[Muanet] Italian scholar cancels US visit

[Dion Giles]

C'mon, folks -- do find and post relevant stuff.  One doesn't have to agree 
with it, merely to think it's of relevant interest.  Also, it doesn't 
matter if it's in Australian newspapers as not everyone will have read 
it.  And include URLs where possible, please!

Dion Giles

NO TO BIO-POLITICAL TATTOOING
Giorgio Agamben
Le Monde
10 January 2004

Original at
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-348677,0.html

Translation at
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://rezo.net/33303&prev=/search%3Fq%3DLe%2BMonde%2BAgamben%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8

The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the 
United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their 
fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention 
of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to 
cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New York University in March.

I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is, why, in 
spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American colleagues and 
their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once 
necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other 
European intellectuals and teachers.

It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has 
long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only 
that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the 
humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.

The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of 
personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it 
would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the 
so-called democratic states where we live.

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as 
the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control 
that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.

Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the 
usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has 
reached previously unimaginable levels.

All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the 
control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political 
era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the 
progressive animalisation of man which is established through the most 
sophisticated techniques.

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as 
well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute 
towards defining this threshold. The security reasons that are invoked to 
justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with 
it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find 
themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political 
relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has 
anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but 
concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and 
incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.

These technological devices that register and identify naked life 
correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: 
between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a 
body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more 
scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the 
dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, 
which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the 
person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has 
become the dangerous class.

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no 
longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed 
from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not 
historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is 
proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly 
seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and 
registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The 
bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its 
territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept 
later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's 
gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and professor at the University of Venice 
and New York University.