ABSTRACT. The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agam- ben\u2019s conclusion that the camp has replaced the city as the biopo- litical paradigm of the West is as difficult to digest as it is easy to see how it responds to contemporary political tendencies in the world today. In this introduction to this theme issue on Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp, a detailed exposition, emulating the structure of Agamben\u2019s seminal book Homo Sacer, is conducted, tracing the genealogies of Agamben\u2019s ideas and commenting on his swiftly enhanced importance in the social sci- ences and humanities. The introduction concludes by outlining some possible research fields in human geogrphy where much in- sight could be gained if Agamben\u2019s work is given more detailed consideration.

The seemingly radical notion that it is the camp rather than the city that has become the biopolitical paradigm of the West, as the state of exception tends to become the rule, is dif\ufb01cult to digest. Nev- ertheless, a plethora of contemporary societal ten- dencies resonates ominously well with the alarm- ing conclusions that may be drawn from Giorgio Agamben\u2019s work on homo sacer, the displacement and desubjecti\ufb01cation of more and more human be- ings in the world today.

On a world political scale, the State of Emergen- cy declared by the post-11 September political leadership of the Bush/Cheney and Blair adminis- trations (Armitage, 2002; Norris, 2005) has initiat- ed inter/national measures that have begun to un- ravel repellent geopolitical consequences such as the global war prison implemented to \ufb01ght the \u2018war on terror\u2019 (Gregory, 2006). The territorial states of the \u2018West\u2019, generally regarded in political theory as havens of human rights and enlightened democracy (Slater, 2004), have increasingly implemented harsher immigration and asylum policies (Papas-

tergiadis, 2006). An innocent human is shot dead in the head by the police in the London Underground with the comment \u2018we are sorry, it was a mistake, but we are prepared to do it again\u2019 (Minca, 2006a).

The creation of homo sacer and the state of ex- ception are not twenty-\ufb01rst-Century phenomena (Landzelius, 2006), even though the Guant\u00e1namo Bay camp is a painfully singular example. Never- theless, as a result of the second military campaign against Iraq (and Afghanistan before that) by the George Bush Junior administration, world political development has been such that there has been a \ufb02urry of interest in Agamben\u2019s writings within the social sciences and humanities.1 Claudio Minca ar- gues that \u2018Guant\u00e1namo is the archetype of the spac- es of exception produced by contemporary geopol- itics\u2019, thus indicating the return of the camp (Minca, 2005, p. 406). When the atrocities in former Yugo- slavia could be discursively constructed as \u2018taking place\u2019 due to \u2018ancient ethnic hatreds\u2019 in the geopo- litical scripts of the West (\u00d3Tuathail, 1996a), the re- turn of the camp \u2018has been simply metabolized by a signi\ufb01cant part of the electorate in the world\u2019s most important democracy\u2019 (Minca, 2005, p. 405).

de\ufb01antly answered that \u2018it\u2019s philosophy, nothing else but philosophy\u2019 (Wallenstein, 1998, pp. 179\u2013 180). Agamben, on the other hand, searches for the contours of another Europe beyond the present or- ders\u2019 degeneration (Fiskesj\u00f6, 2004) and explicitly relates to contemporary incidents, such as when the Italian police in 1991 herded Albanian immigrants into the stadium in Bari before sending them to Al- bania (Agamben, 1998). But Agamben\u2019s writing is very complex, and one way of trying to do justice to his work is to triangulate renderings and inter- pretations of his main conclusions made by other scholars.2

aphysical and usually regarded as philosophical, it also constitutes a distinct spatial theory of power (Minca, 2006a) that calls for an examination and rereading of the political and the spatial, and the spatial logic of the camp (Diken and Laustsen, 2006a). Agamben\u2019s spatial theory of power, sover- eignty and displacement also invokes a scrutiniza- tion of traditional political geographical theories about inclusion and exclusion, belonging and insu- larity, as well as established imaginations about thematically speci\ufb01c political places such as hu- manitarian camps (Elden, 2006).

The section that follows includes a brief intro- duction to Giorgio Agamben\u2019s biography and work on language and aesthetics, followed by a more de- tailed exposition of his work on sovereignty,homo

vided in three subsections, namely: abandonment as the original political relation; the production of naked life as the fundamental activity of sovereign power; and the camp as contemporary biopolitical paradigm. In the fourth section of this introduction, Agamben\u2019s increased importance in the social sci- ences and humanities is commented on, together with a presentation of some of the critique that has been directed towards Agamben\u2019s work. In the \ufb01fth section, I hint at how Agamben\u2019s work onhomo

man geography, focusing on the research \ufb01elds of critical geopolitics, mobility, actor network theory and recent work on relational space. Finally, the pa- pers in this theme issue are presented.

The philosophy of Agamben is unsystematic or un- classi\ufb01able in the sense that it does not reside in a speci\ufb01c system of thought or philosophical school, which means that simply regarding his work as an

(Iversen et al., 2003; Bolt and Pedersen, 2005). Giorgio Agamben was born in Rome in 1942. In 1965, he wrote a doctoral thesis in law and philoso- phy on the political thought of the French philoso- pher and Marxist activist Simone Weil. On comple- tion of his law studies, however, Agamben changed direction after having met some writers, and instead became a \u2018free writer\u2019 (Bolt, 2003). He participated in Martin Heidegger\u2019s seminars on Heraclitus and Hegel in 1966 and 1968 (Mills, 2006), and became in\ufb02uenced by the German philosopher.

As a philosopher and philologist, Agamben has been on the scene since the late 1970s, although the majority of his work has only been available in English since the early 1990s (Bos, 2005). In his earlier work he focused on aesthetics and literature (Mesnard, 2004) and language and metaphysics (Mills, 2006). In The Idea of Prose (Agamben, 1995), for instance, he discusses the relationship between poetry and philosophy, likewise inLan-

presents a fundamental objection to Derrida\u2019s the- sis on deconstruction (Thurschwell, 2005). In his \ufb01rst major contribution to the philosophy of aes- thetics,Stanzas (Agamben, 1993a), which he ded- icated to Heidegger, he deals with questions of lan- guage and phantasm, and the self and language (Bartoloni, 2004). The experience of language is also elaborated upon in Infancy and History (Ag- amben, 1993b). Questions regarding language and literature (Agamben, 1999a, 1999b) and aesthetic theory (Agamben, 1999c) have also been tackled in later works.

Living in Paris, Agamben was part of the philo- sophical intelligentsia circle of friends and ac- quaintances that consisted of Jacques Derrida, Jean- Luc Nancy, F\u00e9lix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and per- haps especially Guy Debord. He was, however, also a member of the diaspora community of Italian po- litical philosophers that included Toni Negri and Paolo Virno. Like the rest of his generation of Ital- ian philosophers, his work (and life) became both characterized and influenced by a societal reality filled with deep and violent antagonism (Bolt, 2003), and, from the beginning of the 1990s, a turn in Agamben\u2019s authorship may be observed in which political theory becomes pivotal (Franchi, 2004; Wallenstein, 2005). In a sense his first \u2018political\u2019 book, The Coming Community (Agamben, 1993c), symbolizes a transitory stage between his literary, philosophical books and the political nature of his work, as the book gives philosophical and literary examples of communities based on nothing else but openness (Bolt, 2003; Bolt and Pedersen, 2005).

There is however no break with his earlier pro- ductions. For instance, Infancy and History (Agam- ben, 1993b) contains seminal concerns about the capture of life and preoccupations that eventually evolve in generalized figures such as The musel-

(Agamben, 1991) investigates the metaphysical connection between human mortality and a capac- ity for language (Norris, 2005). From the middle of the 1990s and onwards, Agamben\u2019s contribution to

political theory should rather be considered as an enquiry into aesthetics, history and language, since his political philosophy fits seamlessly with his oth- er philosophy (Thurschwell, 2005).

Agamben\u2019s texts are usually complex, dense, multi-layered and written in a continental philo- sophical, post-foundational tradition.3 One can read and interpret Agamben in different ways, so it is to be expected that an interpretive dialogue will take place within the social sciences and human geography during the coming years. In this sense, Agamben\u2019s work is becoming a signi\ufb01cant source in a multitude of contexts (e.g. readers, introducto- ry texts, key thinker compilations, essential works, critical appraisals) in much the same way as other central thinkers in philosophy and the social sci- ences such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells.

A linear reading of Agamben is only the \ufb01rst step in an interpretation of his work, however. For in- stance, Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998) is written in an episodic mode, where the relationships between the different sections are not always evident (Fitz- patrick, 2005). According to Thomas Wall, each section of Agamben\u2019s texts should be read as being superimposed one upon the other, as if they simul- taneously occupied the same space (Wall, 1999, p. 121).4 Agamben\u2019s political philosophy is eclectic (Sinnerbrink, 2005; Vogt, 2005), in the word\u2019s most positive sense. He picks the most useful interpreta- tions and conclusions from other philosophical and social works and assembles them into a meaningful whole (on eclecticism, see Kelley, 2001; Tellings, 2001).

So far Agamben\u2019s Homo Sacer project includes three books: Part I being Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998), Part II: I State of Exception (Agamben, 2005a), and Part III Remnants of Auschwitz (Ag- amben, 2002a). Part II: II has not yet been pub- lished.5In addition, in Means Without End (Agam- ben, 2000), several of the articles are outlines of the central parts of Homo Sacer and Remnants of

dealt with in a somewhat more rudimentary and ac- cessible way than in Homo Sacer. In this exposition I focus on the \ufb01rst volume and follow the book\u2019s structure: The Logic of Sovereignty, Homo Sacer andThe Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the

In Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben tells a story of the indifferentiability of relationships: between law and life (Kieslow, 2005) and between \u2018humans\u2019 and \u2018politics\u2019 (Spinks, 2001). His ambition is to reveal the true and original nature of the political realm through a three-faceted account of the politics of sovereignty in the West (Edkins, 2000; Hussain and Ptacek, 2000;): literary-historical (Part 1), mythi- cal (Part 2) and \u2018one as brutal as possible\u2019 (Part 3) (Kieslow, 2005).

The literary-historical facet departs from Carl Schmitt\u2019s theory on sovereignty and the exception. For the conservative philosopher Schmitt, the basic principle of politics was the distinction between \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 (Gregory, 2004a) and the \u2018nomos of the earth\u2019 was a spatial ordering, conceptualized on the basis of an \u2018us inside \u2013 them outside\u2019 divide (Diken and Laustsen, 2005a). In Schmitt\u2019s de\ufb01ni- tion of political sovereignty in Political Theology (Schmitt, 1985), the sovereign is whoever can de- cide on the state of exception. Although standing outside the normal juridical order, the sovereign nevertheless belongs to it because he is responsible for deciding whether the normal order should be suspended in toto (Agamben, 2005a). According to Schmitt, the sovereign guarantees the validity of the law by being outside it. In other words, by being the constituting power, the sovereign is outside the constituted power (Wallenstein, 2005). For Agam- ben, the paradox of sovereignty is the fact that the sovereign is simultaneously outside and inside the juridical order. This implies that the power of sov- ereign rulers is not primarily de\ufb01ned by their capa- bility to create, but rather to suspend law and order (Agamben, 1998; Hozic, 2002).

Schmitt\u2019s understanding of the exception is re- lated to a state of emergency in society that endan- gers the state and requires the suspension of the normal order to resolve. However, in Agamben\u2019s exegesis, the notion of the exception moves away to a more original function (Hussain and Ptacek, 2000) in which the exception reveals itself as a kind of exclusion. What is excluded is not absolutely ex- cluded in relation to the sovereign, but is main- tained in relation to the rule of the sovereign in the form of the sovereign\u2019s suspension (Agamben, 1998); that the exception is an inclusive exclusion.