Agamben and colonialism : [recenzija]

Abstract

"Agamben and Colonialism" collects papers that consider and reinterpret Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical work – his concepts of sovereignty, bare life, ban, abandonment, exception, inclusive exclusion, state of emergency, camp, and homo sacer, among others – in the context of Western colonialism. Although Agamben’s work is situated in the Western political tradition, different forms of exclusion, abandonment and violence, including camps, were developed first in the colonies before being transferred back to domestic European societies only later, in what Hannah Arendt called a kind of ‘boomerang effect’ (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, 1979, p. xvii). Indeed, since the development of the legal code of warfare in the Middle Ages, there was a distinction between a chivalric code of conduct, bellum hostile, a supposedly fair and honorable contest among equals, and bellum romanum, regarding conflicts between Christians and relatively lawless and unrestrained non-Christians. Bellum romanum therefore meant that the rule of law was suspended in the alleged ‘chaos’ of the non-Christian world. Later, with the rise of Western European colonialism, the principle of terra nullius defined colonies as juridically empty spaces – sites where ‘sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law’, as Achille Mbembe has put it (‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1 [2003]: 11-40, 23). The colonies thus became a blueprint for different practices of exclusion, abandonment and violence.