Agamben describes this as both an “anthropological machine”

and a “biopolitical apparatus.” As anthropological machine, it has generated our characteristic

ways of thinking, speaking, and enacting the human. It has created the clearing between

animality and humanity in which our form of life has appeared. As a biopolitical apparatus, it has

produced the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It has constructed the aporia between the

human being and the human person into which countless millions have disappeared. Through

these our animality has developed into rationality, sociality, and spirituality. Yet through these

same we have devolved again and again into barbarity. Because of this, Agamben chillingly

concludes that machine and apparatus are inseparable. Our humanism is not the antithesis of our

inhumanity. It is instead its genesis. We cannot repent of the latter unless we recant the former.

Agamben’s topography of the political thus leads us into a no man’s land. The

sites of the city and the camp are not two distinct topographies, two separate spatiopolitical

forms. The city and the camp are a single topology, one spatiopolitical form whose function is

continuous through its inversion.1 We are caught, then, in the threshold, the caesura, the aporia,

the antinomy between the anthropological machine and the biopolitical apparatus.

The issue, argues Agamben, is not that human rights came to be perplexed extrinsically by a form of power possible only in the cultural, social, and

technological conditions of modernity. Rather, law and order are always and already vexed

intrinsically by a political rationality that first divided man from animal in antiquity. The

prerogative of national sovereignty exercised in the interwar Minority Treaties and established as

the exceptional power of police order and internment camps did not, as Arendt writes,

“transform the state from an institution of the law into an institution of the nation.”2 The state

always has been an instrument of the nation, as has the law itself. Natality and nationality are

inseparable. Given the underlying biopolitical rationality of the law, the state of exception is both

an ineliminable stateform and an inexorable situation. The Shoah is its inescapable conclusion,

its all but inevitable culmination. Auschwitz always was, and always will be latent in the

juridical rationality of Western liberalism. Following Benjamin, on whom he relies in order to

correct and complete the work of Arendt, Schmitt, and Foucault, Agamben insists, “[T]he

emergency situation has everywhere become the rule.”3 All of us, each person and every citizen

is a Muselmann, potentially if not yet actually. It is only a matter of time.4

Woodard-Lehman