Agamben, Giorgio (1941–)

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most prominent Italian philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His oeuvre has been particularly influential for those dealing with questions of law, modern citizenship, subjectivity, power, and community. While Agamben has conducted a wide range of philosophical inquiries, his writing generally hones in on contemporary issues of ethics and biopower (a form of power through which political entities articulate their subjects as populations and manage them through control over life). Within these issues, Agamben portrays the modern world as strongly shaped by the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust as well as characterized by the large number of people who exist in ambiguous relationships to states, such as Europe's large number of international sans-papiers (people without legal documents), those across the world living in refugee camps, or those excluded from civic life in their countries of origin. Such a vision reveals a fundamental disjuncture between existing as what Agamben labels homo sacer (“bare life”) versus living life as a fully endowed political subject. For Agamben, and the geographers influenced by his work, the key questions of politics center on controlling the relations of power that coalesce to uphold or break down this distinction, as well as how those relations of power gain spatial expression in the world.

Agamben often identifies the camp (as in the Nazi concentration camps) as the space most evident of the contemporary world's manifestation of ethics and biopower. He uses the camp as a metaphor for and an example of an actually existing space within the modern world to show how spaces of exclusion from the law create political subjects who exist merely as bare life and who can then become the legitimate outlets for state-sponsored violence—a space beyond the reach of ethics. Agamben repeatedly argues that the production of this space outside the law is a key component of the state's capacity to uphold its power and employ tactics of biopolitics. Agamben posits that such spaces are historically generated during periods of crisis and emergency and represent a movement away from the normal functions of the political body. However, Agamben shows how the modern state normalizes this state of emergency so that such spaces become indistinguishable from spaces of the law. He further argues that the basis of sovereign power in the modern world depends on the capacity to produce and maintain an indistinguishable relationship between spaces inside the law (inhabited by those granted political life) and those outside the law (inhabited by those banned from political life and thrust into bare life). This indistinctness structures the relations between those who can no longer clearly recognize their position as being within or outside the camp. From this, ethics breaks down into relations of violence as biological, not political, creatures encounter each other. In short, Agamben portrays a world in which the camp is the norm, not the exception, and a space inherent to and inside the space of the law, not outside it.

Agamben's work is of significance to geographers in three primary ways. First, Agamben's investigations of homo sacer as a condition of modern political subjectivity have allowed geographers to investigate the spaces in which bare life is cultivated, maintained, and resisted through biopower. This approach has allowed geographers to locate places such as the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or international refugee camps within a map of modern political life and explain them not as spaces outside the normal functions of the law but as central to legitimated state-space. The geographies of homo sacer extend political geographers’ capacity to explain the ways [Page 27]in which law and space come together to produce political subjects in the world, political subjects who seem to exist outside the law because of their exposure to seemingly illegitimate and arbitrary violence. Geographers, guided by Agamben, have been able to give a logic to these spaces.

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