Re: [-empyre-] What is Bare Life?

[Susana Mendes Silva <arslonga@netcabo.pt>]

On Jul 12, 2006, at 8:19 PM, Christina McPhee wrote:

> > Indeed, Auschwitz - a space in which the state of exception became  
> > the norm, where law was completely suspended - marks the end and  
> > the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The  
> > bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor  
> > conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely  
> > immanent. And 'the ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species'  
> > cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity.[viii]
> >
> > The Muselmann, Agamben concludes, the most extreme expression of  
> > this new knowledge, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics  
> > that begins where dignity ends.
> > (...) With our political order turning into a state of emergency,  
> > or state of exception, Agamben argues, this bare life, trembling  
> > on the threshold between the human and the inhuman, "becomes both  
> > subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the  
> > one place for both the organization of State power and  
> > emancipation from it."[ix] Corpus is a two-faced being.
> excerpted from "Bare Life and the Occupied Body" by Diane Enns,  
> Theory & Event, 7.3, 2004



Christina asked me about "art_room",

> > Erotic emotions and fears in the anonymous exchange  'ask me  
> > anything you want to know about contemporary art.?"   would it be  
> > different if  we substituted 'anything you want to know about  
> > guantanamo?'

yes, it would be very different if the sentence was: 'anything you  
want to know about guantanamo?'.
I am very disturbed about what is the concept behind that...a place  
without international laws...what would Kant think of this? He, who  
imagined the Society of Nations?




---------------------------------------------
susana mendes silva
www.susanamendessilva.com
arslonga@netcabo.pt

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