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.At the very least, it makesclear the logic whereby certain subjects in certain circumstances can bedenied access to rights.The Long War has generated many such instances, both domesticand international, where this view of the subject combines with the pos-ture in relation to the law that I described above to justify the abroga-tion of civil and human rights by the U.S.administration.The exampleshardly need to be enumerated at this point, but obviously the penum-bra of this mode of thinking covers Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, blacksites, and extraordinary renditions.Equally, it covers the government sattempts to ignore the conventions of habeas corpus in a number ofterrorist cases, like that of José Padilla; or to reduce the ambit of rightslegislation, as in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui; or to brush asidedomestic constitutional rights by wiretapping domestic phone com-munications.All these highly publicized instances are perhaps just thetip of the iceberg.They depend, at least, on a logic that is theoreticallyextensible such that (a) the requisite decning characteristics of thesubject of value might be met by fewer and fewer subjects, and (b) thecircumstances under which the political can claim isolated autonomyfrom the civic might become more narrowly decned.It would perhaps 102 animalsnot be stretching a point to suggest that the victims of HurricaneKatrina, for example, have learned something about the crst of theseconditions, or that the Long War has proved useful in facilitating thesecond of them.In particular, the Long War has facilitated the e,ective ostracismof whole classes of people from the realm of appropriate subjectivity.Such people are, of course, the enemy, as Bush likes to dub them thejihadists, combatants, and fellow travelers whose status has been decidedin advance of any political and legal proceedings.The enemy, in thisview, has always already been stripped of all rights and can be treated,eventually, as little more than an animal.This reduction to the statusof animal warrants and encourages the kind of unsophisticated treat-ment that the United States has notoriously been doling out.This ani-malistic enemy is the subject of the detention center in GuantánamoBay, and of the prison at Abu Ghraib, and of extraordinary renditions,of course.The extralegal status preassigned to them ensures that, oncecaptured, they can be subjected to whatever forms of treatment the U.S.government feels are appropriate, whether it be torture as such, physi-cal and mental abuse, terror tactics, force-feeding, or cultural and reli-gious humiliation.The point is perhaps illuminated at the very momentin September 2006 when the Bush administration moved a number ofprisoners from the hitherto unacknowledged CIA black sites to thedetention center in Guantánamo.Their removal was loudly accompa-nied by the claim that they were cnally going to be brought to trial.Thatclaim not only drew unwelcome attention to the fact that these prison-ers had spent years in legal limbo, but also underscored the even moreuncomfortable fact that they still had no agreed legal status.The U.S.Supreme Court in the summer of 2006 had already declared the plannedmilitary commissions for Guantánamo prisoners to be unconstitutional,and no other legal mechanism had yet been put into place.The United States has made it clear at the legal level that these sub-jects are not worthy of or appropriate for the legal protections of eitherconstitutional or international law.They are simply evil, literally out-laws.They need not, therefore, be seen as common criminals, or evenultimately as individuals.As Dick Cheney pronounced, they don t de-serve to be treated as criminals.They don t deserve to be treated as a animals 103prisoner of war.They don t deserve the same guarantees and safeguardsthat would be used for an American citizen going through the normaljudicial process (New York Times, November 15, 2001).These subjects, removed from the political and legal realm, are e,ec-tively thrown back to some putative natural state where their sup-posedly inherent evil is their only quality.These are people who, inArendt s terms, have been rendered the savage, animalistic other, notproperly endowed with humanity but only human animality (301).That is how Arendt describes the status of the Jews at the hands ofthe Nazi state.Giorgio Agamben describes it similarly, as the reduc-tion of the human being to the zoe, the animal.Agamben further claimsthat this creature can be dubbed the homo sacer in Roman history, theholy sacriccial subject that can be exterminated by sovereign powerwithout guilt or remorse.For Agamben, the homo sacer is the privilegedcgure of the meeting place between politics and power and the exis-tence of life itself, and that represents the inclusion within the realmof politics of what politics in fact excludes what Marx might have rec-ognized as species being. The cgure of the homo sacer is in that sensea deconstructive commutational device by which Agamben wishes tomark the uneasy boundaries between the realms of the political andthe civic.The notion, however, that the subject legally and politically reducedin this way to an animalistic status is somehow held as a ritualized andsacralized subject seems to me a dubious conclusion in the current con-juncture or indeed within the specicc history of America altogether.That is, throughout the history of the republic, the proper place of theoutlaw, precisely, has been the civic realm, where the correct mode ofdealing with that cgure has been the principle of revenge and punish-ment meted out by civil society.One of the specicc ideological featuresof American life has chronically been the application of extralegal sanc-tions in the civic realm, and in a sense the boundaries between the civicand the political have been consistently solid in a way that Agamben sschema would not be able to recognize.This all takes place in the arenaof the natural where the natural nonpolitical outlaw subject is con-fronted by the principles of natural law and justice [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.At the very least, it makesclear the logic whereby certain subjects in certain circumstances can bedenied access to rights.The Long War has generated many such instances, both domesticand international, where this view of the subject combines with the pos-ture in relation to the law that I described above to justify the abroga-tion of civil and human rights by the U.S.administration.The exampleshardly need to be enumerated at this point, but obviously the penum-bra of this mode of thinking covers Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, blacksites, and extraordinary renditions.Equally, it covers the government sattempts to ignore the conventions of habeas corpus in a number ofterrorist cases, like that of José Padilla; or to reduce the ambit of rightslegislation, as in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui; or to brush asidedomestic constitutional rights by wiretapping domestic phone com-munications.All these highly publicized instances are perhaps just thetip of the iceberg.They depend, at least, on a logic that is theoreticallyextensible such that (a) the requisite decning characteristics of thesubject of value might be met by fewer and fewer subjects, and (b) thecircumstances under which the political can claim isolated autonomyfrom the civic might become more narrowly decned.It would perhaps 102 animalsnot be stretching a point to suggest that the victims of HurricaneKatrina, for example, have learned something about the crst of theseconditions, or that the Long War has proved useful in facilitating thesecond of them.In particular, the Long War has facilitated the e,ective ostracismof whole classes of people from the realm of appropriate subjectivity.Such people are, of course, the enemy, as Bush likes to dub them thejihadists, combatants, and fellow travelers whose status has been decidedin advance of any political and legal proceedings.The enemy, in thisview, has always already been stripped of all rights and can be treated,eventually, as little more than an animal.This reduction to the statusof animal warrants and encourages the kind of unsophisticated treat-ment that the United States has notoriously been doling out.This ani-malistic enemy is the subject of the detention center in GuantánamoBay, and of the prison at Abu Ghraib, and of extraordinary renditions,of course.The extralegal status preassigned to them ensures that, oncecaptured, they can be subjected to whatever forms of treatment the U.S.government feels are appropriate, whether it be torture as such, physi-cal and mental abuse, terror tactics, force-feeding, or cultural and reli-gious humiliation.The point is perhaps illuminated at the very momentin September 2006 when the Bush administration moved a number ofprisoners from the hitherto unacknowledged CIA black sites to thedetention center in Guantánamo.Their removal was loudly accompa-nied by the claim that they were cnally going to be brought to trial.Thatclaim not only drew unwelcome attention to the fact that these prison-ers had spent years in legal limbo, but also underscored the even moreuncomfortable fact that they still had no agreed legal status.The U.S.Supreme Court in the summer of 2006 had already declared the plannedmilitary commissions for Guantánamo prisoners to be unconstitutional,and no other legal mechanism had yet been put into place.The United States has made it clear at the legal level that these sub-jects are not worthy of or appropriate for the legal protections of eitherconstitutional or international law.They are simply evil, literally out-laws.They need not, therefore, be seen as common criminals, or evenultimately as individuals.As Dick Cheney pronounced, they don t de-serve to be treated as criminals.They don t deserve to be treated as a animals 103prisoner of war.They don t deserve the same guarantees and safeguardsthat would be used for an American citizen going through the normaljudicial process (New York Times, November 15, 2001).These subjects, removed from the political and legal realm, are e,ec-tively thrown back to some putative natural state where their sup-posedly inherent evil is their only quality.These are people who, inArendt s terms, have been rendered the savage, animalistic other, notproperly endowed with humanity but only human animality (301).That is how Arendt describes the status of the Jews at the hands ofthe Nazi state.Giorgio Agamben describes it similarly, as the reduc-tion of the human being to the zoe, the animal.Agamben further claimsthat this creature can be dubbed the homo sacer in Roman history, theholy sacriccial subject that can be exterminated by sovereign powerwithout guilt or remorse.For Agamben, the homo sacer is the privilegedcgure of the meeting place between politics and power and the exis-tence of life itself, and that represents the inclusion within the realmof politics of what politics in fact excludes what Marx might have rec-ognized as species being. The cgure of the homo sacer is in that sensea deconstructive commutational device by which Agamben wishes tomark the uneasy boundaries between the realms of the political andthe civic.The notion, however, that the subject legally and politically reducedin this way to an animalistic status is somehow held as a ritualized andsacralized subject seems to me a dubious conclusion in the current con-juncture or indeed within the specicc history of America altogether.That is, throughout the history of the republic, the proper place of theoutlaw, precisely, has been the civic realm, where the correct mode ofdealing with that cgure has been the principle of revenge and punish-ment meted out by civil society.One of the specicc ideological featuresof American life has chronically been the application of extralegal sanc-tions in the civic realm, and in a sense the boundaries between the civicand the political have been consistently solid in a way that Agamben sschema would not be able to recognize.This all takes place in the arenaof the natural where the natural nonpolitical outlaw subject is con-fronted by the principles of natural law and justice [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]