ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the apparent paradox, which is structured around a tripartite reading of Giorgio Agamben's exception, as his discussion of the processes and effects of the suspension of normative law has three major facets: legal-political, biopolitical, and spatial. The state of exception describes simultaneously the legal-political state of emergency or siege, the status of bare life within the biopolitical system of modernity, and the location of the camp within a disciplinary institutional constellation. It discusses the form of bare life observed in the concentrationary space, homo sacer, and the ways that this subject is discursively constructed as deserving his exclusion from the political. The chapter draws on the work of writers such as Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, and Derek Gregory in order to demonstrate the relevance of Agamben's discussions of sovereignty, governmentality, and violence to both the colony and the post-9/11 global war prison.
