be analysed in terms of biopolitical technologies. These zones of containment in which human rights are suspended are to be regarded as the ultimate materialisation of the state of exception.’
Francois Zammit teaches philosophy at St Edward’s College, Malta. He has worked on transhumanism, terrorism, Bataille, and education. Over the years he has presented papers on Bataille's Interpretation of Mauss' The Gift, The Concept of the Self in Contemporary Maltese Literature, and A Colonial Reading of Agamben's Homo Sacer. His last WIPSS paper, in 2015/6, was a discussion of foreign fighters for ISIS in the Middle East in terms of theories of social disassociation (Camus and Wilson) and of excess (Bataille).
Convenors: Paul Clough, Peter Mayo, and Michael Briguglio
