"Camping" as a Contemporary Strategy - From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities

Abstract

To be sure, the techniques of total exclusion from human togetherness were first developed in the colonies. However, once invented and perfected, they did not cease to come back to Europe; indeed, what the European Christian bourgeois could not truly forgive and forget regarding Hitler was “not the crime of genocide, but the crime of having applied to Europe the colonialist actions” (Bauman 2002: 3). The Nazi’s real crime was to bring the homo sacer to Europe. Today the homo sacer is in the West and is so in many, old and new, ways, in expected and unexpected situations. This paper deals with the situation of the asylum seeker, who, being “human as such”, is more than anything else an instantiation of the homo sacer. And as Arendt wrote long ago, the “conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human” (quoted in Agamben 1998: 126). Not much has changed since her time, and the confrontation with the refugee remains in our own time an acid test for politics, a confrontation that incessantly brings into play the “scandal of the human as such” (Dillon 2001: 114). However, the contemporary system into which refugees are enrolled is designed to keep refugees off