Spaciocide, Hanafi
Hanafi S., "Spaciocide",City of Collision, Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism, Birkhäuser, Basel, Boston, Berlin, pp.92-101
p.95
Colonial Bio-power, Bare life, and the state of exception
How did spaciocide become possible in the Palestinian occupied territories? The sovereign power, according to Giorgio Agamben, routinely distinguishes between those who are to be admitted into “political life” and those who are the excluded from it as the mute bearers of “bare life”. The process he describes is one in which people and bodies are categorized in order to manage, control, and monitor them, reducing them to a life which is bare, i.e. to mere “vegetative” beings, apart from the social, political, and historical attributes that constitute them as individual subjects. And the task at hand is the identification of mechanisms through which the state is able to insert into citizen/colonized bodies as a measure or sovereign power, enacting specific forms of violence by the rule of the exception – through which sovereign power is defined – and turning all life an all political struggles into battles, once, over bare life. Such forms of sovereignty can be found in the way colonial powers manage bodies according to colonial and humanitarian categories.
Developing Michel Foucault’s exploration of biopower, Giorgio Agamben demonstrate how sovereignty carries with it a “power over life” by the rule of exception, i.e. being above the law- as it constituting force- but also safeguarding its application. Agamben sees two models of power a juridical one – focused on the problem of the legitimacy of Western power (the problem of sovereignty), a none juridical one – centred around the problem of the effectiveness of Western power. These two models meet in the dimension of exception. The sovereign, according to Carl Schmitt, is the one who can proclaim the state of exception; this person is not characterized by the order that she or he institutes, but by the suspension of this order. This temporary suspension becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabitant by the naked life (of people without political right) that cannot be inscribed into the order. The sovereign has the right to suspend the validity of law, a right is, of course, not inscribed in the constitution.
Foucault contested traditional approaches to the problem of power, which had been exclusively on juridical models (“what legitimizes the power?” or institutional models (“what is the state?”). He stresses the passage from a “territorial state” to a “state of its population” and the increased prominence of nation’s health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power. The growing inclusion of man’s natural life into the mechanisms and calculations of power, translated, for the first time in history, into the possibility that power both protects life and authorises its destruction. In this view of sovereignty, population are objective matter to be administered, rather than potential subjects of historical or social action. This does not mean that subjects cannot emerge and resist this sovereignty, but that sovereignty attempts to reduce the subjective trajectories of individuals to bodies.
p.95
Colonial Bio-power, Bare life, and the state of exception
How did spaciocide become possible in the Palestinian occupied territories? The sovereign power, according to Giorgio Agamben, routinely distinguishes between those who are to be admitted into “political life” and those who are the excluded from it as the mute bearers of “bare life”. The process he describes is one in which people and bodies are categorized in order to manage, control, and monitor them, reducing them to a life which is bare, i.e. to mere “vegetative” beings, apart from the social, political, and historical attributes that constitute them as individual subjects. And the task at hand is the identification of mechanisms through which the state is able to insert into citizen/colonized bodies as a measure or sovereign power, enacting specific forms of violence by the rule of the exception – through which sovereign power is defined – and turning all life an all political struggles into battles, once, over bare life. Such forms of sovereignty can be found in the way colonial powers manage bodies according to colonial and humanitarian categories.
Developing Michel Foucault’s exploration of biopower, Giorgio Agamben demonstrate how sovereignty carries with it a “power over life” by the rule of exception, i.e. being above the law- as it constituting force- but also safeguarding its application. Agamben sees two models of power a juridical one – focused on the problem of the legitimacy of Western power (the problem of sovereignty), a none juridical one – centred around the problem of the effectiveness of Western power. These two models meet in the dimension of exception. The sovereign, according to Carl Schmitt, is the one who can proclaim the state of exception; this person is not characterized by the order that she or he institutes, but by the suspension of this order. This temporary suspension becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabitant by the naked life (of people without political right) that cannot be inscribed into the order. The sovereign has the right to suspend the validity of law, a right is, of course, not inscribed in the constitution.
Foucault contested traditional approaches to the problem of power, which had been exclusively on juridical models (“what legitimizes the power?” or institutional models (“what is the state?”). He stresses the passage from a “territorial state” to a “state of its population” and the increased prominence of nation’s health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power. The growing inclusion of man’s natural life into the mechanisms and calculations of power, translated, for the first time in history, into the possibility that power both protects life and authorises its destruction. In this view of sovereignty, population are objective matter to be administered, rather than potential subjects of historical or social action. This does not mean that subjects cannot emerge and resist this sovereignty, but that sovereignty attempts to reduce the subjective trajectories of individuals to bodies.