Week 11: 'What is a Camp?'

(On Giorgio Agamben's "What is a Camp?"
Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, Ch 5
and Amy Kaplan's "Where is Guantanamo?"

In one of my courses last year, I had the opportunity to discuss the concept of state in reference to Agamben's text on camp and exile. It was interesting to delve into that same text even more to apply his philosophy to race in the recent past and contemporary times by reading it with Ngai and Kaplan's texts. Ngai describes the internment and other mistreatment of Japanese Americans as a result of the sentiment during and after World War II. Kaplan similarly describes the situation Guantanamo and the experience of those involved with the space.

Agamben writes, "this institution is dissolved by the state of exception on which it was founded and is allowed to continue to be in force under circumstances. The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule.In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law" (389). There is a lot packed into those few sentences and I am far from thoroughly understanding what he means, but as far as I can tell, the nature of the concept of campe is based on the 'state of exception' and the consequential rearrangement to justify or blur the glaring discrepancy. This reminds me of Locke's theory of the natural state and transgressors as exceptions. Him as well as other thinkers seem to maintain the similar idea of exception and 'camp' to separate differences.