File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0407, message 36


Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 03:26:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Schaefer: "Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben Protests US Travel Policies"




What the NYTs Choose Not to Mention
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben Protests US Travel
Policies

http://www.counterpunch.org/schaeffer01232004.html

By STANDARD SCHAEFER 

In an act of protest, world-renown Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben has cancelled plans to teach atNew
York University and UCLA because of the United States'
new policy of photographing and fingerprinting foreign
visitors. Described by the New York Times and Newsday
as a mere professor of philosophy and aesthetics,
Agamben has written extensively about the holocaust
and questions of political sovereignty. 

These news organizations, however, described his
protest as being based on a simple comparison between
the new US policy and Hitler’s concentration camps.
The New York Times gave the final word to Sheldon E.
Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on
Education, noting that he “was not aware of other
professors who had declined to come to the United
States because of its fingerprinting policies.”
Steinbach himself said, "There is an undertone of
massive paranoia that is speculative and anticipatory
that is seemingly permeating some elements of the
professoriate.'' 

In truth, Agamben explained his position in the
Italian daily La Repubblica with great care that
hardly resembles any knee-jerk reaction: "Because I do
not wish to undergo such a procedure, I immediately
cancelled the lecture I was scheduled to give in March
inNew York University." An over-reaction? Agamben
explains that he made the decision, "despite my liking
for the American students and professors, who I have
felt bound to in friendship and work for many years." 

The New York Times abbreviated his position omitting
the context in which he makes his comparison. Here is
a more complete version and a better translation: 

"A few years ago I wrote that the political model of
the west is not the city but the concentration camp,
not Athens but Auschwitz. That was, of course, a
philosophical, not a historical thesis. This is not
about mixing phenomena that must be separated. I only
want to remind readers that the tattooing in Auschwitz
possibly appeared as 'normal' and economic in order to
regulate the admission of the deportees to the camp.
The bio-political tattooing, which we are forced to
undergo today in order to enter the United States is a
relay race to what we could tomorrow accept as the
normal registration of the identity of the good
citizen considering the mechanisms and machinery of
the state.” 

It is not at all rash and is very much worth
considering, especially because Agamben belongs to the
tradition of philosophy that includes Michel
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

Agamben’s positions is particularly honorable
considering that as an Italian citizen he is exempt.
Twenty-seven countries, limited largely to Bush’s
hallucinatory pro-war coalition, have been exempted
from the policy that began this month and subjects
foreigners to photographing and fingerprinting. He
says his position is one of solidarity with those
excluded from the exemption. 

In his philosophical writings, Agamben has repeatedly
explored notions of exemption that would be
threatening to US interests. He has also written
critically about issues of the nation state, most
famously asking, do we really care “to solve the
Palestinian question in a way just as insufficient as
the way in whichIsrael has solved the Jewish
question.” 
Agamben teaches at the University of Verona, the
College International de Philosophie in Paris and the
University of Macerata in Italy. Recently, he has been
a visiting professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the University
of California, Los Angeles.

Standard Schaefer is a free-lance journalist and can
be reached at ssschaefer-AT-earthlink.net. 



===="What war is not a private affair, and, inversely, what wound is not a war that comes from society as whole?"

- Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (1969)


	
		
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