No to Bio-Political Tattooing
By Giorgio Agamben
Le Monde Saturday 10 January 2004
The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and thats why I didnt wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New York University in March.
I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is, why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.
Its not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.
The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.
Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.
All the same, it wouldnt be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques.
Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.
What is at stake here is nothing less than the new normal bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the bodys biological life.
These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that its humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.
Some years ago, I had written that the Wests political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.
I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the states gears and mechanisms. Thats why we must oppose it.
Translated from Italian to French by Martin Rueff.
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Italy to fingerprint all Roma gipsy children
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 9:20PM BST 26/06/2008
Around 80,000 gipsy children are to be fingerprinted by the Italian authorities under a new scheme that has drawn comparisons to the policies of Benito Mussolini.
Unicef said it was 'shocked and deeply worried' by Italy's plans to fingerprint all Roma children
The Italian government has blamed immigrants, and particularly Roma gipsies, for the country's crime problems.
Since Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister in April, gypsy camps in the south and north of the country have been burned by vigilante mobs.
The home minister, Roberto Maroni, has now announced that all the Roma will be fingerprinted, including children. "This is not ethnic cataloguing, this is the ultimate safeguard of their rights," he said.
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Minister will Fingerprints aller Italiener
Kurier Artikel vom 11.07.2008 16:17 | apa | sk
Nach Protesten gegen die italienische Roma-Datei hat der Verteidigungsminister vorgeschlagen, allen Einwohnern Fingerabdrücke zu nehmen.
Weltweit wurde gegen die in Italien geplante Datei für Roma protestiert. Nun, die Proteste bewirkten anscheinend etwas. Ob dies im Interesse der Protestierenden liegt, ist aber fraglich. Der italienische Verteidigungsminister hat nämlich vorgeschlagen, doch schlicht und einfach allen Italienern die Fingerabdrücke zu nehmen. "Auf diese Weise wird man uns nicht mehr des Rassismus bezichtigen können", sagte der Verteidigungsminister im Interview mit der römischen Tageszeitung Il Messaggero.
Ignazio La Russa, Spitzenpolitiker der Rechtspartei Alleanza Nazionale, kritisierte die Resolution des Europaparlaments, in der die Erfassung von Fingerabdrücken der im Land lebenden Roma als diskriminierend bezeichnet wird. Die Abnahme der Fingerabdrücke sei ein Weg, um die Identität der vielen minderjährigen Roma festzustellen, die in Italien in illegalen Behelfsiedlungen leben. "Das EU-Parlament nutzt das Thema Roma für politische Propaganda aus, ohne sich um das Schicksal der Roma-Kinder zu kümmern", meinte La Russa. Die italienische Regierung habe sich als Ziel genommen, viele Kinder zu retten, die jetzt von Bettlerbanden ausgenutzt werden.
Die Maßnahme der italienischen Regierung sei eine eindeutige Diskriminierung, erklärten die EU-Abgeordneten. Es solle überprüft werden, ob das Vorgehen mit EU-Recht vereinbar sei. Italien hatte erklärt, die Erfassung der Fingerabdrücke sei zur Verbrechensbekämpfung notwendig.
Humanitäre Gründe
Die italienische Regierung protestierte vehement gegen die Resolution des Europaparlaments. Innenminister Roberto Maroni berichtete, dass Italien "aus rein humanitären Gründen" eine Zählung der in illegalen Barackensiedlungen lebenden Menschen begonnen habe. Diese Camps, in denen die Lebensbedingungen unannehmbar seien, seien in den letzten Jahren unerlaubt an der Peripherie von Rom, Mailand und Neapel entstanden. Mit dieser Initiative wolle man die Identität der vielen Menschen ergründen, die illegal, ohne medizinische Betreuung und ohne Rechte in den Camps leben. Die Regierung wolle keineswegs eine Zählung der Roma auf ethnischer Basis durchführen, sondern illegale Barackensiedlungen abbauen, erklärte Maroni.
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