No to Bio-Political Tattooing
                             by Giorgio Agamben
                                  Le Monde
                              10 January 2004


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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     Reprinted for Fair Use Only.




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