one forgets that the biopolitical body that constitutes the new fundamental political subject is neither a quaestio facti (for example, the identification of a certain biological body) nor a quaestio iuris (the identification of a certain juridical rule to be applied), but rather the site of a sovereign political decision that operates
in the absolute indistinction of fact and law.
No one expressed this peculiar nature of the new fundamental biopolitical
categories more clearly than Schmitt, who, in the essay “State, Movement, Peo-
ple,” approximates the concept of race, without which “the National Socialist
state could not exist, and without which its juridical life would not be possible,”
to the “general and indeterminate clauses” that had penetrated ever more deeply
into German and European legislation in the twentieth century. In penetrat-
ing invasively into the juridical rule, Schmitt observes, concepts such as “good
morals,” “proper initiative,” “important motive,” “public security and order,”
“state of danger,” and “case of necessity,” which refer not to a rule but to a situ-
ation, rendered obsolete the illusion of a law that would a priori be able to reg-
ulate all cases and all situations and that judges would have to limit themselves
simply to applying. In moving certainty and calculability outside the juridical
rule, these clauses render all juridical concepts indeterminate. “In this sense,”
Schmitt writes, with unwittingly Kafkaesque accents,
today there are now only ‘indeterminate’ juridical concepts. . . . The entire appli-
cation of law thus lies between Scylla and Charybdis. The way forward seems to
condemn us to a shoreless sea and to move us ever farther from the firm ground
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of juridical certainty and adherence to the law, which at the same time is still the
ground of the judges’ independence. Yet the way backward, which leads toward
the formalistic superstition of law which was recognized as senseless and super-
seded long ago, is not worthy of consideration. (Ibid., pp. 43–44)
A concept such as the National Socialist notion of race (or, in the words of
Schmitt, of “equality of stock”) functions as a general clause (analogous to “state
of danger” or to “good morals”) that does not refer to any situation of external
fact but instead realizes an immediate coincidence of fact and law. The judge, the
civil servant, or whoever else has to reckon with such a notion no longer orients
himself according to a rule or a situation of fact. Binding himself solely to his
own community of race with the German people and the Führer, such a person
moves in a zone in which the distinction between life and politics, between ques-
tions of fact and questions of law, has literally no more meaning.
7.5. Only from this perspective does the National Socialist theory that posits
the immediate and intrinsically perfect source of law in the word of the Führer
acquire its full significance. Just as the word of the Führer is not a factual sit-
uation that is then transformed into a rule, but is rather itself rule insofar as
it is living voice, so the biopolitical body (in its twofold appearance as Jewish
body and German body, as life unworthy of being lived and as full life) is not
an inert biological presupposition to which the rule refers, but at once rule and
criterion of its own application, a juridical rule that decides the fact that decides
on its application.
The radical novelty implicit in this conception has not been sufficiently no-
ticed by historians of law. Not only is the law issued by the Führer definable
neither as rule nor as exception and neither as law nor as fact. There is more: in
this law, the formation of a rule [ normazione] and the execution of a rule—the production of law and its application—are no longer distinguishable moments.
(Benjamin understood this when he projected the Schmittian theory of sover-
eignty onto the baroque monarch, in whom “the gesture of execution” becomes
constitutive and who, having to decide on the exception, is caught in the im-
possibility of making a decision [ Ursprung, pp. 249–50].) The Führer is truly, according to the Pythagorean definition of the sovereign, a nomos empsuchon, a living law (Svenbro, Phrasikleia, p. 149). (This is why the separation of powers that characterizes the liberal-democratic State loses its meaning here, even if it
remains formally in effect. Hence the difficulty of judging according to normal
juridical criteria when judging those officials who, like Adolf Eichmann, did
nothing other than execute the word of the Führer as law.)
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This is the ultimate meaning of the Schmittian thesis that the principle of
Führung is “a concept of the immediate present and of real presence” (“Staat,”
p. 42). And this is why Schmitt can affirm, without contradiction: “It is general
knowledge among the contemporary German political generation that precisely
the decision concerning whether a fact or a kind of thing is apolitical is a spe-
cifically political decision” (ibid., p. 17). Politics is now literally the decision
concerning the unpolitical (that is, concerning bare life).
The camp is the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact
and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly
decides between them. What confronts the guard or the camp official is not an ex-
trajuridical fact (an individual biologically belonging to the Jewish race) to which
he must apply the discrimination of the National Socialist rule. On the contrary,
every gesture, every event in the camp, from the most ordinary to the most excep-
tional, enacts the decision on bare life by which the German biopolitical body is
made actual. The separation of the Jewish body is the immediate production of
the specifically German body, just as its production is the application of the rule.
7.6. If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization
of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare
life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must
admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such
a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed
there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. The stadium in
Bari into which the Italian police in 1991 provisionally herded all illegal Albanian
immigrants before sending them back to their country, the winter cycle- racing
track in which the Vichy authorities gathered the Jews before consigning them
to the Germans, the Konzentrationslager für Aüslander in Cottbus-Sielow in
which the Weimar government gathered Jewish refugees from the East, or the
zones d’attentes in French international air ports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained will then all equally be camps. In all these cases, an
apparently innocuous space (for example, the Hôtel Arcades in Roissy) actually
delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which
whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility
and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign
(for example, in
the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d’attente before the intervention of the judicial authority).
7.7. In this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event
that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is produced at
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the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was
founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and
a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscrip-
tion of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides
to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks.
If the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three ele-
ments land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced not in the two aspects that constituted it according to Schmitt (localization, Ortung, and order, Ordnung), but rather at the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth that thus becomes nation) within the two of them. Something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and
the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order—or,
rather, the sign of the system’s inability to function without being transformed
into a lethal machine. It is significant that the camps appear together with new
laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens—not only the Nurem-
berg laws on citizenship in the Reich but also the laws on denationalization
promulgated by almost all European states, including France, between 1915 and
1933. The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of
the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement
inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that
order. The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new
fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. To an order without localization (the state of exception, in which law is suspended) there
now corresponds a localization without order (the camp as permanent space
of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical
rules in a determinate space, but instead contains at its very center a dislocating
localization that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken. The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of
the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we
must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities. The camp is the fourth, inseparable
element that has now added itself to—and so broken—the old trinity composed
of the state, the nation (birth), and land.
From this perspective, the camps have, in a certain sense, reappeared in an
even more extreme form in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. What is hap-
pening there is by no means, as interested observers have been quick to declare,
a redefinition of the old political system according to new ethnic and territorial
arrangements, which is to say, a simple repetition of processes that led to the
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constitution of the European nation-states. At issue in the former Yugoslavia is,
rather, an incurable rupture of the old nomos and a dislocation of populations
and human lives along entirely new lines of flight. Hence the decisive impor-
tance of ethnic rape camps. If the Nazis never thought of effecting the Final
Solution by making Jewish women pregnant, it is because the principle of birth
that assured the inscription of life in the order of the nation-state was still—if in
a profoundly transformed sense—in operation. This principle has now entered
into a process of decay and dislocation. It is becoming increasingly impossible
for it to function, and we must expect not only new camps but also always new
and more lunatic regulative definitions of the inscription of life in the city. The
camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new bio-
political nomos of the planet.
א Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term “people” must begin
with the singular fact that in modern European languages, “people” also always indicates
the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive
political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.
In common speech as in political parlance, the Italian popolo, the French peuple,
the Spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and late Latin populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in “the Italian people” or “the people’s judge”) and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione popolare, front populaire) .
Even the English word “people,” which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves
the sense of “ordinary people” in contrast to the rich and the nobility. In the American
Constitution one thus reads, without any distinction, “We the people of the United
States.” Yet when Lincoln invokes a “Government of the people, by the people, for the
people” in the Gettysburg Address, the repetition implicitly opposes the first “people” to another “people.” Just how essential this ambiguity was even during the French Revolution (that is, at precisely the point at which claims were made for the principle of popular sovereignty) is shown by the decisive role played by compassion for the people understood
as an excluded class. Arendt noted that “the very definition of the word was born out
of compassion, and the term became the equivalent for misfortune and unhappiness—
le peuple, les malheureux m’applaudissent, as Robespierre was wont to say; le peuple toujours malheureux, as even Sieyès, one of the least sentimental and most sober figures of the Revolution, would put it” ( On Revolution, p. 70). But in the chapter of Bodin’s Republic in which democracy or the état populaire is defined, the concept is already double: as the titular holder of sovereignty, the peuple en corps is contrasted with the menu peuple, whom wisdom counsels excluding from political power.
Such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect
an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept “people” in Western
politics. It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dia-
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lectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People
as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary
multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that
claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve—court of miracles or camp—of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. In this sense, a
single and compact referent for the term “people” simply does not exist anywhere: like
many fundamental political concepts (similar, in this respect, to the Urworte of Abel and Freud or to L. Dumont’s hierarchical relations),
“people” is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes. But this also means that
the constitution of the human species in a political body passes through a fundamental
division and that in the concept “people” we can easily recognize the categorial pairs that we have seen to define the original political structure: bare life (people) and political existence (People), exclusion and inclusion, zoē and bios. The “people” thus always already carries the fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself. It is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part and what cannot belong to the set in which it is always already included. Hence the contradictions and aporias to which it gives rise every time
that it is evoked and put into play on the political scene. It is what always already is and yet must, nevertheless, be realized; it is the pure source of every identity but must, however, continually be redefined and purified through exclusion, language, blood, and
land. Or, at the opposite pole, the “people” is what is by essence lacking to itself and that whose realization therefore coincides with its own abolition; it is what must, together
with its opposite, negate itself in order to be (hence the specific aporias of the workers’
movement, turned toward the people and, at the same time, toward its abolition). At
times the bloody flag of reaction and the uncertain insignia of revolutions and popular
fronts, the people always contains a division more originary than that of friend-enemy,
an incessant civil war that divides it more radically than every conflict and, at the same time, keeps it united and constitutes it more securely than any identity. When one looks
closely, even what Marx called “class conflict,” which occupies such a central place in his thought—though it remains substantially undefined—is nothing other than the civil war
that divides every people and that will come to an end only when, in the classless society or the messianic kingdom, People and people will coincide and there will no longer be,
strictly speaking, any people.
If this is true, if the people necessarily contains the fundamental biopolitical fracture
within itself, then it will be possible to read certain decisive pages of the history of our century in a new way. For if the struggle between the two “peoples” was certainly always under way, in our time it has experienced a final, paroxysmal acceleration. In Rome, the internal division of the people was juridically sanctioned by the clear division between populus and plebs, each of which had its own institutions and magistrates, just as in the Middle Ages the distinction between the popolo minuto and the popolo grasso* corresponded to a precise
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