ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a few of Giorgio Agamben concepts' relevance and power for certain sorts of transformative work. Agamben bases his concept not only on that of Schmitt but also on that of Walter Benjamin, which was supposedly established as a response to national emergency, had become no longer an exception but the rule. Silvia Grinberg makes similar use of Agamben's concepts of the camp, the state of exception, and homo sacer in her analysis of Buenos Aires shantytowns. "Of course," she writes, "shantytowns are not concentration or refugee camps. But they live on the symbolic border of the nation, occupying an ambivalent 'inside/outside' citizenship status." Races then represented developmental stages along the way toward human perfection, which meant that some were superior and some inferior to others. Superior races approached the human ideal, while inferior races moldered in developmental retardation or total arrest; some might even be regressing toward savagery and extinction.
