Text for the publication Domènec. A century of European Architecture, edited by MAC – Mataró Art Contemporani in the context of Manifesta 15. Barcelona Metropolitana.  December 2024

 

One form of concentration camp can be a hotel, at the price of fifty pounds sterling per night, in a shared room. This is how Marco Martins documents it in the film Great Yarmouth. Provisional Figures (2022). In Norfolk County, the friendly coastal town that was once recognized as a tourist enclave, ended up becoming the destination of a large migrant population, confined without documentation in ramshackle hotels and enslaved in turkey meat processing factories. The example is only somewhat arbitrary for a quantitative matter. Just as Domènec’s proposal “A Century of European Architecture” contains up to twenty-two examples of literal concentration camps scattered throughout the continental geography along the twentieth century, on the streaming platform Filmin, the search “concentration camps” offers, to date, 45 titles found. These different signs of numerical order harbour the same eloquence with multiple derivatives: neither the concentration camp is exceptional – we will have to return to this – nor does the exhibition of its intricacies repel us. Everything suggests, in some way, that the concentration camp obeys a certain inevitability or, in other words, arises as a structural effect of certain causes that, far from being few and far between, remain embedded in the anthropological and political paradigm of modernity. From this perspective, any quantitative approach to the notion of camp, beyond its condition as an archive of real injustices, contains enough data to challenge the nonsense that inhabits the interior of any notion of ideal justice.

Ideals, whatever they may be, do not belong to this world, but operate as slogans to correct it according to a certain value regime. Hence, even what is just, like any principle on which a social utopia is organized, entails a division. A regulated world is a world divided between what fits value and what remains on the outside. If the camp is so numerous, so variable and so geographically extended, it is because it refers to this vast outside that is always there, despised and made available for exploitation or abandonment. It could be said that the hotel – concentration camp – that Tania governs in Great Yarmouth does not respect this argument since, of course, it is illegal and, consequently, no matter how much the locals act as accomplices, the existence of this camp does not obey the law (it should be remembered that even Auschwitz was protected by decree). The migrants who come to the place, in principle, would not be properly excluded from the value regime, but relegated to such a peripheral condition within the regime itself – provisional figures – that at any moment they can be pushed out. But a minimally attentive look makes it clear that division prevails and, with it, there is always a remainder. In Great Yarmouth, in fact, there is another camp, atrocious and bloodthirsty, in which hundreds of turkeys are slaughtered daily by the unfortunate sons of Saul[1].

There is no concentration camp without division and the most elementary caesura is the one that, within the living being, distinguishes an animal condition and a possible rational condition. Hence, within the framework of humanism, there is room for the slaughterhouse without any remorse. But it would be too easy to interpret the existence of the camps as the result of the simple animalization of certain human individuals. There is no doubt that a camp is a technical device whose function is to accelerate the process of dehumanization of inmates, but its condition of possibility lies in very deep legal and ideological artifices. Roberto Esposito has reconstructed in detail how archaic Roman law formulates the categorical distinction between the “natural man” – for whom it may or may not be appropriate to enjoy a personal status – and the entity “person” itself, that which in the body is more than the body and which is the basis of its brain, social and civic dimension. The purpose of this division is none other than to allow the preparation of a sophisticated catalogue of gradation of the person device. Those who have overcome their dimension as natural men to favour the full deployment of their rational potentialities will become integral persons; at the other end, those individuals who remain anchored in their primitive “naturalness” must be considered defective persons. Between the two extremes, the panoply of possibilities can be as extensive as one intends (semi-person – provisional figure –, non-person – animal –, anti-person – mad person –…). The final horizon of this argument is the clarification of the applicability of the lawful rights. The complete person is the unequivocal subject with full rights while, in its gradual downward decline, that same subject is progressively dispossessed of privileges until he ends up confined to the concentration camp: the place where the definitive suspension of the rights takes place. Of course, the key point of this reasoning lies in the arbitrariness that affects the recognition of the threshold that separates integral person from defective person. The defect that makes any individual or community eligible to enlarge the population of a camp may consist in the most diverse anomaly: recognizing him as an enemy, as a Jew, as an impious or as an animal. What holds the power to discern this terrible border is, quite simply, the power.

As Giorgio Agamben has argued, power, based on that caesura that is now expressed by the terms zoe (the mere metabolic life common to all living beings) and bios (life endowed with a complement of language and politics), must be understood as a kind of judgment by which it is determined which lives are qualified to form a body of citizenship and which, on the contrary, remain in a precarious state that makes them despicable and exterminable. This expendable remnant of life – naked life – is, consequently, a production of power itself to the same extent that it also produces citizens with full rights. The two poles derived from the caesura are direct effects of sovereign power since this is always biopolitics, a mandate over life that can only command and correct it through its division. It does not matter whether this biopolitics is resolved by the orthodox way – letting people live and making people die – or by becoming its necropolitical variant – making people live and letting people die. Power, insofar as it aspires to exercise domination, is nothing more than the delimitation, on the appropriate scale, of a domus – a house, a space regulated and governed by a dominus, a head of the family, owner and master – whose function is to offer shelter to those who deserve to be inside and to keep outside those who endanger the rule. The historical failure in the application of Human Rights is not due to the lack of forcefulness in the defence of the category of person but, on the contrary, to the very ideology of the person by which they are condemned to a division that classifies and hierarchizes them. The concentration camp, in this key, is the negative of the space of the domus produced by the same logic that builds it. The camp is the shed attached to the domus where bare, naked life is confined – as is literally stated in The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer; 2023) – which is no longer so much an object of domination – it has been expelled from the house and hence lacks the principle of law that organises it – as of extraction or annihilation.

The production of naked life is functional. What is confined to the camp, susceptible to exploitation, enslavement, discard, or extermination, fulfils a certain role as the foundation of the power that governs the house. In its most elementary profile, this shed is the mere warehouse where the life dispossessed of rights is stored as a food supply or as the free workforce that sustains the well-being of the domus; in turn, in the most sophisticated version, the camp has the immunity function of identifying and confining the dangers that lurk in the established domain. Power is power to the extent that it is in danger of being lost. To hold power is to be threatened by some risk. Every community, established and mobilized from a principle of identity of any order (racial, theological, ideological…), at the same time that it is constituted as a family in which individual barriers are suspended, demands to be immunized against those differences that pose a risk to its supposed idiosyncrasy. In this situation, the camp is one of the consequences of the preventive neutralization of the danger exercised by any state of law, legitimized to enact states of exception that allow the repeal of law and the reduction to naked life of those who pose a threat. Any regime of power, therefore, harbours the outline of a camp, including the model of liberal democracies. If today the camps camouflaged in all kinds of variants are proliferating, it is because of the progressive conversion of the rule of law – the one that in principle would have the purpose of dispelling fear and establishing social tranquillity – into Security State – the one that is based on the promotion of enemies and fear to strengthen its rules of domination. The greater the promotion of dangers, the greater the definition of situations as exceptional and risky for the communal domus, then the greater the legitimacy of power to suggest the identification of actors and, above all, the greater the basis for suspending their full condition. With these ingredients in place, the proliferation of camps is inevitable, whether they are as ordinary and explicit as Guantánamo, or disguised under the precautionary rhetoric as in Lesbos or any Foreigner Detention Centre. Referring to the concentration camps that populated the European geography throughout the twentieth century is therefore not a mere exercise in historical memory but archaeology of the present.

[1] Saul fia (Son of Saul). Dir.: László Nemes. 2015. Under the cover of the biblical story, the protagonist, a member of the Sonderkommander, works in the ovens where fellow human beings are annihilated. In a sort of loop, Tania, a Portuguese and first-generation immigrant to Norfolk, does the same when she confines her compatriots between the hotel and the slaughterhouse.