Problem Zagłady w ujęciu Giorgio Agambena

• Authors: Mirosław Miniszewski

Title variants

EN

GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF GENOCIDE

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

In my paper I present Giorgio Agamben’s critical approach to state of emergency which is the paradigm of modern politics. Concentration camps are a special case of State of Emergency as areas where, by law, the rules of law are not applicable anymore. It causes a paradoxical situation which allows for the exclusion of people placed in camps from any order of rules of law. Agamben writes that the process of formation of concentration camps lasted throughout all the Western Civilization. The instance of excluding (bando) and its manifestation as concentration camps is constitutive for this process. This generates a contaminated notion of “Bandit” (bandito) and “Outlaw” (bannitus) in one. This conceptual conjunction causes political indistinguishability of excluded human being from an ordinary criminal because of his political or biological uselessness. Agamben’s considerations lead to the conclusion that formation of State of Emergency in an area of political state is an attempt to reconstruct “State of Nature” within Hobbes’ understanding. This is possible because of ambivalence of human life understood as Political Life (βιοc) and Biological Life (ζωή) – this division originates from Ancient Greece. Agamben calls the procedure of splitting “The Antropological Machine”. Agambenian analyses are for me a starting point not only for reflection upon events of mass extermination, but, in the first place, for a critical approach towards the colonial era which allowed for mass extermination in the modern era at all, but first authorizing itself within ideological concepts of Western civilization, and legitimizing itself by means of Western civilization.

Keywords

EN

GENOCIDE; CONCENTRATION CAMPS; STATE OF EMERGENCY; WESTERN; CIVILIZATION; ANTROPOLOGICAL MACHINE

• Publisher: Bialystok University Press
• Journal: Archeus. Studia z bioetyki i antropologii filozoficznej
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 12
• Pages: 235-257

Contributors

author

Mirosław Miniszewski

• Wyższa Szkoła Administracji Publicznej, im. Stanisława Staszica, ul. Dojlidy Fabryczne 26, 15–555 Bialystok,POLAND