Homo Sacer in US Deportations

 I was going to post about how much I like toys, which toys I enjoyed as a kid, etc. 

But I can't get over a story (one of many) about the Venezuelan men deported--against a federal judge's orders--to a brutal prison in El Salvador.

Here's a skeet about it.

 

Do I know if the man is lying? No. Do I know whether he is, as alleged by Trump's ICE, a member of a violent gang? No.

Does it matter? Not as far as my horror at this act goes. 

Way back in the bad old days of the Iraq invasion, philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote about homo sacer (sacred man, set-aside man). This refers to the classification of biological human life excluded (set apart) from consideration as a fully political person. It was possible, Agamben wrote, to kill homo sacer without it being a crime. Homo sacer isn't so much murdered as exterminated. Agamben's larger argument suggested that something like this figure forms the necessary counterpoint to human rights discourse. When there exist "humans" with "rights," there also exists homo sacer--the human being with no rights. 

Human rights are, in theory, universal. In practice, however, they require systems that recognize and honor such rights. These systems in turn inevitably distinguish between the humans who "count" as having rights and those who, for some reason, do not. Different eras offer different social-political technologies that define such groups: enslaved people, women, the poor, immigrants, unhoused people, children and adolescents, disabled people, queer people, incarcerated people, elderly people, Black or Indigenous or POC folk. The 2000s provided ample opportunities to see Agamben's theory play out: "enemy combatants," some of whom still languish in Guantanamo in a legal limbo. These "terrorists" were denied even Geneva Conventions consideration. It became legal to commit acts (torture, indefinite detention, lack of habeus corpus) that would be war crimes if committed against others.

Many of these technologies persist for these groups. Right now, "citizenship" seems to be asserting itself once more as a major dividing line between humans with rights and "others" whom it is legal to mistreat. This isn't new. "The right to have rights" has long been one of the major defining features of citizenship. The notion disrupts ostensibly universal human rights discourse--don't rights inhere in humanity itself? 

As I tell my students, however, the core question of politics is "Who counts?" Which humans count as human? Which humans actually get considered as such by the State (and arguably by culture, the economy, etc.)? As long as that question exists, the possibility of not counting--or of counting not as much--persists. Indeed, how are the ones who count able to know what "counting" means except via constant reference to those who don't count as much? There's an old lefty adage that we have prisons to convince those not in prison that they're free. I know I have rights, in one sense, only to the extent that I can imagine and point to those who do not. That imagining and pointing can all too easily create or rationalize classes of homo sacer.

The men kidnapped and deported to a torture space under an authoritarian dictator--they are homo sacer. They have been deemed as "not counting"--apparently not endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. We don't know--can't know--whether they are actually guilty, let alone debate whether their guilt justifies shipping them off into what amounts to a concentration camp. We are expected simply to take the word of an administration whose first two months have been defined by incompetence, cruelty, and power-grabbing.

It is the job of every person who invokes the stirring rhetoric of human rights, of liberty and equality and democracy, to speak out against the curtailment of these rights. We must not claim the right to have rights--and then slam the door behind us, locking everyone else out into the space of bare existence as homo sacer.

God help those imprisoned there--and everywhere. Help those living in fear of being kidnapped by the State and sent into hell. Save them, Lord who sets prisoners free.