Athena Athanasiou Technologies of Humanness Aporias of Biopolitics and The Cut Body of Humanity 1

Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut
Body of Humanity
Athanasiou, Athena.
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 14,

Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 125-162 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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athena athanasiou
Technologies of Humanness,
Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity
What is nazism if not also the worst Today politics knows no value (and,
moment in the history of technology? consequently, no nonvalue) other
“Worst” can serve as a rhetorical quali- than life, and until the contradictions
fication of “moment,” which may not be that this fact implies are dissolved,
restricted or an indication of closure. Nazism and fascism—which trans-
The worst moment in the history of formed the decision on bare life into
technology may not have an off switch, the supreme political principle—
but only a modality of being on. will remain stubbornly with us.
—Ronell 16 —Agamben, Homo Sacer 10
Technologies of the Human

at the Limit of Representation
H ow does one reckon the technologies of the human? But

there is no such thing as the human. Instead, there is only the dizzying
multiplicity of the cut human, the human body as interminably cut, frac-
tured. In the clefts of history and at the limits of representation, the cut
body of humanity tells the story of the indeterminability that haunts the
dreams and nightmares of the “fully there.”
In this essay, my inquiry concerns technology and the human,
though not technologies that humans use, invent, invoke, hail, or deploy
in order to overcome the limitations or shortcomings tied to the human
body and its nature. I propose, rather, to set out in the opposite direction;
I propose a meditation on the technologies that define, circumscribe,
enact, constitute, and reconstitute the very intelligibility of that which is
human. This will, I hope, lead us to look at technology not as an organic
instrumental totality of fulfillment or alienation, but rather as a condi-
tion of the human and the fractionings that form the scarred horizon
of its cultural signification. In its multiple registers of ontological and
Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14 :1
126 Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity
topological genealogy, namely, the demand for the genesis of the new, the
promise of eternally renewing metamorphosis, the lingering specter of
the catastrophic eschaton, or the always emerging monstrous contamina-
tion, technology is related to birth and death, the intercorporeal tension
between life and death, with reproducibility as a pulsation animating its
workings and unworkings. What follows, then, is a reflection on the ways
in which “technology” and the “human” determine and in-determine each
other as conditions of possibility in the disciplinary realm of biopolitics,
where the very intelligibility of life/non-life, as well as body/non-body, is
supposedly managed in late modernity.
What will centrally concern me here is the aporia at the heart
of technomediated representation, this supplement of presence ( parousia)
and authority (exousia) that stands in for the body in the absence (apou-
sia) of the body. In the proper sense of the word, if such a thing exists,
representation is modeled on the vestigial fluctuations of essence (ousia)
between presence and absence, rupture and substitution. In the wake
of the endless finitude of the human that exceeds any representational
appropriation in the age of political mass death, representation assumes
a special connection to the figure of death and thus implicates a rhetoric
of limits, an exigency of terminal symptoms.
I attempt to read the contours, some of the limits and intersec-
tions, of representation, sovereignty, technology, annihilation, and the
human in the context of the return, or perhaps persistence, of biopolitical
sovereignty in the contemporary world. Inevitably, then, this essay touches
not only upon the insurmountable aporetic rifts that define the splits of the
human in relation to the Other body (in particular, the persecuted, injured,
or slain body) and the limits of human relation to the death of the Other,
but also upon the relation of such splits and limits to language, in their
very being-in-language. I take my cue from Judith Butler’s significant for-
mulation of the inevitable co-implication—“chiasmic relation”—between
language and the body:
The body is given through language but is not, for that reason,
reducible to language. The language through which the body
emerges helps to form and establish that body in its knowability,
but the language that forms the body does not fully or exclusively
form it. (“How Can I Deny” 257)
To bring into question the technologies through which the bio-

political body is fabricated in late modernity entails bringing into question
d i f f e r e n c e s 127
the technologies through which bodily entanglement among—and dis-

entanglement from—the singularities of the various Others—including,
ultimately, our Other selves—is effected in discourse. This is also, I argue,
to pose the question of deconstruction. To be “touched by deconstruction,”
in what might be an utterly improper sense of the term, is to venture
to touch the pulsations of the limit, the haptic shifter (without proper
home and legitimate paternity) that the limit of signification is. As Jean-
Luc Nancy puts it: “Writing, reading: matters of tact” (24). Our critical
task entails tracing the erotic and pained palpability of what cannot be
said and what should be said that ineluctably exposes the problematic of
the articulation of language and silence, an articulation without origin,
transparency, or guaranteed purity. A taut articulation, indeed, since all
constituent parties—language, silence, muteness, cry, and the long chain
of their in-between multiple and incomplete tonalities—remain untotaliz-
able and other to themselves, out of sight, out of touch. It is the dilemma
or double bind of undertaking to put the undecidability and elusiveness of
signification in touch with political responsiveness, in shifting contexts
of social suffering and affliction, political death and displacement, where
life reaches its limit. Of course, it is the limit that creates the event of life,
that is the necessary condition for the experience of life.
My theme here is the political engagement with the technoper-
formativity of biopolitics in the age of genocide and in light of what Giorgio
Agamben has called the Nomos of modernity—the concentration camp
and its spectral echoes in Europe and the Balkans. Martin Heidegger’s
critique of technology will provide the basis on which to address and
develop my questions: What happens to the language of representation
when it encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken, abandoned,
dismembered human corporeality onto the body of the text? How does
unrepresentability organize the representable? I attempt to trace the tech-
noperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits, designated
as they are by the palpable and yet ineffable—at once all too represented
and radically unrepresentable—corporeality of deported, tortured, raped,
violated, detained, dismembered, quarantined, annihilated, and surviving
bodies. It is on the ethicopolitical force of such engagement that rests the
responsibility to face up to the exigency of thinking and responding, even
if there can be no question of knowing what it means, even if one cannot
sense what it would be like to suffer the pain of the marked Other as s/he
stands before the totalizing nomos of the power over naked life and living
death, before biopolitical sovereignty and its demand for a uniform and
unified body politic. This act of responding, mediated as it may be by the

unfixable semantic and performative forces of language, exceeds the for-
mal structure of mere naming or re-membering. It even exceeds bearing
witness. It is, above all, a movement of imagining the necessary possibility
of shifting, evading, or disrupting this limitation, this irreparable limit
to othering the self and selfing the other; a movement of reckoning with
the radical incalculability of the possibility of perverting the limits of this
impasse, even though—or rather, because—there can be no question of
fully overcoming it; and even though—or rather, because—language will
always fail us.
The coercive monologism of an all-encompassing body politic
that brings the body into History by means of the hegemonic codes and rec-
ognizable splits of gender, sex, and race, the Ur-media of representation,
is perturbed by the quivering humanity of the barely living—in pain and
in pleasure—bodies resisting, differing, sexing, living, aging, and dying,
touched and touching otherwise, elsewhere. The coming politics of this
“new body of humanity,” to borrow Agamben’s phrase,1 haunts and exceeds
the ontology of representable institutional conditions of social belonging,
the apparatuses of capturing, counting, measuring, naming, recording,
appropriating, and hailing that the medical, legal, and demographic Law
establish in the name of the social bond.
The problem, then, remains how to seek out the impossible and
yet necessary possibilities: how to think representation (cultural, political,
textual) without the ontological presuppositions of authoritarian self-pres-
ence; how to think the body beyond the “ontic,” beyond the representa-
tional presuppositions of the birth to presence; how to think the political
beyond sovereignty; and, finally, how to think the language of the political
beyond denomination. Facing this multifaceted problem entails taking the
risk of facing and witnessing the bodily self and human sociality in ways
not assimilated or submitted to the representational epistemes required
by the metaphysics of presence—in spite of and yet with(in) Heidegger’s
engagement with technology, language, and metaphysics. In what respect
does the venture into that risk involve us in a possibility of theorizing the
limit, or theorizing at the limit?
In the Realm of the Camp:

Reading Heidegger’s Questioning
of Technology Politically
As a guiding thought experiment for the problematic in ques-

tion, I have taken Heidegger’s aphorism in the 1953 lecture “The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology”: “The essence of technology is nothing
technological.” Heidegger has defined his notion of “essence” as Wesen in
Introduction to Metaphysics, but also in On the Way to Language. Rather
than eternal and universal permanence, “essence” has for Heidegger the
temporality of “enduring” in coming to presence within the framework
of an epochal historicity (i.e., the modern epoch): “As the essencing of
technology, Enframing is that which endures” (“Question” 31). Taking
Heidegger’s diacritic definition seriously, it is impossible not to think about
that which in technology opens up to the political. My ensuing discussion
of the political question of the relationship between technologies of life
and technologies of sovereignty seeks to further such thinking. In order
to allow the question of the interrelations of language, representation,
and modern biopolitics, I discuss modern Western philosophy’s relation
to technological reason in the light of annihilation.
The task for political thinking, I suggest, is to bring this writ-
ing back to the critique of the Western metaphysical tradition as well
as to the archive of future radical rearticulations of such critique. More
important for our purposes is to try to read the political specificity of
Heidegger’s thought and to transgress its internal limits in ways that would
point toward a future antifascist ethics and politics of responsiveness and
responsibility that would block the premises of subjection and overcome
the foreclosure of Western political ontologies and technologies of repre-
sentation. (Beyond representation, says Heidegger, lie thinking and reflec-
tion.) Such performative reading, such political appropriation—beyond
faith or unfaith—would entail a diffusion of the contingency of the autho-
rial proper name and signature. As Avital Ronell puts it:
To the extent that we continue to be haunted by National Social-

ism and are threatened by its return from the future, it seems
necessary to open the question of politics beyond a proper name
that would displace thinking to a subjective contingency. I am
less curious about Mr. Heidegger’s fantasy of becoming the
Führer’s Führer—he momentarily wanted to teach and inflect
“destiny”—than compelled to recognize in Heidegger’s thinking
the ineluctable signaling of democracy’s demise. Heidegger

failed democracy (the way a teacher fails a class, but also the
way one fails a task, an Aufgabe)
e) on the grounds of technology.
(7–8)
In Heidegger, being and technology are interrelated in a critique of meta-

physics, representational thinking, and modernity. The focus of our dis-
cussion is the site of the political and the biopolitical within Heidegger’s
writing on the extermination camp à propos of his delving into the ques-
tion of technology. 2
The biopolitical technology of the concentration camp has been
widely construed and represented as defining the constantly recast and
renegotiated limit of philosophical as well as poetic reflexivity, the limit
of discourse, of representation, of poetry, of imagination, of humanness,
and of the Enlightenment promise. The camp has rightly been seen as
the place where the very narrational or testimonial capacity of language
is compromised and where aporias are confronted at several levels. Per-
haps, more accurately, not a moment or a site, but rather the very limit of
these two, and between the two, a zone (“the gray zone,” to borrow Primo
Levi’s phrase) where language is experienced in its most intense and—at
the same time—its most impossible dimension. Paul Celan and Primo Levi
have seen the extermination as the death of poetry, of representation, of
death; in Celan’s case, language itself died in the extermination camps. 3
“Silence,” then, does not necessarily signify complicity. The camp remained
absent from Michel Foucault’s work, for instance, despite his theoretical
and political interest in carceral spaces of discipline and despite the anti-
sovereignty of his writings and his political engagement. In his preface
to the American edition of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti- Oedipus, Foucault
states that thinking through Auschwitz has become an imperative for all
European intellectuals. Certainly, Foucault’s genealogies of discipline,
biopower, and governmentality have opened the way for a discursive and
political engagement with the aporias of modern biopolitics.
On the other side of the spectrum, thematic appropriation of
the concentration camp should not be taken as an unproblematic sign of
democratic or antifascist politics. The Silent Scream, a notorious right-
wing propaganda film made by anti-abortion lobbies in the U.S., highlights
this point: the echographic representation of the fetus’s alleged bodily and
emotional reactions to its abortion is punctuated by evocative images of
Nazi concentration camps.4 The signifier of Nazi extermination is loaded
with demagogic potential as well, as it has all too often been displayed,
manipulated, and appropriated as an ethical and judicial alibi in order

to legitimize and routinize ideologies and practices of coercion, suffer-
ing, and normativity. The use of this master signifier of the biopolitical
sovereignty that marked the twentieth century mobilizes a struggle over
the very definition and representation of “life” and “humanness” and thus
requires a politics of positioning.
In this struggle over political representation and its discursive
practices, claims, imagery, desires, and counterdesires, the task is to per-
form a radical gesture toward an alternative vision of representation, for
want of a better term. The task is to move toward the anarchic difference
that cuts loose from and exceeds the carceral logic of referential repre-
sentation, in other words, the inappropriable and unforeseeable other of
presence, presentation, and re-presentation: the language of the Other.
No guarantee of normative intelligibility can be evoked here. Does this
imply the possibility of novel representational spaces beyond the presen-
tist premises of the ontopological logic of representation? 5 The question,
a question of the possibility of interrupting the force of representation, or
the representation’s being in force, must be left in suspense.
Heidegger’s essential questioning of technology can give us an
interesting cue, however. Technology for Heidegger is not just a means
to an end and an assemblage of equipment—as the “uncannily correct”
instrumental definition of technology maintains, according to him (“Ques-
tion” 5)—but also truth and a mode of revealing, a destining of Being, the
very mode of Being’s manifesting of itself. In the Heideggerian idiom,
modern technology is in force in the vanishing figures of an aesthetico-
material arsenal of artifacts: the chalice, the ancient temple, the peasant
shoes. How does the extermination camp enter this enchanted semiotic
phantasmagoria? Is there a way to refocus our attention and move beyond
Heidegger’s intentions and disavowals, and recognize in his philosophical
thinking “on the grounds of technology” the conditions of intelligibil-
ity by which the biopolitical technology of modernity seeks to mark off
unthinkable/unlivable life from possible/recognizable configurations of
human life? The operation of this technology cannot be captured, as the
following remarks attempt to show, in a construal of language as authoriz-
ing and authenticating self-identity. One would need a more shaded and
oblique poetics of language as difference, political as much as psychic,
in order to start thinking the question of how the body of the effaced
Other—ultimately disposable and transposable—emerges, albeit obscurely
and uninvited, in Heidegger’s language.
The (Uninvited) Emergence of the Camp

in Heidegger’s Questioning of Technology
Let us consider the question of taking up a sign—in particular, the inju-

rious possibilities of iterability—in Heidegger’s writings on technology.
Heidegger delivered a cycle of four lectures on the subject of technology
at Bremen in 1949. In the only one that remains unpublished, he wrote:
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in

its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and
the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the
reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manu-
facture of hydrogen bombs. (qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe 34) 6
Several things deserve notice in this gesture of repudiation, wherein

Nazi death emerges in the consciousness of the Heideggerian text as a
paradeigma (etymologically associated with what is para - [beside or
amiss], what is subsidiary to diction [pointing out in words], - deiknynai
[to show, to prove]). This oblique reference to the extermination camp—as
an example, an instance, and a paradigm—relates mass annihilation to
industrial agricultural production, and both to a certain indirect sense of
Enframing g that underlies the essence of modern technology for Heidegger.
The “now” that serves to connect temporally the two realms of the formu-
lation signals a point in time that heralds the Other of human finitude’s
time, the “brink of a precipitous fall,” the advent and event of the regime
of calculative-representational thinking: in a word, the time of Technik.
What concerns me in this scene of being-in-technology is precisely this:
that Heidegger’s language manifests the camp in the context of calculative
and objectifying technology and in its ambiguous proximity with tech-
nologies of agricultural production; at the same time, as Heidegger turns
his attention to the problem of technology his text comes to be haunted
by a force arguably exceeding its author’s writerly intention and control,
namely, the historical specificity of the dead other.
Heidegger’s fugitive illustration of the bodies of the camp à
propos of his meditation on the loss of “the human” and its originary
authenticity in the time of modern technology may be seen as a hint but
also as a symptom or signal as well as a symbolic lapse. Is Heidegger
putting into play his own notion of the hint? “A hint can give its hint so
simply,” he writes, “[. . .] that we release ourselves in its direction without
equivocation. But it can also give its hint in such a manner that it refers
us [. . .] back to the dubiousness against which it warns us” (“The Nature

of Language” 96). Heidegger’s “hint” (der Wink) emerges as a shadowy
trace that inscribes itself in the precarious flickering between presence
and nonpresence, evidence and nonevidence, and above all, revelation and
dissimulation in the topos of textual representation. This opening up of
present phenomenal actuality by and to proliferating suggestion alludes
to the very spectral nature of referential representation, its incomplete
and dismembered texture and structure.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Heidegger’s writings on
technology is the conviction that the question concerning technology can-
not be posed or thought apart from the question concerning the tradition
of Western metaphysics. Heidegger’s questioning of technology should be
seen within the context of his critique of the way in which metaphysics has
construed—or not—the problematic relation between Being and beings,
between Being and time. And yet, Heidegger’s questioning appears to be
indelibly marked by a residual investment in a particular metaphysics
whereby the determination of essence is knotted together with autho-
rial disengagement; the disarticulation of the thematized “production of
corpses” from any authorial or political response becomes the very condi-
tion under which the extermination becomes posable and nameable in the
Heideggerian textual body. In a text that asserts the preeminence of the
question, the camp and the author’s relation to it remain unarticulated,
unasked, unaddressed, and unquestionable, the very limit to (Heidegger’s
own) questioning. Questioning, then, the piety of thinking in Heidegger’s
terms (“Question” 3–35) becomes not only a master modality but also an
authoritative means of avoiding the politics of address.7
In a similar vein, it is instructive to read Heidegger’s deploy-
ment of the trope of analogy through the lens of his special relation to
metaphoric language (which he mixes with technical language), a relation
consisting both in identifying metaphor with metaphysics and d in putting
metaphor into play. On the one hand, there is an experience in language
and with language that entails the tropological reinscription and disin-
scription of metaphor; on the other is Heidegger’s ambivalent elaboration
on the divestiture and overcoming of metaphysics as an alternative mode
of conceiving the real, beyond the calculative-representational frame
incited by modern Technik. The role of metaphor in envisaging or creating
a novel reality through redescription signals the point at which motorized
agricultural production and the mass obliteration of lives in gas chambers
and concentration camps are posed in tandem.
But what makes the extermination camp a site of meaning in

Heidegger’s critique of technology? What logic of originary familiar and
familial linearity between the natural and the political generates this tex-
tual carrying-over? And further, because metaphoricity is not merely about
translating between already given meanings, but also about reformulation,
or displacement, what is it that the application of this textual technique
redefines or conjures here? In Heideggerian terms, what does this unveil-
ing dissimulate? The metaphoric gesture of embedding the camp in the
ground of technological mass production along with that of industrial
agriculture sets in play an uncanny convergence, a point of resonance
and transposability between two disparate inflections of “production”—a
production, indeed, embedded, through analogy and difference, in the
dystopic realm of Technik.
The passage fuses the massive and motorized technical pro-
duction of human food with the massive and motorized technical produc-
tion of dead human bodies. Mass annihilation is articulated in terms of
mechanical economy in the age of technical reproduction; the concentra-
tion camp is cast, at a stroke, as an assembly-line of decorporealization,
a technological project whereby the natural world is reduced to a “stand-
ing-reserve” of raw material. In Heideggerian terms, both these realms
attest to an apotheosis of the instrumental and objectifying technics of
Enframing (Ge-stell); they both stand for a technologically mediated and
mass-produced eventuality of thingness (ultimately broken organicity:
the processed animals and crops, the “produced” corpses) enclosed—or
thrown—within the mastery of a moribund “thereness.”
The neuralgic point (or cathected spot) that Heidegger’s formu-
lation discloses is a certain politically neutral conception of technology as
a paradigm of the modern condition of Being, a paradigm a priori inimical
to humanity. To the instrumental and dehumanizing use of technology, he
opposes the classical Greek technee and its relation to poiesis, the bringing
forth of truth (aletheia) and essence. An essential synonym of physis, poi-
esis connotes a “bringing-forth” of what is present for human encounter
and handling. Heidegger, we should bear in mind, distinguishes technol-
ogy—its various actual manifestations—from what he calls its “essence,”
which is not itself technological, not a bringing-forth in the sense of the
ancient Greek techne. “The essence of modern technology,” he argues,
“shows itself in what we call Enframing,” Ge-stell : the setting up and
hunting down of nature as standing-reserve, the ordering and challeng-
ing of nature to unconceal itself (“Question” 23). Samuel Weber translates
Ge-stell as “emplacement,” “in order to retain the reference to place and

to placing which is paramount in Heidegger’s discussion of the phenom-
enon.” Weber also suggests, taking his cue from Heidegger’s own semantic
suggestions, that the translation by “skeleton” would not be inappropriate.
He explains: “For the more technology seeks to put things in their proper
place, the less proper those places turn out to be, the more displaceable
everything becomes and the more frenetic becomes the effort to reassert
the propriety of the place as such” (124). 8 I would add that the translation
by the word “skeleton” would not be inappropriate for another reason as
well: it echoes the corporeal implications of Enframing; more specifically,
it signals a claim upon a crumbling and perished corporeality, evidenced
by—or, rather, revealed d as—the very remains of those reduced to a stand-
ing-reserve, deemed unfit to live. Despite Heidegger’s somewhat neutral
employment of Enframing, his notion is itself charged with strong implica-
tions of the biopolitical propriety underwriting the skeletal power to body
forth beings and things, to challenge them forth within the configuration,
the “Frame-work,” of modern technology.9
In Heidegger’s questioning (understood as a will to essence),
edibility and extermination are interlaced, and as such, are inscribed—or
emplaced—within the regime of industrial planning and technology. The
mass annihilation of human bodies and the mass production of the means
of human subsistence together usher in the era of technological Enfram-
ing, articulated—through Heidegger’s framing device of analogy—as
instances of the modern technologies of amassing, clearing, crashing,
and becoming-waste.10 Man, plant, and, most crucially, the animal—the
other of man in Western metaphysics—emerge as essential categories
whose ontological distinctions are blurred and collapsed at the horizon
of modern technology. With the obsolescence of the (nostalgic) aletheic
essence of “handling”11 in favor of mechanical means, bodies (human and
non-human) are figured as final products, mere effects, of a technological
inevitability, vestigial (or skeletal) residues of physis in the topos, or better,
in the thesis, of the factory and the camp, the wastelands of modernity.
The emphasis on this essential operational affinity occludes—
or brings to light precisely by “writing out” of the self-aware tropologi-
cal space—the singularities and temporalities of the human/non-human
spectrum: those whose labor and time are consumed and exploited in the
automated assembly-line of human food agriculture; those who feed their
human living mortality by consuming the industrially produced agricul-
tural commodities; those who, by virtue of their assigned biogenetic and
morphological status as non-human animals—are susceptible to being

confined to motorized frameworks of human “handling”; and those, naked
and anonymous, who were not only forced into slave labor but reduced
to “life that does not deserve to live” by the biopolitical technology of the
Nazi extermination camp. These disparate singularities remain unac-
knowledged—bound to dissolve in the crucible of Enframing—not only
precluding certain kinds of questions and foreclosing the possibility of a
different kind of questioning but also absolving the philosopher from the
“task” of responding differently to the paradigm of extermination.
In the Heideggerian text, the agricultural factory and the con-
centration camp thus become the exemplary delimited spaces of modern
Enframing, where the spectrum of technomediated “mere life” is delin-
eated in all its limits, continuities, and discontinuities. In the exchange of
typical instances, “examples,” “para-deigma-ta,” the regime of Enfram-
ing, where “man is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve,” is
fused with technological execution whereby the naked body is left bare of
any subjective content, standing before the sovereign power that consti-
tutes and obliterates it as such. Heidegger’s reference to the concentration
camp gives an example as much as it sets an example: it brings to light the
naked body of the technologies of modernity as indistinguishable from
its intimate limit, and the word soma thus resumes its Homeric Greek
limit-designation of a fallen or thrown nonliving body, a “corpse.” But it
does so, however, in a way that obliterates the eponymous subjectivity of
those nonliving bodies, reducing them to a faceless and nameless mass of
“by-products.” It does so in a way that undermines any involvement with
response-ability for the Nazi realm of Enframing, a regime of decimat-
ing Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and communists, all precluded from the
realm of humanness and, as such, put to death.
The subjugation of human life and death to biopolitical sover-
eignty comes to be what is at stake in modern technology; it also returns to
haunt Heidegger’s questioning of technology. In a certain sense, the force
of substitution encapsulated in Heidegger’s use of the correspondence
between industrial agricultural production and the industrial production
of corpses here resonates uncannily with the scene of sacrificial offer-
ing (in its particular instantiation in the scene of the “holocaust,” which
signifies “burnt offering”). And thus, absolved from the form of political
execution sanctioned as the racial purgation of “the human,” the system-
atic obliteration of the crematoria becomes redolent with the innocuous
expiation of the sacrificial pyre. In the illuminating ritual flames of
symbolic exchange and fusion, the forces of displacement and replacement

take the upper hand; boundaries bleed and limits are tested between the
living and the dead, subject and object, the natural and the social, the
sacred and the profane, inclusion and exclusion, humanity and divinity,
human form and animal form, animate and inanimate matter, the saved
and the lost, the edible and the discarded, killing and purifying, and kill-
ing and eating.
“Bare Life” and the Return of the (Other)

Body in Heidegger’s Language
Organic “life,” or Heidegger’s physis, is thrown back to the

nomos of its theological foundations. Only we are now in the terrain
(“emplacement”) of the eminently political relationship between life and
sovereign power, the indistinguishability of life from Law (as well as of
physis from nomos); we are neither in the realm of religion nor in that of
juridical order, but rather in that “zone of indistinction” that is biopolitics
in its form as the “state of exception” (Agamben, Homo Sacer). The actual-
ization of “bare life” in the figure of the sacred living figure emerges from
the order of biopolitical sovereignty. As Agamben has shown, the Nazi con-
centration camp is the zone of exclusion and exception that not only resides
in the heart of modern sovereignty but also organizes its Law. There is,
then, a relation of “exclusionary inclusion” between the sovereign power
and “bare life”: bare life is excluded at the moment of juridical “inclusion,”
that is, at the moment of institution of the body politic, and is “included”
in the state of exception. Centered on exercising control over life, death,
and the human body, this manifestation of power dictates who may enter
the realm of recognized human life and who must not; it determines from
whom the body politic ought to protect itself; it determines and forcibly
materializes the location of the border of “humanity.”
The discourse of the sacredness of life,12 in both its ontotheo-
logical and juridical-political connotations, is all too commonly deployed
as an alibi for the violence of modern biopolitics, as a strategy of contain-
ment by which the eminently political character of biopower is neutralized.
It is significant from this perspective that the Nazi extermination of Jews,
homosexuals, and Roma has been articulated through the sacrificial reg-
ister of the “Holocaust.” But no sacrificial figure of rite, consecration, or
divinization can redeem the political death to which bare life is exposed.13
As Agamben puts it:
The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the

Jews by means of the term “Holocaust” was [. . .] an irresponsible
historiographical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the
privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty
and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a
life that may be killed but not sacrificed [. . .]. The truth—which
is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the
courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is that the Jews were
exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as
Hitler had announced, “as lice,” which is to say, as bare life.
The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither
religion nor law, but biopolitics. ( Homo Sacer 114) 14
In Heidegger’s analysis, “man” is one, “the orderer of the stand-

ing-reserve” posturing as the “lord of the earth”:
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even

as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve,
and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer
of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a
precipitous fall; that is he comes to the point where he himself
will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, pre-
cisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of
lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail
that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his
construct . (“Question” 26, original emphasis)
The essence of technology is the revealing of nature as a standing-reserve

at the disposal of human Being. What escapes Heidegger is precisely the
political and politically uneven nature of technological sovereignty, which
the politically neutral apparatus of “modern technology” does not suffice
to grasp. In his endeavor to posit an “essence” of technology, an essence
that is (bio)politically unencumbered, Heidegger cannot address the
necessary presence and force of a politics that sets up “beings” as stand-
ing-reserve in the regime of modern technology. He fails to ask how death
(the “throwness” toward death that is at the core of Dasein’s temporality)
and Being belong together not essentially, but rather, through the dying
body of the subjected Other. In positioning “human” subjectivity as an
“Ek-sistent essence” separated by an abyss from plant and animal,15 as a
homogeneous force acting upon and setting up the “worldless” natural
world, he cannot address the biopolitical cuts and fractures of the “human-
ness-versus-inhumanness” distinction as they are exemplified by the
body of the sovereign and the unsacrificeable body of homo sacer. rr. Lack-
ing any notion of the politics of difference, he cannot address the camp’s
regime of the “human” consumption of objectified otherness; neither can
he reckon with the historical and cultural condition of becoming-less-
human and being treated as such. Heidegger alludes to the figure of the
edible beast—emplaced in a motorized agricultural industry—to convey
the “inhumanness” of modern technology, but without addressing the
politics of subhumanity in the order of Technik.
Metaphors of animality as morbidity played a central role in the
construction and representation of the Jew as Other in late-nineteenth-
century Europe. Suffice it to consider the Nazi tropes of Jews as mice, icons
of contamination, or as lice, icons of parasitic living—both connoting, in
popular imagination, unbridled proliferation. Hitler used the metaphor
of “lice” to dehumanize Jews—not just any y figure of non-human animal,
but that of lice, the insect-figure of the abject: insidious, faceless, imper-
ceptible, inappropriate(d), almost unnoticeable but all-pervading. The
lice-figure also maintains a special connection to the “hosting” body by
virtue of its vampiric quality of living parasitically on other bodies and
sucking their blood, indeed a figuration of living death that served as a
crucial trope for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century association of Jews
and vampirism that, as Sander Gilman reminds us, attained its literary
culmination in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922 (138). The
Nazi concentration camp as such remains in the penumbra of Heidegger’s
text; it emerges only as a mere instance of modern technodystopia, as one
more representation of the loss of the human, rather than as the biopoliti-
cal nomos of modern Western humanistic logos.
But is it not impossible to pose the question concerning mod-
ern technology without also posing the question concerning biopolitical
technology in modernity, or the biopolitical turn of modern technology?
By virtue of the very iterability of the sign of annihilation, Heidegger
inadvertently addresses the Nazi extermination as an “emplacement” of
factical life and death, a biopolitical and thanatopolitical technology that
seeks to put humans and non-humans in their proper place—allowed to
live or put to death.16 Heidegger’s emphasis on “facticity” denotes precisely
the “throwness” of the material being-there-and-then that is proper to
Dasein; the aprioricity, the “alreadiness” of Being’s bodily advent and
appropriation to the primal “fact” of language. Implying what in Being is
both already given and d brought to experience and thought, “facticity” is

the “destiny” of Being in a world inhabited by beings that are involved with
and revealed—albeit in a veiled way—to “Dasein” (openness-for-Being).
Self-presence and self-inquiry are bound together in Dasein’s essential
facticity. In Being and Time, facticity implies Dasein’s understanding of
its existence as present at hand, as a fact; it implies that “an entity ‘within
the world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand
itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it
encounters within its own world” (82). Being a questioner in the modern
Technik is a destiny of facticity.
In tracing the affinity of Heideggerian ontology with Nazism,
Agamben suggests that Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism
be read through the prism of his understanding of “life” as an actual deter-
mination and essential experience and task (Aufgabe
( ) of facticity. Follow-
ing Levinas (“Reflections”), he traces the analogies between this ontology
of life’s indistinguishability from its actual situation and the philosophy of
Hitlerism. Indeed, in Heideggerian ontology, human life is always already
politics; life and politics form an immediate and indissoluble unity (tak-
ing politics in a very broad sense: more as a bodily exposure to a certain
materiality of human historicity and sociality than a reflective engage-
ment in processes of accountable appropriation and disappropriation).
Science and knowledge belong to the life of the polis. For Heidegger, the
“purest form of thinking” is “the highest doing,” according to the ancient
Greek experience of bios theoretikos, where bios receives its determina-
tion from theoria, the “consummate form of human existence” (“Ques-
tion” 164). Human essence always already contains immediately y the force
that constitutes “man” as Dasein, as a political and historical Being-there
but also Being-open, emplaced in and enframed by the polis, taking into
consideration that the camp—or the camp’s exclusion from the polis—is
also included in the polis; it is, indeed, a constitutive part of the political
sphere. As Agamben puts it:
For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to

assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life
is immediately political in its very facticity. Man is not a living
being who must abolish or transcend himself in order to become
human—man is not a duality of spirit and body, nature and poli-
tics, life and logos, but is instead resolutely situated at the point
of their indistinction. ( Homo Sacer 153, original emphasis) 17
The camp makes its appearance in Heidegger’s philosophical

text as the “hidden paradigm” of modern technology, echoing Agamben’s
words: “[T]he camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopoliti-
cal space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will
appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose
metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize” (Homo
Sacerr 123). The representational use to which Heidegger’s text subjects the
“production of corpses” bespeaks a textual coming to light of the body as
incarcerated and slain à propos of modern technology. The textual subjec-
tion of disintegrated corporeality takes form in the figure of the soma of
the Shoah, the body that is entirely exhausted in perished bare life, “life
that is unworthy of being lived.” And all this despite the fact that, as Nancy
reminds us, Heidegger considers the body as “extraneous to his project”
(qtd. in Nancy 232). It is through the prism of Heidegger’s technological
“production of corpses” that we should then read Nancy’s disclaimer:
“There has never been any body in philosophy” (20).18
But what concerns our analysis here is that the holocaustic
machinery of extermination emerges in Heidegger’s language within the
textual apparatus of his questioning of Ge-stell. Technology becomes the
occasion to expose the body’s “emplacement” in language, or to contami-
nate language by the body. At this moment of difference in the Heideg-
gerian discourse, the textual affirmation of the coming-to-presence of
essence is performed in a way that disrupts that very coming-to-pres-
ence. Language cannot be sheltered from the eruption of difference, as
Heidegger’s work itself has shown; difference is an irreducible dimension
of language: the difference between the extraneity of the body and the
manifestation of the body, between essence and nonessence, between
“concealing” and “withdrawing,” between a body and a cadaver, between
political killing and sacrificial offering, and finally, between the animat-
ing and inanimating forces of language. In the realm of the body, the
determination of the signifier’s essence falters and fragments, and per-
haps necessarily so. How does the body—undesirable and “extraneous”
to Heidegger’s philosophy—return, however furtively, to a language that
denies any implication with it?
In her treatment of the relation between figuration and mate-
riality à propos of the encounter between language and the body in
Descartes’s Meditations, Butler addresses the necessary implication of
the body in language: any effort to excise the body from the text is bound
to fail, because the body always returns in the form of spectral figuration,
and at the same time, always eludes every linguistic effort to capture it:
Language itself cannot proceed without positing the body, and

when it tries to proceed as if the body were not essential to its
own operation, figures of the body reappear in spectral and
partial form within the very language that seeks to perform
their denial. Thus, language cannot escape the way in which it
is implicated in bodily life, and when it attempts such an escape,
the body returns in the form of spectral figures whose semantic
implications undermine the explicit claims of disembodiment
made within language itself. Thus, just as the effort to determine
the body linguistically fails to grasp what it names, so the effort
to establish that failure as definitive is undermined by the fig-
ural persistence of the body. (“How Can I Deny” 258)
Butler’s formulation of the inescapable co-implication of language and the

body resonates with the spectral eruption of the body in Heidegger’s lan-
guage of essentially defined and determined technology. The “extra-ordi-
nary” return in Heidegger’s language of “the body”—or to “the body”—has
indeed not only a performative character but also a spectral quality about
it, an undecidability, as it were, in that the spectral is neither presence nor
absence, neither inclusion nor exclusion. Although it belongs in between
the living and the dead, the limit-figure of the specter has the outward
appearance of a dead being precisely as the body returns to Heidegger’s
articulation in the form of the cadavers of the undesirables. The extermi-
nated body, or rather its remainder, is there but not addressed as such; it
is there like a passing shadow, its political specificity as bare alterity—as
life that does not deserve to live—not being answered to; under our eyes
and yet nonmanifest, close at hand and yet elusive, revealed and yet dis-
simulated. But does not such doubleness characterize the euphemisms so
common among Nazi health officials—“euthanasia,” “mercy killing,” and
“solution” to a humanitarian problem? Also, does not the unheimlichkeitt of
the formulation become the very way in which Heidegger is able to articu-
late—indeed, “in spectral and partial form”—his ethicopolitical distance
from Nazi biologism and naturalism?19 The spectrality and partiality that
permeate the politics and poetics of language/body evoke the archiving
apparatus of iterability, of repetition and alterity, that perturbs and resists
any authorial or authorized force to expel or flatten difference.
Ambivalent Biopolitics:
Bearing Witness to the Postmodern
Condition of the Human
The concept of people always already

contains within itself the fundamental
biopolitical fracture. It is what cannot
be included in the whole of which it is
a part as well as what cannot belong to
the whole in which it is always already
included.
—Agamben, Means 32
This last section is a meditation on the divergent appropriations

of the “human” and the “inhuman” in the contemporary order of Technik,
the fundamentally ambiguous Technik of the “here-and-now.” I would
like to extend Heidegger’s insights on the technoscientific apparatus he
called Ge-stell—an apparatus occurring under the regime of the principle
of reason—to stimulate a rethinking of the political in an era of uneven
technomediated globalization that many want to consider “postpolitical”
and “posthistorical.” This reimagining of the political ought to accord
special significance to the biopolitical incarnation of the political, that
is, to the installation of epistemic and political technics through which
“human life” emerges, and future regimes in which human intelligibility
and normativity are shaped. Such technics include organizations of life,
fertility, birth, illness, death, and the concept of “people”; the intertwining
of nativity and nationality; the transfiguration of human agent as national
subject; conceptions of desire, sexual alliance, and the body; population,
demography, territory, resources, migrancy; and organizations of tempo-
rality. All seem to converge on the aim of furnishing cultural fields and
rational models of what counts as human and what counts as inhuman.
The question I raise here is simply this: what is the meaning
of the “political” in the age of new and renewed biopolitical technologies?
Among the many effects of this reformulation of “politics,” I shall discuss
only one: the new humanities and inhumanities emerging from the tech-
noscience of identifying, devaluing, abandoning, controlling, and annihi-
lating the Other. What is meant by the political, here, engages the question
of addressing the other’s “emplacement” at the irreducible limit of human
intelligibility, speakability, and livability, of addressing the disappropria-
tion of the other’s humanness by the discourses and practices of the Same.
In contrast to foundational and ontopological modes of already installed
subjectivities, communities, identities, and truths, this sense of the political
bears on the conditions of being inscribed in the social field, being placed
and finding—or not finding—place in the world, placing in reserve, and
refusing to stay in place (and here we might also recall Heidegger’s
reflections in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”); this sense of the political
cultivates the praxis of deterritorialization. Heidegger wrote about the
singularity and solitude of dying; he also took being-unto-death to be
constitutive of what it is to be human, what humans, in their raw corpo-
reality, have in common. He failed to address, however, being-unto-death
beyond the ontological sphere of the same (Being), beyond the existential
analytic of human finitude as originary, beyond the horizon of “our com-
mon humanity” as being-one and pertaining evenly to all. At the horizon
of contemporary global biopolitics and thanatopolitics, dying alone and
massively, within and outside the (human) community, assumes—again—
an infinitely crucial political meaning. Despite and against Heidegger’s
meditation on the loss of “the human” and its originary authenticity in
the time of modern technology, I suggest the necessity of reinscribing the
order of Technik in a historical and discursive horizon of humanity that
exceeds it. In other words, the technology of the camp is not to be taken
as a radical break in humanity’s humanness, but rather as a politically
and culturally invested technology of attaining sovereignty that continues
to haunt the very terms in which the intelligibility of the human order is
summoned and sustained at both the “local” and the “global” levels.
In the current context of neoliberal post-nation-state global-
ization, wherein geopolitical changes in Europe have upset the territorial
and demographic map of the continent, biopolitics provides a protocol
for the construction of boundaries between sites of affinity and sites of
alienation, “home” and its “others,” as well as human and its others. The
founding duality of the modern biopolitical technoscience is that between
modernity’s fascination with the promise of futurity and, at the same time,
the impulse to subject the future’s contingency to the order of a calculable
and intelligible archive. It is upon such boundaries and fractures in pro-
cesses of archiving the future that I would now like to focus.
The challenge, following Foucault, is to rethink “technology”
not as a singularly constituted and reified instrumentality, but rather as a
plural, dispersed, and discontinuous engagement as it is enacted in the fol-
lowing registers: biopolitical technologies, whereby an archive of political
rationalities, knowledges, discourses, and practices seek to govern both
the individual human body and the welfare of population; technologies
of the body, whereby at stake is not (or is not only)
y) the memorable image
of Foucault’s publicly tortured “body of the condemned” in Discipline and

Punish, but rather the management of the desiring body’s life and agency;
and technologies of the self, which permit individuals to act upon them-
selves and constitute themselves as (intelligible) self-governing subjects.
As Foucault has shown, what is technological about such modalities of
technology is their performative ability to incite into discourse, to call forth
desires and prohibitions, and to bring intelligible figurations of human
subjectivity into being. As Ronell puts it, technology has produced man
as subject and world as his object (217). The globalized political invest-
ment in subjects does not wipe out the modern histories of differentiated
subjects as viable or disposable according to certain standards of intelli-
gibility, including class, economic resources, gender, sexuality, race, and
ethnicity. If there is anything “new” about the technoscience of Western
postmodern biopolitics, it would be that it complicates, decentralizes,
proliferates, and intensifies the differentiation of power involved in the
definitions, images, fantasies, and representations of “humanity” and its
thinkable demarcations. Paradoxically, biopolitical discipline tends thus to
be less visible, more subtly dispersed and systematically integrated in the
discreet banality of cultural fabric, despite the proliferation of electronic,
virtual, digital, and other technologies of surveillance and visual media.
This dispersion does not imply that contemporary biopolitics entails nec-
essarily less authoritative violence, but rather that it involves a multitude
of recognized and misrecognized techniques of violence through which
the conditions of human intelligibility and livability are instituted and
confirmed. In the horizon of post–cold war biopolitics, the conceptual and
political distinctions between criminal and symbolic violence, welfare and
warfare, as well as between fatality and legality, are brought into crisis.
It is in a “genealogical” mode that I look at the constitution of
epistemes, identifications, discourses, disciplinary techniques, and power
practices in the Europe of modernity and postmodernity, in the Europe
of humanism, inhumanness, and posthumanity. By epitomizing critical
variables of the modern facticity, such as transparency and self-evidence,
quantitative formalization came to be indispensable to the emergence of
national “population” in the European eighteenth century as a thematized
object of scientific inquiry and administrative control, governmentalized
through the phenomena of birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility,
patterns of hygiene and habitation. Made possible by the late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century epistemological emphasis on standardized
quantification, the authority of referentially anchored calculative and
classificatory logic remains part of an imaginary in which numerical nor-

malcy is a crucial characteristic of any nation-state worthy of the name.
The contemporary instances of obdurate enmity between the
nation-state and its Others, whether insiders (disenfranchised ethnic,
religious, or other “minorities”) or outsiders (demonized strangers or
foes) ought to be viewed, I suggest, not as irrational expressions of innate
primordial sentiments, but as political phenomena grounded in modern
rational collective imaginations deeply concerned with—technologically
mediated—biopolitical enumeration and ascription. Not only the highly
mediatized explosion of ethnic conflicts in the “post-socialist” Balkans
during the past decade (such as the recent shambles of Kosovo following
Yugoslavia’s demise and the disastrous involvement of the international
coalition of “the West”), but also the smaller-scale and anonymous “every-
day crimes” of xenophobic animosities against guest-worker and immi-
grant populations in various European capitalist democracies expose the
enduring logic of categorical objectification and taxonomic reification in
the age of transnational time-space flexibility and unboundedness. The
ethnonationalist politics of rape, the ethnic cleansing and bloodletting
during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also the anti-immigration
politics plaguing an increasingly if unevenly integrated “postnational”
Europe are expressions and mutations, but not aberrations, of this power-
ful truth regime.
The 1992–95 siege of Sarajevo and the systematic destruction
of Bosnia by Serbian nationalists; the dislocation of populations in the
territories of the former Yugoslavian Federation; the Kosovo war in 1999,
when about 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were driven from their homes and
hundreds were killed by Serbian security forces; the swell of asylum-seek-
ing people passing through the headquarters of the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees in Tirana to apply for refugee cards during the
Kosovo war and after its conclusion in July 1999; the “local communities”
in Southeast European towns who protested against the adulteration of
their authentic locality by “too many” “illegal” immigrants; the preoccu-
pation with “depopulation” of the so-called nationally sensitive border-
land areas and the ensuing cultural stigmatization of non-procreation
and also of alternative figurations of relatedness and kinship; the racist
stereotype of the ostensibly inordinate reproductive urges of the “others”:
all, I believe, have to be seen as inscriptions of biopolitical subjection that
enact late modernity’s encounter with its precarious limit.
At the limit of cultural signification of legality stands the tech-

nology of the shadowy non-place wherein liminal subjects of European late
modernity, those not carrying crucial preconditions of globalized intelligi-
bility such as full citizenship and legal subjecthood, are to be placed and
ordered, restored to a proper legality. The order of the political is haunted
by these sociopolitical non-places of emplacement (at once disciplinary
and “humanitarian”), their different manifestations and metamorphoses,
their various technological inscriptions—whether as refugee camps and
camps of detention in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, centers
of reception in Balkan and European cities, or even zones d’attente in
international airports. Rosi Braidotti has put it well: “Once, landing at
Paris International Airport, I saw all these in between areas occupied by
immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had
arrived, but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious
transit zones, waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European
Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded
at the margins and nonbelonging can be hell” (20). From the processes of
naturalization or repatriation, assimilation or expulsion, the refugee has
emerged as a “limit-concept” of late modernity’s exclusionary discourses
of recognition as human, along with a fragmentary multitude of other
limit-representations of the human: the homosexual, the transgendered,
the hiv-positive, the poor, the elderly, the mentally ill, the displaced, the
dispossessed, as well as the populations of the so-called Third World.
Little wonder that, by means of the performative power of discourse and,
specifically, the political relevance of the contamination model of alterity,
there were suggestions in the Europe of the 1980s that hiv-positive people
and aids patients be held in concentration camps. Indeed, contemporary
homosexual panics, everyday practices of sexual othering, and phobic
discourses about aids not only remind us that sex has been “placed on
the agenda for the future” (Foucault, History y 6), they also bring forth
once again the limits and boundaries of the cultural intelligibility of the
human. This fraught relation between human life and power of recogni-
tion is crucially addressed by Butler:
Indeed, how are we to grasp this dilemma of language that

emerges when “human” takes on that doubled sense, the norma-
tive one based on radical exclusion and the one that emerges
in the sphere of the excluded, not negated, not dead, perhaps
slowly dying, yes, surely dying from a lack of recognition, dying,
indeed, from the premature circumscription of the norms by

which recognition as human can be conferred, a recognition
without which the human cannot come into being but must
remain on the far side of being, as what does not quite qualify
as that which is and can be? Is this not a melancholy of the public
sphere? (Antigone
( 81)
The categorical and numerical order of cultural identification

and difference is also echoed in the mnemonic residues of the camp, the
spaces of demarcation and estrangement of European late modernity. The
camps of ethnic rape in the former Yugoslavia, dark instantiations of the
biopolitical impulse to expose the body to subjection and to normalize the
body politic according to the prevailing norms of patrilineal reproduction,
kinship, and “life,” are one such example, one that urges the parallel:
Omarska as the afterlife of Auschwitz? 20 Judith Magyar Isaacson, an Aus-
chwitz survivor, attests to the radical significance of gender and sexual
difference in the face of biopolitical subjection when she states that her
greatest fear in the concentration camp was not death but rape (Kremer). 21
The enforced naked thingness of the subjected Being-toward-death is
painfully sexed and gendered.
The nation-state is, and not merely by virtue of etymological
affinity, ineluctably linked with birth: “The fiction that is implicit here is
that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there
may not be any difference between the two moments” (Agamben, Means
21). As a technology of giving birth to the nation’s cleansed and pure
future, the camp serves as a means for the inscription of calculable and
quantifiable life in the nation-state and its attendant biopolitical regimes
of the normal. The Nazi concentration camp was, indeed, about normal-
izing population through managing numbers and controlling categorical
boundaries. As Agamben has convincingly shown, the concentration camp
has been the paradigmatic space in which the biological body, to which
the inmate stripped of every political status is reduced, came to function
as a political criterion; it is the site, biopolitical par excellence, “in which
public and private events, political life and biological life, become rigor-
ously indistinguishable” (Means 122). When seen in the light of such an
inaugural biopolitical technoscience, that is, in light of the invention of the
“Jewish question” and the implementation of the “final solution,” political
demography as the episteme of systematic categorizing, counting, and rei-
fying of bodies acquires a differently informed meaning. It will then have
to be conceded that there can be nothing politically innocent or anodyne

about an epistemic regime that monitors the state’s management of the
minute and intimate aspects of the life of the national population.
Biopower, in its multiplicity of postmodern modalities, is enacted
in the refugee camps in European cities, the state-sponsored “reception
centers” and “transit camps” in which “illegal” immigrants are temporar-
ily detained before deportation: the stadium in the Italian town of Bari,
for instance, into which the Italian authorities in 1991 concentrated all
“illegal” Albanian immigrants before sending them back to their country
(Agamben, “Camp”). A reflection on modern European biopolitics and its
discontents cannot ignore these bounded “ec-topias” retaining or “host-
ing” the redundant and burdensome others of the new ambivalently and
anxiously “borderless” European order. Lying in the interstices of deten-
tion and protection, those sociopolitical spaces bespeak the constitutive
complicity between disciplinary incarceration on the one hand, and
technocratic-humanitarian management of public safety on the other. 22
The transient inmates of such interstitial spaces, whether refugees, immi-
grants, expellees, or asylum-seekers, are construed as redundant and
polluting, a sheer “matter out of place,” and at the same time, as victim-
ized “human beings” in need of humanitarian sheltering and compassion.
The spatial discipline of those distinctly—albeit ambiguously—demarcated
sites requires a thinking through of the ambivalences of biopolitical disci-
pline, especially in a context of both postnational exaltation and residual
or resurgent nationalist politics in Europe. In such sites, the founding
ethnographic narratives of bounded field and static location are placed
under considerable stress. The camp of late European modernity, conjoin-
ing technologies of welfare with technologies of discipline, emerges as a
reminder, then, of the anxious ambivalence underlying the late modern
biopolitical condition.
To realize that, having spawned subtler technologies of nor-
malization, the concentration camp of extermination is not the reigning
order of the day, is to complicate one’s understandings of contemporary
European biopolitical technoscience, in both its chilling similarities with
and its incommensurable differences from the absolute horror signified by
the “inaugural site of modernity.” In exploring the multiple and shifting
configurations of modern biopolitical violence and legality, we might also
find that we ought to rethink the boundaries between “similarity” and “dif-
ference,” as well as between “continuity” and “rupture.” If the concentra-
tion camp can be taken as the icon of a deadly hygienic or sanitary opera-
tion that works through massive and centralized tactics of subservience

and a violent stripping away of any notion of personhood, the late modern
disciplinary technoscience of biopolitics works at the more life-affirming
level of a proliferation of highly respected epistemic discursivities, such as
demography and biomedicine, which produce care about the body and its
materiality through administering fertility, procreation, sexual hygiene,
life planning, life expectancy, longevity, and public health. Late-twen-
tieth- and early-twenty-first-century Western biopolitics is performed
primarily through the production of human subjectivities and epistemes
of life, through self-surveillance and self-normalization; it is valorized
in terms of care for propitious sexual and reproductive health and for the
future of human life; it is experienced in terms of individual responsibility,
self-determination, technological enablement, free choice, and free flow
of information. Through such biopolitically invested epistemes of subject-
formation and human welfare, recognizable humanness is constituted by
means of demarcations and exclusions along power differentials of class,
race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Not for a moment would I claim, however, that the historically
specific and unparalleled order of the concentration camp is definitively
over, or that the neoliberal democracies of late modernity provide immu-
nity against its recrudescence. 23 Quite the contrary, I would suggest that,
if Foucault was right that “power is tolerable only on condition that it
mask a substantial part of itself” (Historyy 86), the eventuality of the death
camp’s resurgence might very well be the remainder that the biopolitics
of late modernity needs to cynically mask in order to purchase legitimacy
and affirm viability. In fact, the recent history of conflict in the post–cold
war era has provided ample evidence to suggest that echoes of the Shoah
manifest themselves in contemporary fascism, as much in the residual
tyrannies of xenophobia and racism as in the atrocities of ethnic rape,
unwanted pregnancy, and the abjection of the nongenerative, “degenerate”
minoritized “other” within, an abjection also known as homophobia.
In Europe, technologies that seek to determine which figura-
tions of the human attain full cultural signification and which do not
persist, albeit in increasingly differentiated articulations, in the all too
common contemporary politics of pogrom and expulsion, disdain and
exclusion. Although Foucault has written convincingly about the histori-
cal transition from the society of incarceration to the society of control,
the current biopolitical technologies attest to the enduring and complex
coexistence of these two modalities of power. The cynical apathy with
which the existence of refugee camps on the periphery of Southeastern

European cities was widely received was acutely observed in a political
cartoon strip that the Greek Anti-Racist Calendar 2001 reprinted from the
Swiss Caricartoons Exil : Two men are chatting in an obviously mirthful
tone; in the background, there lies what appears to be a refugee camp:
rows of military tents stand within a fenced area located in the outskirts
of a bustling modern city. One of the two men, who are standing outside
of the fence scrutinizing the camp, expresses a professed puzzlement: “I
don’t understand what it is that bothers them, after all. Don’t we go camp-
ing when we travel abroad?” The border separating the campsite from
the city is not about a mere concentric, tranquil “homely” cohabitation
between host and guest but rather signals litigious circumscriptions, as
well as contaminated and bleeding boundaries of sameness and alterity,
livability and unlivability, home and exile. 24 A woman refugee from Bosnia
writes about her new “home” in Germany, in February 1995:
I try to read the German newspapers as infrequently as possible

now, but every once in a while I buy one and take a look. There
are so many stories about how Germany is flooded with refu-
gees, especially those refugees from Bosnia. I read about why
we are a danger, why we should be kept out. Meanwhile, I, the
one with the college education, take care of their children and
clean their houses. Never before in my life did I ever step foot
anywhere where I was not wanted. I do not recognize what I
have become. (qtd. in Mertus et al. 122)
The baleful echoes of Nazism in the contemporary resurgence

of nationalisms, forced displacement of populations, and eruptions of
violence against “foreigners” are found in another cartoon strip from
Exil, where the military-like ranks of demonstrators protesting against
the influx of “foreigners” form the shape of a swastika. Such instances
of ironic critical commentary confirm that biopolitical subjection is by
no means reducible to its efficacious or felicitous realization; rather, it is
ultimately haunted by its incalculable limits and ambivalences. It is such
necessary possibilities of misfire and dissent that can prove to be disrup-
tive in ways biopolitical discipline cannot appropriate and regulate, and
that constitute, when all is said and done, “the only guarantee we have
against racism” (Copjec 22).
Biopolitics, in the sense of political power concerned with
managing human life, has always been intricately interwoven with than-
atopolitics, the episteme of speculation on and rationalization of death:

from the obsessive fear of epidemic disease in Europe after the cholera
epidemic of 1832 to the sinking of the Titanicc through which Europe at
the beginning of the century found itself “confronted with its own death,”
in Slavoj Žižek’s words (qtd. in Doane 235); and from the establishment of
the canonical list of death causes still in effect in most parts of the world
(i.e., William Farr’s nosology and nosometry) 25 to the technologies of risk
such as those used by economists and the insurance industry. Even the
technological “production of corpses in the gas chambers and the exter-
mination camps” that Heidegger summoned in his lectures on the subject
of technology in 1949, even that technoscience of annihilation occurred
in the name of “human life” and claims to “humanness.”
It is impossible, I have suggested here, to read Heidegger’s
questioning of technology outside the history of modern biopolitics. In
light of the biopolitical violence over socially and culturally sanctioned
borders of humanness that has marked the end of the last century and the
beginning of this one, we need to move beyond clichés of horror as mere
rupture and ask in spite of—and yet within—Heidegger’s questioning: what
if, instead of an aberrant breakdown in humanity’s humanness, the loss
of the human’s originary authenticity, as Heidegger saw it—instead of an
evil we all disown in exultant abomination—we recognize the annihilation
camp in its inherent continuity with the history of humanity and with the
political rationality of “our own” world: as the nomos of the political space
of the modern rather than a scandalous episode of anomie. Such a line of
questioning would certainly be not only in spite off but also in accordance
with Heidegger’s own account of modern technology, for Heidegger’s own
non-instrumental conceptualization of technology allowed for an under-
standing of technology as a phenomenon that, in its essence, determines
Western history. But this would not be all. What if, instead of a mere
suspension of modernity’s avowed humanness, we recognize the camp
as a place, a discursive realm, and an episteme where what essentially
“revealed itself” (to use Heidegger’s language of veiling/unveiling) was
the very idea of sovereignty through the demarcation of human intelligi-
bility in Western modernity. What contemporary microcosms of fascism,
what identifications with its everyday manifestations, are concealed in
“humanity’s” revulsion at the unspeakable evil of Nazism and the Shoah,
the so-called limit of representation? Against the backdrop of Heidegger’s
“piety of thinking,” I conclude this essay by evoking Gillian Rose’s ques-
tioning of what she has dubbed “Holocaust piety”: “To argue for silence,
prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the wit-
ness of ‘ineffability,’ [. . .] is to mystify something we dare not understand,
because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous
with what we are—human, all too human” (43, emphasis in original).
I would like to give special thanks to Elizabeth Weed for her insightful suggestions. For
helpful discussions and comments on an earlier draft of this essay, thanks also to Mary Ann
Doane, Lynne Joyrich, Ellen Rooney, and all the participants in the Pembroke Center Seminar
(2001–2002). I wish, finally, to thank Steve Caton, Veena Das, Mariella Pandolfi, Rayna Rapp,
and Elena Tzelepis for engaging earlier versions of my written work on biopolitics.
athena athanasiou is a social anthropologist. She teaches at the University of Thessaly,

Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, in Greece. She writes on bio-
politics, gender, biotechnologies, aids, and anthropological theory. She is currently working
on a book manuscript about the anxious biopolitical techno-body of/in Europe.
Notes 1 Agamben elaborates on the nov- rhetorical mode of à propos (i.e.,

elty of the coming politics of the eitherr a link of organic necessity
“whatever singularities,” the sin- orr a fortuitous and metonymic
gularities that form communities association) in a space of seman-
without affirming a recognizable tic suspension.
and representable identity:
Whatever singular- 3 In a similar vein of exposing the
ity, which wants to appropriate limits of the poetics of trauma,
belonging itself, its own being- Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed
in-language, and thus rejects all in his film King Learr (1987):
identity and every condition of “No more Shakespeare after
belonging, is the principal enemy Chernobyl!” “No more . . . after
of the State. Wherever these sin- . . .”: catastrophe appears to be
gularities peacefully demonstrate marked by a certain paradoxical
their being in common there will temporality—a temporal limit
be a Tiananmen, and, sooner that signifies the unprecedented
or later, the tanks will appear. and unparalleled singularity of
( Coming Community 87) the moment of the strophe (i.e.,
“turn”)—that cannot be replaced
2 In Derrida’s reading, à propos is or overcome by the will to “rep-
a modality that signifies “either resentation,” or transmitted in
a link of organic, internal, and a representational, aesthetic, or
essential necessity, or else, speech act. Shoshana Felman has
inversely, an insignificant and argued that the Holocaust has
superficial association, a purely opened up a “radical historical
mechanical and metonymic asso- crisis in witnessing” (201), and
ciation, the arbitrary or fortuitous Cathy Caruth has addressed the
comparison—‘by accident’—of two unrepresentable nature of trauma
signifiers” (“Typewriter Ribbon” by theorizing trauma (especially
282). As the following analysis that of the Holocaust, but also
suggests, Heidegger’s writing on any event of massive trauma) as
the extermination camp à propos the failure—and defiance—of all
of his delving into the question of representation. Such unavail-
technology resituates the duality ability of trauma for witnessing
that constitutes the politics of the and representation bespeaks a
politico-ethical limit, as well as that this conceptual phantasm is,

a certain political conceptualiza- so to speak, much more outdated
tion of limit. This limit, where than ever, in the very ontopology
the representation of catastrophe it supposes, by tele-technic dislo-
engages performatively with the cation? (By ontopology y we mean
catastrophe of representation, an axiomatics linking indis-
comes to be what is at stake in the sociably the ontological value of
poetics of disaster. As Maurice present-being to its situation, to
Blanchot wrote in The Writing the stable and presentable deter-
of the Disaster : “There is a limit mination of a locality, the topos of
at which the practice of any art territory, native soil, city, body in
becomes an affront to the afflic - general)” (Specters 82).
tion” (83).
6 In commenting on Heidegger’s
4 In William Brennan’s book The formulation, Lacoue-Labarthe
Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final calls it “scandalously inad-
Solution, abortion is juxtaposed equate”:
with the “final solution,” fetuses It is not inadequate
with Jews, Nazis with “abortion- because it relates mass extermi-
ists,” and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein nation to technology. From that
Kampf” with Boston Women’s point of view, it is indeed abso-
Body Health Collective. One could lutely correct. But it is scandalous
invoke numerous examples of and therefore lamentably inad-
such strategic deployment of the equate because it omits to mention
rhetorical device of the Holo- that essentially, y, in its German
y
caust—as a commonsensical form version, [. . .] mass extermination
of analogy, a comparandum, or was an extermination of the Jews
a commodified stereotype of and that this is incommensurably
“human tragedy”—in the prona- different from the economico-mili-
talist and anti-abortion discur- tary practice of blockades or even
sive practices of the European the use of nuclear arms. Not to
movement for the “respect of life.” speak of the agricultural industry.
In Germany, for instance, the [. . .] The fact that Heidegger was
inaugural manifesto of the “pro- not even able, nor probably even
life” organization Europäische wished to state this difference is
Arzteaktion (Action of European what is strictly—and eternally—
Doctors) had the title “Auschwitz intolerable.
der Ungeborenen” (The Aus- [. . .] In the Aus-
chwitz of the Unborn). In the chwitz apocalypse, it was nothing
discourse of the French anti- less than the West, in its essence,
abortion organization “Laissez- that revealed itself—and that con-
les-vivre,” the abortion pill RU486 tinues, ever since to reveal itself.
is presented as “the new Zyklon And it is thinking that event that
B,” and abortion as “the Holocaust Heidegger failed to do. (34–35,
of France’s children.” emphasis in original)
5 Writing in reference to the 7 The valorization of question

“archaic phantasm” of the nation- over answer is fundamental to
state, of sovereignty, borders, Heidegger’s overcoming of meta-
and nationalisms of native soil physics, his involvement with
and blood, Derrida addresses the the university, his nostalgia for
ontopology—the intricate associa- “the Greeks,” and his critique of
tion of ontology with topology— representational thinking and
that this conceptual phantasm modernity. My remarks about
supposes: “But how can one deny Heidegger’s privileging of the
question refer to his writings on caust and the loss of the sense of
technology. It is in “The Nature of the Other, see Dori Laub’s work
Language” that Heidegger chal- on surviving Holocaust trauma.
lenges the primacy of the ques- She writes:
tion by asserting the preeminence There was no longer
of language and address. Here an other to which one could say
is Heidegger commenting on the “Thou” in the hope of being heard,
closing sentence of “The Question of being recognized as a subject,
Concerning Technology”: of being answered. The historical
At the close of a reality of the Holocaust became,
lecture called “The Question Con- thus, a reality which extinguished
cerning Technology,” given some philosophically the very possi-
time ago, I said: “Questioning is bility of address, the possibility
the piety of thinking.” “Piety” is of appealing, or of turning to,
meant here in the ancient sense: another. (“Bearing Witness” 82)
obedient, or submissive, and in
this case submitting to what think- 8 In her ingenious deconstructive
ing has to think about. One of the study of the history and politics
exciting experiences of thinking is of telephonic communication
that at times it does not fully com- technology, The Telephone Book,
prehend the new insights it has Avital Ronell translates the term
just gained, and does not properly Ge- Stell as both “emplacing”
see them through. Such, too, is the and “Frame-Work.” As the term
case with the sentence just cited is intended to suggest, modern
that questioning is the piety of technology is a “challenging
thinking. The lecture ending with claim” that enframes (i.e., both
that sentence was already in the assembles and orders) everything
ambience of the realization that that it summons forth. Heidegger
the true stance of thinking cannot points to an “eerie” employment
be to put questions, but must be to of the word beyond its “ordinary
listen to that which our question- usage” as “apparatus” or “skel-
ing vouchsafes—and all question- eton.” As he puts it: “We dare to
ing begins to be a questioning only use this word in a sense that has
in virtue of pursuing its quest for been thoroughly unfamiliar up to
essential Being. (“The Nature of now. [. . .] Can anything be more
Language” 72) strange? Surely not” (“Question”
The “question of the question” 19–20).
in Heidegger has drawn much
9 In his introduction to The Ques-
attention among students of
tion, William Lovitt writes:
his philosophy. Does Heidegger
This challeng-
ever question the privilege of
ing summons, ruling in modern
the question—“the remnant of
technology, is a mode of Being’s
Aufklärung g which still slumbered
revealing of itself. Yet in it, also,
in the privilege of the question,”
Being withdraws, so that the sum-
as Derrida puts it in Of Spirit ?
mons that thus “enframes” is all
(131). Although Derrida offers a
but devoid of Being as empower-
negative answer to this question,
ing to be. Compelled by its claim,
he supplements and compromises
ordered and orderer alike are
his response when, in the long
denuded. All that is and man
footnote appended to Of Spirit, he
himself are gripped in a structur-
examines Heidegger’s reference
ing that exhibits a mere skeleton
to language’s priority to ques-
of their Being, of the way in which
tioning. For a very interesting
they intrinsically are. (xxix–xxx,
treatment of the “possibility of
emphasis added)
address” in relation to the Holo-
10 The relevance of “waste” to the enemies” of the German nation

Western technee is echoed in according to the official national-
Lacoue-Labarthe’s definition of socialist discourse. Normative
Auschwitz as “the useless residue procreation of “human life”—in
of the Western idea of art, that is the form of the reproduction of
to say, of techne- ” (46). a pure and integral body poli-
tic—was absolutely essential to
11 The hand is particularly unique the Nazi biopolitical operation.
and proper to the human, its On the far side of human intelligi-
obsolescence signifying the loss bility, but also of the official his-
of the human essence, according tory of Nazi atrocities, gay people
to Heidegger (“The Nature of Lan- have been considered for decades
guage”). Derrida examines the unworthy of being included in the
role of the hand in Heidegger’s “official” list of Nazism’s victims
What Is Called Thinking g in his and thus deemed unqualified for
essay “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s any sort of compensation. Those
Hand.” abject referents of biopolitical
sovereignty—others of the Other—
12 For the important relevance of
were condemned to nonrecogni-
“sacred life” and “homines sacri”
tion, relegated to the fringes of
to the political power of manage-
humanity. As “Josef K.” submits
ment of social subjects’ bodily
in Men with the Pink Triangle, the
life, see Agamben, Homo Sacer. r
r.
1947 Austrian law for the protec -
“Homo Sacer,” as a metaphoric
tion of Holocaust victims referred
formulation, bespeaks the biopo-
only to those prosecuted for
litical moment at which human
racial, political, and religious rea-
life is sacralized at the same
sons (Heger). When in 1988, the
time that it is threatened by the
Green Party and the Homosexual
forces of sovereign power. This is
Initiative (hosi) requested that
the moment at which exception
gay people be included among the
and rule become indistinguish-
victims of Nazism, the Austrian
able and modern democracy and
Parliament rejected the request,
totalitarian regime meet each
and so did the three officially rec -
other in the realm of biopolitics.
ognized associations of victims of
As Agamben writes, “Only when
Nazism.
these events [the deportations to
the camps and the final extermi- 15 See “The Origin of the Work of
nation] are brought back to their Art”: “Plant and animal likewise
‘humanitarian’ context can their have no world. [. . .] The peasant
inhumanity be measured” (150). woman, on the other hand, has a
world because she dwells in the
13 Veena Das is right to emphasize
overtness of beings” (230).
that the Holocaust signified the
end of traditional theories of 16 Foucault first alerted us to the
theodicy. interweaving of “biopolitics,” the
management of human life, with
14 If the Jew is “the privileged nega-
“thanatopolitics,” the epistemic
tive referent” of the Nazi biopo-
rationalization and political
litical sovereignty, s/he is by no
administration of death. Exer-
means the only one. An event of
cising sovereignty by means of
particular relevance to the under-
defining, circumscribing, and
standing of Nazi biopolitics was
exercising control over life and
the creation, in 1934, of a special
death is fundamental to the
department of the Gestapo for the
modality of subjection that Fou-
obliteration of homosexuality and
cault called “biopower.”
abortion, the two major “internal
17 It would be interesting, I think, (Being and Time 321). This notion

to read Agamben’s critique of of the “unhomely” assumes a
Heidegger’s emphasis on “factic - special significance if considered
ity” as a concept that denotes in relation to Heidegger’s thought,
the “throwness” of Dasein in where Enframing is taken to be
conjunction with Luce Irigaray’s the signature effect of modern
reading of Heidegger in The For- technology. Samuel Weber has
getting of Air in Martin Heidegger.r
r. alerted us to the fact that place
In her meditative engagement and placing are paramount in
with Heidegger’s work, Irigaray Heidegger’s discussion of mod-
critiques Heidegger’s emphasis ern technology. The relevance of
on the element of earth as the place, (em)placing, or emplace-
ground of life and speech. In her ment to the Heideggerian ren-
words, “perhaps one must remove dition of modern technology is
from Heidegger that earth on ambivalent, however, as the very
which he so loved to walk. To effort to put things in their proper
take away from him this solid place requires—and recognizes—
ground, to rid him of the ‘illusion’ a certain displaceability of things
of a path that holds up under his as well as a certain impropriety of
step—even if it goes nowhere— place. The rhetorical unheimlich-
and to bring him back not only to keitt of the Heideggerian analogy
thinking but to the world of the between the Nazi extermination
pre- Socratics” (2). A question and the agricultural industry
springing from such a discussion is ambivalent in that respect as
of Heidegger’s omission of air and well: the more Heidegger’s anal-
prioritization of earth would be: ogy seeks to place things properly
how does technology’s metaphysi- (in language), the less proper
cal emplacement relate to the fac - those places (and interplace-
ticity of life in Heidegger’s work? ments, e.g., extermination camp/
And further: how does Irigaray’s agricultural factory) turn out to
remembering of airr relate to be. Heidegger’s parallelism can
Derrida’s remembering of spirit be seen, then, as a political move
in Heidegger? Such an “elemen- to reassert the propriety—the
tal” line of critical reading, how- homeliness, as it were—of such
ever, ought to include Heidegger’s interemplacing.
own critique of the loss he saw
in Platonic philosophy (for him 20 In the notorious Serb detention
the inaugural moment of Western camp of Omarska (located in
metaphysics) of a pre- Socratic a former mining complex near
insight into being as physis. the town of Prijedor) in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslim
18 See also Gayatri Spivak’s and Croat women and men were
“Response to Jean-Luc Nancy” interned and systematically
in the same volume (32–51). tortured by their Serb captors.
Women were sexually assaulted
19 The word “unheimlich” becomes and forcibly impregnated and
a term of art for both Sig- kept in rape camps until their
mund Freud and Martin Hei- eighth month of pregnancy to be
degger (Being and Time). The prevented from attempting an
term—translated by Strachey as abortion. Whereas Serbian war
“uncanny” in Freud—denotes the crimes in Kosovo were unequivo-
state of unfamiliarity, the sense cally deemed “genocidal” among
of not-being-at-home. Dasein international officials, in the case
is unheimlich, thrown as it is of Bosnia, the term “genocide”
into the world as “not-at-home” was carefully avoided. The very
nomenclature of political anni- ing discrimination in Eastern

hilation as genocide—i.e., killing Europe, and currently refugees
of the genos (offspring)—is com- and asylum-seekers mainly from
pelled into referential crisis and Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq)
the sexed and gendered character make their last stop before facing
of biopolitical management of the considerable risks—180 m.p.h.
“life” is exposed in all its war- winds, electrocution, squash-
like and deathlike implications. ing at the banks—of crossing the
(Heidegger’s meditation on the Chunnel to England, riding under
“human” configuration of tech- or on top of the luxurious Euro-
nology as techne—i.e., as bringing star passenger train. Red Cross
forth and “giving birth”—assumes officials take pains to explain the
here, in the rape camp, an ambig- camp’s “open-door policy” and to
uous meaning of producing— clarify that the razor-wire fenc -
and de-producing—“life” and ing around the shed is intended
“humanness.”) Due to the brave to “protect” the refugees by repel-
efforts of rape camp survivors, in ling unwanted intrusions into the
June of 1996 the United Nations camp. Interestingly enough, such
International Tribunal for the definitional clarifications and
first time in history recognized reassurances are often articu-
rape as a war crime and a crime lated in diacritic relation to the
against humanity. “concentration camp.” As the
president of the French Red Cross
21 In a different context of political put it: “After all, it is not a concen-
trauma, that of the hibakusha (lit- tration camp. These people have
erally, atom-bombed persons) in traveled thousands of miles to get
Japan, Maya Todeschini offers a here, and it is impossible to make
sensitive ethnographic look at the them believe they can’t go the last
role gender and sexual difference 32 miles” (New York Times Maga-
play in the experience and appro- zine, 14 Apr. 2002, 40).
priation of trauma, showing how
female bodies are constructed 23 Such specters return occasionally
as memorials to the bombing of to haunt the life of our Western
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (102–56). democratic societies. This typi-
cally happens through a strategic
22 Such “reception-camps” oper- recourse to a “corpse-politics,”
ate under the aegis of either the a politics revolving around sym-
Departments of Health and Wel- bolic appropriation of political
fare or the Red Cross. European death: In 1985, American Presi-
governments typically appeal to dent Ronald Reagan visited Bit-
the Red Cross to open or super- burg cemetery, where forty-nine
vise temporary shelters “to get Nazi SS officers are buried. One
the refugees off the streets.” Such year after that notorious symbolic
is the case of Lavrio, located in an gesture, Reagan had to take the
underprivileged area in southern face-saving measure of making
Attica, but also of “centers” of the U.S. a party to the Genocide
ambiguous legal status such as Convention, which called for
the one housed in an old prison in contracting parties to take action
Mytilene on the borderland island under the Charter of the United
of Lesvos, in Greece. Another Nations for the prevention and
such “camp” is the Sangatte suppression of acts of genocide.
camp, in Calais, France, where Even then, there were so many
unpapered refugees (people from reservations by Republican sena-
Kosovo escaping the former Yugo- tors attached to the American
slavia before the Dayton peace signature that the U.S. accession
accords in early 1999, Roma flee- to the convention would not be
meaningfully binding. In May “suicide” in Stammheim prison in

2002, the George W. Bush admin- 1977, their brains were removed
istration decided to formally from their bodies in order to be
renounce any involvement in a forensically examined. The brain
treaty setting up a permanent of Ulrike Meinhof is still in the
international criminal tribunal hands of the authorities and is
designed to prosecute individuals going to be delivered to Meinhof’s
for genocide and crimes against daughters, who intend to bury
humanity. This American repu- it with the rest of their mother’s
diation of the International Crim- remains. Meinhof’s brain had
inal Court involves the “unsign- avowedly been removed in order
ing” of the treaty signed—albeit for scientists to determine the fac-
not ratified—by the Clinton tors accountable for her “person-
administration. ality change”—from a bourgeois
In Europe, the party journalist to a terrorist (Vima 20
of Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s Nov. 2002). For an interesting eth-
extreme-right Front National, nographic treatment of what I call
won seventeen percent of the here “corpse-politics,” see Kath-
national vote in April 2002. In erine Verdery’s excellent analysis
his pre-election campaign, Le of “how dead bodies animate the
Pen called for France to shut study of politics” (23); see also
its European borders, and sug- Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”
gested that illegal immigrants on the question of how the rela-
be put in “transit camps” and tion between resistance, sacrifice,
then deported—language recog- and terror is reconfigured in the
nizable as an echo of the Third exercise of control over life and
Reich. In his public appearances, death.
anti-immigration statements are
combined with overt anti-Semi- 24 Derrida has posed the problem of
tism, racist puns on crematories, the explosive tension between the
remarks about the “inequality of ethic of hospitality and refugee
the races,” and homophobic state- and asylum rights in relation to
ments. In 1987, he likened aids the question of the “open cities,”
patients to lepers “sweating the where migrants may seek refuge
virus through their pores” and from persecution, torture, and
stated that he was “not thrilled at exile in the contemporary world.
the idea of Arab boys having sex How can we continue to envision,
with girls from Strasbourg” (New he asks, a new status for the con-
York Times 6 May 2002, A8). In temporary city as “city of refuge”?
April of 2002, the prime minister (On Cosmopolitanism 5).
and the cabinet of the Netherlands
25 William Farr (1807–83) helped
resigned in response to a report
institutionalize British vital sta-
that pointed to the responsibil-
tistics and the classification of
ity of the Dutch “peacekeepers”
diseases (nosology); he devised
in the massacre of Srebrenica,
the term “nosometry” (“disease
Bosnia, in the summer of 1995.
measurement”) to describe his
And finally, a macabre epilogue
own contribution to the field:
to the history of German “terror-
a new system of recording and
ism” was written by the recent
analyzing vital statistics that
revelation that the brains of three
encompassed not only classifica-
members of the so-called Baader-
tion but also systematic enumera-
Meinhof Gang (Andreas Baader,
tion. For more on the role Farr’s
Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl
work played in the institution of
Raspe) have been lost and possibly
probabilistic laws in the western
destroyed and discarded. It was
world, see Hacking.
revealed that, after the prisoners’
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Athena Athanasiou Technologies of Humanness Aporias of Biopolitics and The Cut Body of Humanity 1

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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 14,

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Technologies of the Human

H ow does one reckon the technologies of the human? But

To bring into question the technologies through which the bio-

the technologies through which bodily entanglement among—and dis-

unified body politic. This act of responding, mediated as it may be by the

In the Realm of the Camp:

As a guiding thought experiment for the problematic in ques-

To the extent that we continue to be haunted by National Social-

the ineluctable signaling of democracy’s demise. Heidegger

In Heidegger, being and technology are interrelated in a critique of meta-

manipulated, and appropriated as an ethical and judicial alibi in order

The (Uninvited) Emergence of the Camp

Let us consider the question of taking up a sign—in particular, the inju-

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in

Several things deserve notice in this gesture of repudiation, wherein

us [. . .] back to the dubiousness against which it warns us” (“The Nature

But what makes the extermination camp a site of meaning in

Ge-stell as “emplacement,” “in order to retain the reference to place and

morphological status as non-human animals—are susceptible to being

symbolic exchange and fusion, the forces of displacement and replacement

“Bare Life” and the Return of the (Other)

Organic “life,” or Heidegger’s physis, is thrown back to the

The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the

In Heidegger’s analysis, “man” is one, “the orderer of the stand-

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even

The essence of technology is the revealing of nature as a standing-reserve

both already given and d brought to experience and thought, “facticity” is

For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to

The camp makes its appearance in Heidegger’s philosophical

Language itself cannot proceed without positing the body, and

Butler’s formulation of the inescapable co-implication of language and the

The concept of people always already

This last section is a meditation on the divergent appropriations

of Foucault’s publicly tortured “body of the condemned” in Discipline and

classificatory logic remains part of an imaginary in which numerical nor-

At the limit of cultural signification of legality stands the tech-

Indeed, how are we to grasp this dilemma of language that

indeed, from the premature circumscription of the norms by

The categorical and numerical order of cultural identification

to be conceded that there can be nothing politically innocent or anodyne

tion that works through massive and centralized tactics of subservience

which the existence of refugee camps on the periphery of Southeastern

I try to read the German newspapers as infrequently as possible

The baleful echoes of Nazism in the contemporary resurgence

atopolitics, the episteme of speculation on and rationalization of death:

athena athanasiou is a social anthropologist. She teaches at the University of Thessaly,

Notes 1 Agamben elaborates on the nov- rhetorical mode of à propos (i.e.,

politico-ethical limit, as well as that this conceptual phantasm is,

5 Writing in reference to the 7 The valorization of question

10 The relevance of “waste” to the enemies” of the German nation

17 It would be interesting, I think, (Being and Time 321). This notion

nomenclature of political anni- ing discrimination in Eastern

meaningfully binding. In May “suicide” in Stammheim prison in

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.

Das, Veena. “Sufferings, Theodicies, Disciplinary Practices, Appropriations.” International