Autonomies

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.

Primo Levi, If This is a Man

I know.
I know and you know, we knew,
we did not know, we
were there, after all, and not there.

Paul Celan, So Many Constellations (1963)

The paradoxical status of the camp as a space of exception must be considered. The camp is a
piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space. What is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself. Insofar as the state of exception is “willed,” it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception. The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception – the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception. This is why in the camp the quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995)

You see, the world has a choice, because surplus populations like the Palestinians, like refugees crossing the Mediterranean, like the poor people in the favelas and in the inner-city slums, these will either be dealt with through a genocidal project, as Israel has dealt with the Palestinians in Gaza — and this kind of response or this kind of template will become part of the military doctrine that is taught to armies across the world in dealing with these surplus populations.

Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah (in interview for Democracy Now news service – 30/12/2024)

Gaza has been described as an open air prison, a concentration camp, compared to a Nazi Jewish ghetto; it is today a death camp.