The Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo

A few weeks ago, just before leaving Providence, I read a new pamphlet from Prickly Paradigm Press, Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo . It's an anthropology of the U.S. President, along the lines of Carl Schmitt's theses about power and sovereignty. The sovereign, in Schmitt, is the one who has the power to decide what is the exception (the state of emergency, martial law, response to the threat of civil war, etc.) In the U.S., the sovereign decides the happy exception of a pardoned Thanksgiving turkey or (unlikely, for this president) a pardoned prisoner, as well as the dire exceptions: the establishment of a camp in which U.S. laws do not apply.

OK, it's canny of Fiskesjö to have focused on the persistence of this ceremony, the pardoning of the turkey. And it's a delightful bit of reporting, too, to have discovered that these same turkeys, supposedly sent to a farm to "live out their days," are generally dispatched without ceremony not so long after their arrival at the farm--they are genetic freaks, after all, bred for early slaughter, not really capable of a good long life.

And it's quite apt of Fiskesjö to bring up Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, with regard to Guantanamo. There could not be a better or more gruesome example of Agamben's concept of "bare life" than in this month's Vanity Fair, which reports on the rise of suicide attempts at Guantanomo, or, as these acts are called by the camp administrators, "manipulative self-injurious behavior," m.s.i b, an invented syndrome. --One s.i.b.'er was so self-injurious that he is now in a permanent vegetative state. How manipulative of him! But that's what the camp commandant actually says of this wretched being: he says he's "childish." !!!

The pamphlet is onto something, but I wonder about the usefulness of a "weak Agambenianism," as I would call it, or a weak "Schmitt-ism." I mean, the more I read this word, "the sovereign," without context, without history, the less satisfied I am. It's not an eternal condition, is it? I guess it is, according to Schmitt. I think there's something about deploying the concept of sovereignty anthropologically that I don't like.