Minca, Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos

GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS

© The author 2006Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 387

GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THENEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS

byClaudio Minca

Minca, C., 2006: Giorgio Agamben and the new biopoliticalNomos. Geogr. Ann., 88 B (4): 387–403.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I reflect on the progressive normali-zation of a series of geographies of exception within Western de-mocracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new bio-political power that is progressively affirming itself in our every-day lives – and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, se-cret, ontology of the political.

I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and,specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpinshis theory of sovereign power.

Starting from Agamben’s spatial conceptualizations, I explorehis attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of thecontemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in thecrisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt de-scribed as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how thedefinitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had domi-nated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and thelack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the centurywhich followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading somekey episodes in the history of European geography; in particular,the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel’s grand geo-graphical project and the Geopolitik experiment.

What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geo-graphies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vitalthat we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveilthe arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around whichturn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo-biopolitical machine.

Key words: biopolitics, Agamben, Nomos, history of geography,camp

IntroductionOn 7 July 2005, five suicide attacks rip through theheart of London, striking its Underground in par-ticular. The attacks leave fifty-four dead and count-less wounded. On 22 July, two weeks after the at-tacks, a suspected terrorist is shot down by a policeanti-terrorist unit after having been captured on theUnderground. The suspected terrorist is, in fact, aBrazilian electrician who, allegedly seeing himselffollowed by plain-clothes police, decides to fleeand, once reached, is killed with five shots to thehead. His behaviour and clothing (according to theagents, much too heavy for the warm London tem-perature), rendered him an homo sacer (Agamben,1995), a suspected terrorist who can be deliberatelykilled without committing homicide. In the daysthat follow, the police forward their apologies to the

family for the unfortunate error and reassure thatthey will do everything in their power to preventsimilar mistakes in the future. At the same time,however, the official communiqués insist that thepreventive measures which consent shooting to killsuspects in the head (the so-called ‘Operation Kra-tos’ – see la Repubblica, 2005a), introduced in thedays after the July attacks, are absolutely necessaryin order to avert other suicide attacks and to assurethe protection of London’s citizenry. Jean Charlesde Menezes, apparently marked out by his heavyclothing, was killed to protect the body of the popu-lation/citizenry – of which he, in that specific timeand place, suddenly ceased to be part of. The coun-ter-terrorism measures transformed, in place, theelectrician into homo sacer, granting the policeagents absolute sovereign power over him: theright, that is, to define, within the instant, the con-fine between a life worth living and a life that doesnot deserve to live (on some of the controversies re-garding the police’s behaviour that have emerged inthe subsequent months see Cowan, 2005).

This sovereign power is only in part a functionof the identities of the actors involved in that ma-cabre scene; it is, above all, the product of a spaceof exception – the London Underground – thatgranted the agents that extraordinary, arbitrary, de-cisional power. In theory, any of us acting like theBrazilian that day could be killed without a crimehaving been committed. In a regime of exception,all of us can become potential homines sacri for thevery fact that we travel on the Underground; for thefact that we enter into a vast and extraordinaryspace of exception – extraordinary precisely for itsapparent normality. Within this space of exception,the norm and its transgression are decided in themoment; they straddle a mobile confine that we, ascitizens, are not consented to know, but that re-quires us to be ready to die to save ourselves (Cav-alletti, 2005). A confine with respect to which, atany moment, can be decided the threshold betweenour life worth living – and that which can be sup-pressed without committing homicide.

A few months later in Milan, the Italian courts

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© The author 2006Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography388

open an investigation into the activities of twenty-two CIA agents, charged with having kidnappedand deported an Egyptian imam in February 2003(la Repubblica, 2005b). The accusations are fullysubstantiated and an arrest warrant is issued for theagents, causing the Italian government considera-ble embarrassment, as the activities were carriedout in violation of Italian laws and, indeed, Italiannational sovereignty (la Repubblica, 2005c). Just afew weeks before, Le Monde (Chambraud, 2005)had unveiled a series of other similar ‘kidnappings’that had taken place in other European countriesover the past couple of years, as well as countless‘secret flights’ that had transited with their humancargo through the airports of the Old Continent, enroute to undisclosed locations (Leser et al., 2005;see also Amar et al., 2005; Staglianò, 2005). Theexception to the norm, to the juridical order in ef-fect within the national territory, thus becomes notonly systematic, but part and parcel of a veritablestrategy of intervention implicitly consented to byEuropean governments (Leser et al., 2005, p. 25).In the light of these events, we should ask ourselvesif we are today witnessing a definitive paradigmaticbreak in conceptions of the relationship betweenjuridical-political order and territory; if we are fac-ing the creation of an enormous space of exceptionwithin which each and every one of us – in a tem-porary and arbitrary suspension of the norm – canbe potentially whisked away to a secret prison, sim-ilar to in the panoptic nightmare imagined so wellin Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

This paper will remark upon the progressive nor-malization of a series of geographies of exceptionwithin Western democracies and, in particular, therelation of these to the new biopolitical nomos thatis progressively affirming itself in our everydaylives – and that appears to be imposing itself as thenew, secret ontology of the political. The writingsof Giorgio Agamben in these past years have fur-nished a formidable body of reflection regardingthe deep nature of exception in contemporary pol-itics. In particular, Agamben’s notions of homo sac-er and nuda vita (bare life), fundamental pillars ofhis theory of sovereignty, have stimulated count-less disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates andform today key reference points for discussions ofthe political grammar of modernity (see e.g. others,Edkins et al., 2004; Norris, 2003, 2004a, 2004b;also the special issue of Paragraph edited by Dil-lon, 2002). Yet, despite the enormous impact of theItalian philosopher’s work, little has been writtenthus far about the spatial architecture of his

thought. It is my firm belief that Agamben’s theo-retical edifice should be conceived of, above all, asa grand spatial theory; or, better yet, that one of Ag-amben’s most important intuitions is that there is nopolitics, and thus no political analysis, without atheory of space (it is not by chance, in fact, that twoof the principal referents in the elaboration of hisbiopolitical theory of exception are Carl Schmittand Michel Foucault). The concept of the space ofexception is, indeed, key to Agamben’s theoreticalapparatus.

In the pages which follow, I will try to demon-strate how, starting precisely from Agamben’s spa-tial conceptualizations, we can begin to explore hisattempt to trace the contours and the secret coordi-nates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, anomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressivedemolition of that which Carl Schmitt (1998, pp.161–265) described as the ius publicum Europae-um. I will note, moreover, how the definitive disso-lution of the geographical nomos that had dominat-ed the two centuries preceding the First World War(as described by Schmitt), and the lack of a new, al-ternative, geographical nomos in the century whichfollowed, can also be grasped by critically re-read-ing some key episodes in the history of Europeangeography; in particular, the contested legacy of thework of Friedrich Ratzel (and, in part, that of KarlHaushofer). Indeed, both Schmitt (1998, p. 84) andAgamben (2003, p. 48), albeit in different fashion,make reference in their writings to the work of theputative father of political geography. What I willtry to demonstrate here is that to understand thedeep nature of the geographies of exception thatarm the global war on terror, it is vital that we thinkin terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveilthe arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centrearound which turn the wheels of the macabre bio-political machine; a biopolitical machine that to-day’s new global political grammar is perhaps,once again, attempting to bring to its extreme con-sequences.

I cannot hope to tackle the entire spatial archi-tecture of Agamben’s thought here, for such a taskwould require a book; a book which, I believe, it isgeographers’ task to write. What I will try to dohere, rather, is to hint at some of the key spatialquestions raised by Agamben’s work, with somebrief allusions to Ratzel’s grand geographicalproject and to Haushofer’s Geopolitik experiment.I will argue that not only should geography engagewith Agamben’s spatial theory, but it should alsointerrogate the production of a new implicit global



nomos, a new Atlantic nomos that risks translatingitself into a terrifying biopolitical caesura of thebody of the nation and of our individual bodies – asthe new danger evoked today even in the very banaldecision to travel on London’s Underground ap-pears to portend.

The end of the European nomos and the triumph of exceptionAgamben’s considerations on the state of exceptiontake as their starting point the paradox of sover-eignty as presented by Schmitt. According to theGerman legal theorist, the sovereign is he (sic) towhom the juridical order grants the power to pro-claim the state of exception and, thus, to suspendthe order’s very validity. The sovereign, Schmitt in-sists, is at the same time both outside – and inside– the juridical order (see Agamben, 1995, p. 19;1996, p. 84; 2004, pp. 33–34). Agamben remarks,in particular, on that which he defines as the implicittopology of the paradox of sovereignty; that is, themechanism by which the sovereign, possessing thelegal means to suspend the juridical order, placeshimself (legally) outside of the law. This observa-tion is key both to understanding the spatial theoryimplicit in Agamben’s own work but it is also a vitalstarting point for my own attempt to rethink in ex-plicitly geographical terms the spatial nature of thatwhich has been defined as the new biopolitical era.I will begin, therefore, by briefly considering thetwo key spatial-ontological devices that structureAgamben’s theory of exception – the camp and theban – to then move on to a discussion of the sup-posed dissolution of the geographical nomos de-scribed by Schmitt, suggesting some ways in whichan understanding of this latter point can help us tobetter decipher the geographies of decision that ap-pear to guide American geo-biopolitics today.

According to Schmitt, there is no norm applica-ble to chaos. To obtain juridical-political order, a‘normal’ situation must be created. At the sametime, however, any such order is senseless withoutterritorial grounding – and without the meaninggranted by such grounding. In this optic, the occu-pation and denomination of territory thus becomethe foundational ontological gestures, from whichall rights emanate and within which space andright, order and its localization, come together(Schmitt, 1998, p. 26). All rights, all laws are thusapplicable only to specific ‘territorial situations’ –and can only be suspended, with respect to suchspecific ‘situations’, within the exception. Sch-

mitt’s theory of exception is therefore premisedupon the recognition of the necessity of a funda-mental spatial ‘measure’ of the Earth – of a spatialtheory – starting from which both order and the sus-pension of order gain meaning. And what has al-ways been the preoccupation of geography andgeographers if not the spatial measure of the Earth– a measure which, at a certain point in time, cameto be termed ‘geographical space’ (see Farinelli,2003)? Indeed, has not the implicit and explicit def-inition of territorial order always been an essentialtask of geography? In this sense, Schmitt’s DasNomos von der Erde reflects in many ways the spa-tial ontologies of the Ratzelian project – a projectstrategically misread by twentieth century academ-ic geography. The Schmittian theory of exceptionupon which Agamben’s reasoning draws is thusfirmly rooted in geographical theory.

The essence of sovereignty, Schmitt continues(1988, evoked by Agamben, 1995, p. 20; 1996, p.84; 2004, p. 47), is not the monopoly of sanction orrule, but rather the monopoly of decision. The ex-ception, which makes sense only when clearly de-fined in spatial terms, reveals this deep nature ofsovereign authority. In proclaiming the state of ex-ception, the German legal theorist concludes, sov-ereign authority demonstrates that it does not needlaw to create law. The exception is thus more inter-esting than normality: ‘this latter proves nothing,while the exception proves everything […] the rulelives only within the exception’ (Agamben, 1995,p. 20). However, to ‘live’, the rule requires a spatialtheory, a ‘measure’ of the world that grants it ma-teriality and meaning. The juridical order ‘does notoriginally present itself simply as sanctioning atransgressive fact but instead constitutes itselfthrough the repetition of the same act without anysanction, that is, as an exceptional case’ (Agamben,1995, p. 31; 1998, p. 26; see also 2004, pp. 44–49).Such repetition of the exception must, necessarily,be spatialized, for its very existence depends uponits (concrete) location outside of the juridical order,beyond the ‘measure’ that translates space intonorm. The law, Agamben argues (1995, p. 31; 1998,p. 26; see also 2004, p. 54), is rendered into normnot simply because it commands or prescribes butbecause it must first create its sphere of reference in‘normal’ life, it must normalize it. The repetition ofan act without sanction necessitates a where; ne-cessitates a topography that allows for the ground-ing of the (exceptional) act. Such grounding in aconcrete space aims at making possible an impos-sible coincidence between the norm and its trans-

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gression, placing them in a zone of indistinctionwhere the exception gains form, meaning and le-gitimation. It is here that inhabit the sovereign andthe homo sacer – and it is within this terrain that wefind the roots of today’s geographies of exception,geographies of exception that risk transforming allpolitics into a pure biopolitical task.

The exception is, thus, a kind of exclusion, ac-cording to Agamben (1995, pp. 21–22; 1998, pp.17–18), but what truly characterizes the exceptionis that what is excluded in it is not, for this reason,without relation to the norm: indeed, what is ex-cluded in the exception remains in relation to thenorm in the form of the latter’s suspension (2004,pp. 47–54). Agamben terms relation of exceptionthe extreme form of relation within which some-thing is included only by its exclusion: ‘the situa-tion created in the exception has the peculiar char-acteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situ-ation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead in-stitutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinctionbetween the two’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 22; 1998, p.18). From a political point of view, this thresholdrepresents not only the cardinal point of any geo-graphy of exception, but also a fundamental pas-sage in the production of the body of the nation, apassage that can never be complete(d). This thresh-old constitutes, in fact, the most fundamental cae-sura between nascita (birth) – and life – of an in-dividual and nazione (nation); that is, the necessary– though always incomplete – translation of the in-dividual into a member of a greater, biological-ter-ritorial body: exhaustive, totalizing, yet always in-complete. I will say more on this point subsequent-ly.

In the sovereign exception, Agamben (1995, p.23; 1998, p. 19, emphasis added; see also 2004, p.47) continues, ‘what is at issue … is not so muchthe control or neutralization of an excess as the cre-ation and definition of the very space in which thejuridico-political order can have validity’. It is inthis sense that the exception becomes that whichSchmitt terms the ‘fundamental localization’ (Or-tung), a spatial device that ‘does not limit itself todistinguishing what is inside from what is outsidebut instead traces a threshold [the state-space of ex-ception] between the two, on the basis of whichoutside and inside, the normal situation and chaos,enter into those complex topological relations thatmake the validity of the juridical order possible’(Agamben, 1995, p. 23; 1998, p. 19). The ‘spatialordering’ that constitutes for Schmitt the sovereignnomos is not, Agamben (1995, p. 23; 1998, p. 19)

adds, merely ‘a “taking of land” (Landesnahme),the determination of a juridical (Ordnung) and aterritorial (Ortung) order – but above all a “presadel fuori” [a “taking of the outside”], an excep-tion’. And such a presa del fuori is performed,again, on eminently geographical turf; that is, theterritory and its spatial ‘measure’.

The entire edifice of Das Nomos von der Erde isfounded, in fact, upon the analysis – and prospecteddemise – of the European nomos; that is, of a globalspatial order founded upon the existence of anenormous space of exception, the extra-Europeanone; a space where the European order was sus-pended, but at the same time with respect to whichit was constituted and found its meaning. Thethreshold of exception is, then, presented by Ag-amben since the opening pages of Homo Sacer asthe focal point of an exquisitely geographical the-ory. The space of exception constitutes, for Agam-ben, the original nomos, the founding gesture of thepolitical space of modernity, the ontological devicethat lies at the roots of the modern nation-state andits potential translation into a biopolitical machine.The camp is the paradigm of this political space;the structure of the ban its translation into geo-graphical terms.

The campIn its archetypal form, the state of exception istherefore the principle of every juridical local-ization, since only the state of exception opensthe space in which the determination of a cer-tain juridical order and a particular territoryfirst becomes possible. As such, the state ofexception itself is thus essentially unlocaliza-ble (even if definite spatio-temporal limits canbe assigned to it from time to time).

(Agamben, 1995, p. 24; 1998, p. 19)

Here lies the geographical arcanum that any con-temporary theory of exception must take into con-sideration – and that Agamben’s reflections finallybring to light. The nexus between the localization(Ortung) and ordering (Ordnung) that constitutethe ‘nomos of the Earth’ for Schmitt (1998) con-tains within it ‘a fundamental ambiguity, an unlo-calizable zone of indistinction or exception that, inthe last analysis, necessarily acts against it as aprinciple of its infinite dislocation’ (Agamben,1995, p. 24; 1998, pp. 19–20). This explains why,‘when our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a per-manent and visible localization, the result was the



concentration camp’. The camp is thus the spacethat is opened when the state of exception begins tobecome the rule and gains a permanent spatial form(Agamben, 1996, p. 37).

The camp as a space of exception is, in fact, aportion of territory which lies outside of the jurid-ical order – but is, none the less, not simply a spaceexternal to that order. As Gregory (2004a, p. 258)rightly notes, in the camp ‘the external and the in-ternal are articulated not to erase the outside but toproduce it as the serial spacing of the exception, forever inscribing exclusion through inclusion’. Thepolitical system thus no longer orders forms of lifeand juridical rules in a determinate place but, in-stead, contains at its very centre what Agambenterms a ‘dislocating localization’ that exceeds itand into which every form of life and every normcan be virtually taken. The camp, as ‘dislocating lo-calization’, may thus be seen as the hidden matrixof modern politics:

the birth of the camp in our time appears as anevent that decisively signals the political spaceof modernity itself. It is produced at the pointat which the political system of the modernnation-state, which was founded on the func-tional nexus between a determinate localiza-tion (the territory) and a determinate political-juridical order (the State) and mediated by au-tomatic rules of the inscription of life (nascitaor nazione), enters in a lasting crisis, and theState decides to assume directly the care of thenation’s biological life as one of its tasks.(Agamben, 1995, p. 197; 1998, pp. 174–175)

The transformation of the state of exception into apermanent spatial order thus corresponds to thedefinitive rupture of the territorial nomos that hadproduced – and had been produced by – the modernEuropean nation-state. And while the aim of Euro-pean bourgeois geography1 of the nineteenth andearly decades of the twentieth century had beenprecisely to describe, inscribe and legitimize thisvery political-institutional-territorial structure(Agamben’s triad of state-nation-territory), the dis-solution of the European nomos, of the Europeanglobal order, and the accordant abandonment ofany attempt to link life and right to a comprehen-sive spatial theory, will result in a violent emer-gence of the biopolitical. The attempt to cancel theambiguity of the original spatialization becomes,indeed, the supreme biopolitical task of the nation-state. The space of exception thus remains unloca-

lizable so long as its nature as a threshold is notmade explicit within a concrete zone of indistinc-tion – within a geography of exception – with re-spect to which the hidden matrix that lies at the or-igin of the camp is transformed into a permanentsuspension of order and, paradoxically, becomesthe norm. Finding the language to describe this per-manent suspension and the almost mystical natureof its original spatialization is, I believe, geogra-phy’s most pressing task today.

Today’s war on an unlocalizable terror is loca-lized with ‘intelligent weapons’ and the appearanceof (more or less) invisible prisons – prisons that cer-tainly exist somewhere, though their exact locationand inhabitants are unknown (Gregory, 2004a). It isfor this reason, perhaps, that the rendering explicitof the Guantanamo experiment (see Butler, 2002,2004) is a fundamental starting point from whichwe can begin to decipher the nature of a new nomosthat struggles to affirm itself as something morethan mere force/action rendered into norm; anomos unable to think itself as spatial theory andwhich, for this reason, produces the conditions thatallow for the localized transcendence of biopoliticsinto tanatopolitics. This transcendence is usuallypresented by sovereign power as an error, a failure,a ‘crack in the project’ while, in fact, the contem-porary camp is the boundary between the insideand the outside of the new order and, as such, mustbe translated into geography, must be territorial-ized. So is what we are witnessing, indeed, the at-tempt of the new nomos to inscribe itself upon theEarth? If the aim of the permanent state of excep-tion is, indeed, to impose a new global nomos, canit do so without a new spatial theory, without a new‘measure’ of the Earth?

The banWe have thus seen that while the exception consti-tutes the ‘deep’ structure of sovereignty, it is also‘the originary structure in which law refers to lifeand includes it in itself by suspending it’ (Agam-ben, 1995, p. 34; 1998, p. 28). Agamben, followingJean-Luc Nancy, terms the ban this potenza2 of thelaw ‘to maintain itself in its own privation’, to applyby ‘(dis)applying’ itself. For Agamben, ‘the rela-tion of exception is a relation of ban’; that is, an em-inently spatial relation:

He who has been banned is not, in fact, simplyset outside the law and made indifferent to itbut is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed

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and threatened on the threshold in which lifeand the law, outside and inside, become indis-tinguishable. It is literally not possible to saywhether the one who has been banned is out-side or inside the juridical order.

(Agamben, 1995, p. 34; 1998, pp. 28–29,emphasis in the original)

The werewolf – the threshold figure that Agambenadopts to explain the geography of the ban – is, atits origin, the figure of the man banned by his com-munity. His life, torn between the forest and thecity, is not ‘a piece of animal nature without any re-lation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold ofindistinction and of passage between animal andman, between physis and nomos, exclusion and in-clusion’ (1995, p. 117; 1998, p. 105). The state ofnature that this latter embodies is not, therefore, ‘areal epoch, chronologically prior to the foundationof the City, but a principle internal to the City’(ibid.). The decisive factor here is that the werewolfdoes not only metaphorically inhabit this thresholdof indistinction; he inhabits and moves through realspaces, spaces which, with his very presence andhis hybrid nature, he contributes to producing. It ishere that Agamben situates the ‘survival of the stateof nature at the very heart of the state’ (1995, p.119; 1998, p. 106), but it is also here that is renderedexplicit (by means of an original and thus hiddenspatialization) the confine between bare life and alife worth living. Agamben’s werewolf is thus asubject torn not only between life and death, butalso between place and its ‘measure’ (space) – ex-cluded by both but, at the same time, constitutive ofboth.

The Brazilian electrician shot down on the Lon-don Underground, in those few, decisive seconds,was thrust into the condition of the werewolf; acondition generated not by his culpability, but bythe exceptional nature of the (real, urban) placewithin which he happened to find himself. Here wecome, again, to the hidden matrix of the geogra-phies of exception. What defines the condition ofthe homo sacer, as we have read in by now count-less articles that adopt this term (see, e.g. Norris,2004b) is ‘the double exclusion into which he istaken and the violence to which he finds himself ex-posed’ (1995, p. 91; 1998, p. 82). The homo sacer,for Agamben (1995, p. 92; 1998, p. 83), representsthe ‘originary figure of life taken into the sovereignban’, so far as ‘the sovereign sphere is the sphere inwhich it is permitted to kill without committinghomicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and la

vita sacra (sacred life) – that is, life that may bekilled but not sacrificed – is the life that has beencaptured in this sphere.’ I do not have the space hereto further develop this key point of Agamben’sanalysis; what I would like to highlight, however, isthat the structure of the ban prompts the Italian phi-losopher to rethink the myths of the very founda-tion of the modern city, arguing that

we must learn to recognize this structure ofthe ban in the political relations and publicspaces in which we still live. … It is the sacrednomos that conditions every rule, the origi-nary spatialization that governs and makespossible every localization and every territori-alization. And if in modernity life is more andmore clearly placed at the centre of State pol-itics (which now becomes biopolitics) … thisis possible only because the relation of the banhas constituted the essential structure of sov-ereign power from the beginning.

(Agamben 1995, p. 123; 1998, p. 111)

When the territorial state of the ancien régimereconfigures itself as the modern, bourgeois nation-state, this latter, in its attempt to render possible acompromise between its initial revolutionary im-petus and its subsequent seizure of power, is thisvery structure of the ban (which becomes, with thispassage, constitutive of all the political categoriesof the modern) that consents to think of the popu-lation as a body and its members as citizens; as bio-logical parts of the greater organism. The nation be-comes the necessary spatialization of this body, andgeography, together with medicine, provide thecognitive tools for the description, identification,organization and management of its parts and itsconfines. But this is nothing particularly new. Nonethe less, the structure of the ban reveals how thetranslation of subjects into citizens is produced bythe reduction of their bodies into numbers, figures,necessary (or not) fragments of the political bodyof the nation (Cavalletti, 2005). These bodies be-come potentially killable, since they are reduced tomere elements of a superior, vital organism whosepreservation and purification become one of theprincipal tasks of modern politics; indeed, thestruggle between the life worth living and the lifenot deserving to live of those citizens is decidedalong the ever-shifting confine defining the body ofthe nation. As Agamben reminds us, this is the de-cisive confine between zoé and bios, betweennomos and physis, Ordnung and Ortung – a confine



whose definition was assigned by the nascent mod-ern state to that which Farinelli (1992) terms ‘bour-geois geography’, often presented as the ‘scienceof synthesis’ par excellence (Capel, 1987).

To understand fully the conditions that allowedfor the affirmation of the structure of the ban, Ag-amben suggests that we look back to the Declara-tion of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 as themoment which, according to the philosopher, sanc-tions the political passage of sovereignty to the na-tion-state: with the Declaration, the principle of allsovereignty comes to reside in the nation ‘preciselybecause it has already inscribed this element ofbirth [nascita] in the very heart of the political com-munity’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 141; 1998, p. 128; seealso 1996, p. 23). The nazione (nation), that derivesetymologically from nascere (to be born), thuscompletes the circle opened by the nascita (birth).Birth itself, in this regime, thus marks our entry intothe nation and our subjection to its sovereign pow-er. Bare life is thus inscribed within the nation’s po-liticization of the corpus of its citizens (Agamben,1995, p. 143; 1996, p. 24). The nation-state, by dis-tinguishing between an ‘authentic’ life and a barelife – a life stripped of any political value – trans-forms the fundamental question ‘what is French(Italian, English…)’ into an essential politicalquestion; a question that, with Nazism, will cometo coincide ‘immediately with the highest politicaltask’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 146; 1998, p. 130).

In his (sic) ascent to power, the modern bourgeoissubject thus mobilizes the idea of nation as a crucialspatial-ontological device and also, thanks to the tri-umph of positivist geography and the failure of theErdkunde project (see Farinelli, 1992, 2003), endsup conceiving of this very (nation) space as given, asnatural. The mystique of the nation, once spatial-ized, allows for the direct intervention into the bio-politics of the bodies of the citizens; citizens who,with their bare life and their political life, make upthe body of the state. The nation-state thus becomesa mythical biological combination of nature and cul-ture. The conditions for the production of the defin-itive relation of indistinction between life and poli-tics were thus already in an embryonic state in thegeographical conception of the bourgeois nation-state. The fatal compromise between a cartographic-geometrical theory of space and the parallel empha-sis on individual rights that formed the ideologicalbasis of the nascent state would have, however, beenimpossible to sustain for long, based as it was upona special effect, upon a metaphysics of power thatwould, sooner or later, inevitably reveal its most

purely biopolitical nature. The fragility of this im-plicit compromise would emerge with virulence af-ter the Great War, transforming – also with the aidof ‘normal’ positivist geography (see, e.g. Demat-teis, 1985) – all citizens into potential homines sacri.

The First World War, according to both Schmittand Agamben, marks indeed the definitive ruptureof the ius publicum Europaeum and with it, of thenomos of the Earth, of the grand spatial project thatlay at its origin. The nexus between the juridical-po-litical order and territory that sustained the originalspatialization – the arcanum of sovereign power – isthus broken and the repressed scarto (rift) betweennascita and nazione is dramatically revealed, losingits original self-regulating function (Agamben,1995, pp. 42–44; 1996, pp. 24–29). It is thus that fas-cism and Nazism appear: biopolitical regimes parexcellence (together with the state-socialist oneswhich would follow) which render explicit, in themost violent of fashions, the place of bare life in theconstitution of the nation-state. The spatio-temporalconfines of the (juridically bare) space of exceptionare definitively breached and come to coincide withthe ‘normal’ order, within which literally everythingbecomes possible (ibid.).

It is here that the grand project of the bourgeoisnation-state reveals all its shortcomings; above all,that of the fictitious compromise upon which its ter-ritorial myth is founded, a myth destined to suc-cumb to its own biopolitical matrix. The reproduc-tion of the ‘biological body of the nation’ thus be-comes the supreme task of the state, and the nor-malization of exception its most immediatepolitical grammar. This ‘biological body’ is also,however, an inescapably geographical body thatrenders inseparable the national territory and theindividuals who inhabit it, now transformed intomere ‘population’. Institutional geography haslong struggled to give form and meaning to thisbody; it has long been its task to furnish it with sta-ble and reassuring representations (Dematteis,1985), and it is here that Friedrich Ratzel’s lessonis particularly instructive. Ratzel’s legacy can, in-deed, tell us much about the definitive passagethrough which the world produced by the bour-geois nation-state, having abandoned the globalspatial theory that lay at the bases of the ius publi-cum Europaeum, entrusts itself to an order withoutlocalization – to the abstract space of the economy– yet without including this latter within a new, al-ternative nomos of the Earth.

Ratzel, as we shall see, is perhaps the last geog-rapher to think in terms of a territorial nomos, and

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his failure tragically reflects the definitive transla-tion of the nation-state into a biopolitical machine– in force but without significance, that cannot butassume as its supreme task the control and manage-ment of the biological life of the population and itsmembers. The definitive disappearance of the‘Subject of geography’ (echoing Farinelli’s (2003)arguments) thus coincides with the disappearanceof the separation between nascita and nazione, be-tween physis and nomos, between life and the map.In this way, the nation-state will be able to extendsovereign power over both nomos and physis. A fewyears later, Vidal de la Blache’s new GéographieHumaine (1903, 1922) and Passarge’s Landschaft-skunde (1919) will aim to provide this passage witha new language and a definitive legitimation. Theimplicitly cartographic logic that guides these twoprojects, and the disappearance of the geographeras the explicitly political subject that characterizesboth, serves to definitively translate the (notion of)territory into a mere container for objects and peo-ple, thus contributing to naturalizing the ius soli asa natural – and no longer political – order.

From that moment on, the biopolitical machinewill spin around a centre that is no more, renderingthe purification of the body of the nation its ulti-mate immanent task, a task that, at this point, can-not have limits; a task that, rather, rests upon the in-finite and arbitrary mobility of such limits. Modernspatial-geometrical conceptions of state and socie-ty and the cartographic logic that guides them thusbecome the ultimate expression of a project basedupon a purification without content, upon a spacewithout a nomos. It is so that the map comes to rep-resent, still today, a mitologema (mythologeme), anideal – to be reached though always unreachable –territorial political form; an illusory reign over theEarth, to borrow Schmitt’s (1998, p. 15) words.

In such a regime of/in force without signifi-cance, the biological becomes immediately andnecessarily political, and geopolitics and biopoli-tics become confounded, become one and thesame: ‘the police now becomes politics, and thecare of life coincides with the fight against the en-emy’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 163; 1998, p. 147; seealso 1996, pp. 83–86), the concept of population, aspatial device (Cavalletti, 2005), while the defini-tion of bare life, pure, unmediated biopolitics. Andwhen life and politics, ‘originally divided, andlinked together by … the state of exception’, cometogether, ‘all life becomes sacred and all politicsbecomes the exception’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 165;1998, p. 148).

Lebensraum… In the history of Western science, the isola-tion of … bare life is a fundamental event.

(Agamben, 2005, p. 393)

In L’aperto (2003), Agamben highlights how theresearch of Jakob von Uexkull, considered one ofthe founders of modern ecology, followed by just afew years the pioneering work of Paul Vidal de laBlache (1903) on the relations between popula-tions and their environment, and the research ofFriedrich Ratzel (1897) on the concept of leben-sraum. The work of Vidal and Ratzel, as Agambennotes, was to ‘profoundly revolutionize the disci-pline of human geography’ (2003, p. 48), contrib-uting to transforming, in fundamental fashion, thetraditionally conceived relation between living be-ings and their environment-world. Agamben’s ref-erence to these important turning points in the dis-cipline expresses his conviction that there exists adirect relation between the evolution of geograph-ical thought and the rise of the biopolitical state.Recalling Ratzel’s theorization of the state’s leben-sraum, Agamben notes how this conception wouldfind its echoes in Nazi geopolitics, while in the Vi-dalian project he envisions the first formalization ofa certain understanding of the relations between en-vironment and society, an understanding that ac-cording to him was to furnish a specific, ‘ecologi-cal’ vision of life, allowing for its eventual total ex-clusion/inclusion within the politics of the state.

Andrea Cavalletti, whose 2005 book La cittàbiopolitica is largely inspired by Agamben’swork, is even more forceful in tracing the links be-tween Ratzel’s spatial theory and the emergenceof the biopolitical state. In his reading of the Ger-man geographer’s work, Cavalletti stresses how,compared to the cosmological speculations of hispredecessors Humboldt and Ritter, Ratzel (1897,1907, 1914) ends up radicalizing the idea of total-ity: what matters, for Ratzel, ‘is the [idea of] ter-restrial space as both generic and limited vitalspace, as the totality of the necessary relationproper to every living being, a totality to which hewill give the name of oecumene’ (Cavalletti, 2005,p. 205). Cavalletti notes, indeed, how in Ratzel’sthought emerges the contrast between the ‘ebb andflow of life, which knows no rest’, and the un-changing spaces of the Earth. It is from this fun-damental contradiction that the ‘struggle forspace’ is born, as described in this well-knownpassage from the geographer’s work:



…life subjected itself to the Earth, but once itreached its confines, it ebbed back … onto thepath already taken. Since then, everywhereand without respite, life struggles with life forspace. The much-abused expression ‘strugglefor existence” signifies, above all, the strugglefor space. Indeed, it is space that grants normand measure to all other conditions of life.

(Ratzel, 1907, p. 718; emphasis added)

Life, in this case, is biological life, Cavalletti (2005,p. 206) insists, which is defined as such in contrastto the inert, to non-life – and which acquires its spe-cific spatial character at the moment in which, hav-ing touched the insurmountable limits of the Earth,it ebbs back into itself (Ratzel, 1907, 1914). It isfrom this moment on that the link between life andterritory is no longer presented in the traditional po-litical-geographic understanding, but is read, rath-er, in geo-biopolitical terms: space becomes ‘vital’– and life becomes spatialized (Cavalletti, 2005).

Traditional interpretations of the history of mod-ern geography have long emphasized the influenc-es of a certain strand of Social Darwinism on Rat-zel’s theory of the state. These interpretations high-lighted, in particular, his idea of the survival of thefittest, strongly marked by evolutionary biologicaltheories popular at the time: an idea which envi-sioned the state as an organism that (as all other or-ganisms) must struggle to survive. The adoption ofan ecological-evolutionary perspective broughtRatzel (1897) to affirm, moreover, the ‘temporary’nature of all state boundaries, since subject to theongoing struggle for space between competingstate actors. The notion of ‘moveable frontiers’ – asthese interpretations of Ratzel’s opus intimate –was most strongly associated with the idea thatlarge states will ‘naturally’ expand to reach theirnecessary lebensraum, often into the territory ofsurrounding ‘weaker’ (smaller) states.

Here, Cavalletti’s reading does not diverge muchfrom the tradition. His analysis suggests, indeed,that while Ratzel’s work purports to transcendempty metaphors, in practice the German geogra-pher enacts a grand representation of the vital or-ganization of the Earth: in his Politische Geogra-phie, the notion of state ‘necessarily mimics … theconstitutive and unproblematized relationship be-tween an organism and its environment’ (2005, pp.206–207). The state, however, does not allow itselfto be bound within rigid confines: ‘The diffusion ofmen and their work on the surface of the Earth hasthe characteristics of a mobile body that, depending

on its ebb and flow, expands and contracts, bindsnew ties, breaks the old and, in doing so, takes onforms that resemble those of other sociable beings’(Ratzel, 1897, p. 3).

Cavalletti’s and Agamben’s considerations onthe importance of Ratzel’s contribution – and, moregenerally, on the vital role played by geographicalknowledge in the constitution and legitimation, aswell as the functioning, of the biopolitical machineof the state – are certainly to be appreciated. Iwould be more critical, however, of the reading giv-en by both to the influences of Ratzel’s work onNazi geographies of exception – and, by extension,of the new, ‘Atlantic’ regime of exception today.For while it is certainly true that Ratzel is widelyconsidered to be the father of twentieth century po-litical geography, his legacy is much more complex– and ambiguous – than most standard accounts al-low. According to Franco Farinelli (1992, p. 110):

the publication, in 1897, of Ratzel’s PolitischeGeographie, does not only mark, as is com-monly thought, the birth of what we now termpolitical geography. At the very same time –and, alas, this is not a paradox – [Ratzel’s oeu-vre] marks the end of geographers’ recogni-tion of the political role of every geography.But this is not Ratzel’s fault. Quite the oppo-site, for his geography of the State proffereditself, unique in the history of geographicalthought, as the only true alternative to stategeography 3; a geography that, having silentlyre-emerged from its ashes in the second-halfof the 1800s, would dominate the entire disci-pline until well after the Second World War.

For Farinelli, then, Ratzel should not be seen pre-dominantly as the founder of the academic politicalgeography that would develop in the successive dec-ades but, rather, as the last bourgeois geographerable/willing to admit the inescapably political na-ture of his cognitive enterprise; the last to render ex-plicit the nexus between his conception of space andhis organic theory of the state. The deterministic in-terpretation of Ratzel’s work, Farinelli insists, is infact an ‘invention’ of French sociology and historio-graphy (2003, p. 108); the adoption of the notion oflebensraum by Nazi geopolitical thought is, on theother hand, a degeneration of the spirit that guidesRatzel’s work, a tragic reinterpretation of the rela-tionship between spatial theory and politics, a re-interpretation that would render explicit the politicalnature of modern geography in its most virulent and

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violent terms. Cavalletti’s and Agamben’s assess-ment, while recognizing, in part, the geographer’scomplex legacy and resisting facile characteriza-tions regarding his determinism, still falls into thetrap of most conventional readings of Ratzel. In-deed, the relationship between the Ratzelian gestureand what we may term the ‘biopolitical turn’ of theEuropean nation-state may be read in a different op-tic altogether. In particular, Franco Farinelli’s (1992,2003) theorizations of the nature of bourgeois geog-raphy and its state of permanent crisis can offersome interesting interpretive avenues which allowus to investigate the links between Ratzel’s opus andthe dissolution of the European nomos that so trou-bled Carl Schmitt (another of Ratzel’s devoted fol-lowers, who thanks the geographer on numerous oc-casions within his writings).

Much has been written about the ways in whichbourgeois geography – in its role as state geography– adopted a geometric concept of geographicalspace in order to reduce the complexity of the worldto the measure of its own language, and to professthe innocence of its representations (see, e.g.Farinelli, 2003; Minca and Bialasiewicz, 2004;Pickles, 2004). It is this very conceptual architecturethat allows it to first forget – and to make forget – theideological thrust of Ratzel’s political theory ofspace and, later, to take advantage of the tragic leg-acy of the degenerate adoption of Ratzel’s theory byNazi geopolitical rhetoric (though not practice), toreinterpret the scientific method of Ratzel’s geogra-phy as though this latter were part of the same pos-itivist tradition from which twentieth-century ‘state’geography largely drew its inspiration. Ratzel thusbecomes, in the official narrative, one of the found-ers of geographical determinism. Ratzel thus be-comes, in the interpretations of many, the fount ofimperialist theories that would justify, on the basisof a misreading of his concept of lebensraum, terri-torial expansion and an evolutionary reading of re-lations between states and nations (for a critique ofsuch readings see Bassin (1987a, 1987b) as well asthe proceedings of the conference on the centenaryof Ratzel’s Politische Geographie: Antonsich et al.,2001).

Certainly, the past decades have brought newcritical impetus to interpretations of Ratzel’swork. For instance, geographers have noted thatalthough Ratzel’s understanding of the territorialstate as an ‘organism’, marked by its own ‘needs’and ‘demands’, was undoubtedly influenced byevolutionary biological theories of the time, thisunderstanding also had much older roots. Indeed,

German idealist philosophers such as Hegel andFichte had also regarded the state as a having a lifeof its own (Agnew, 1998; Heffernan, 2000). Oth-ers (see e.g. Bassin, 1987a, 1987b; Dijkink, 2001)have stressed that Ratzel’s work can in no way beconflated with purely materialistic (and biologi-cal) theories of the state. For others still, Ratzel’swork was not only to be seen as an original reinter-pretation of the intellectual legacy of many of hiscontemporaries, but his very conception of the‘state as organism’ should be viewed part of ‘abroader modern personification of the State’, driv-ing the emergence of nationalist ideologies in thelate 1800s (see Raffestin et al., 1995, p. 25). Ac-cording to this interpretation, for Ratzel, as for theearly theorists of nations and nationhood, the statewas a whole, a whole that acts as one ‘body’. Thisbody was a physical, geographical body – but itwas also the state’s ‘human’ body: indeed, it wasthe decades of Ratzel’s writings that also wit-nessed the emergence of notions such as the ‘so-cial mass’, that witnessed the ‘birth of the crowd’(Raffestin et al., 1995, p. 25); wholes conceived ofas humanized aggregates endowed with a life oftheir own, as well as a certain degree of conscious-ness and autonomy.

Although it is useful to note such continuities, itis also important to note that the body of the Rat-zelian state was characterized by mobile/tempo-rary confines, placing the geographer in clear con-trast with the prevailing nationalist ideologies ofhis time. Ratzel would insist, in fact, that stateswere and could only be fluid historical entities.Moreover, while Ratzel strongly believed that geo-graphy determined state behaviour – in particular,specifying that, often, a state’s ‘success’ was deter-mined by its location – this equation was never ex-tended to human subjects. This distinction is vitalto understanding Ratzel’s collocation in the historyof the discipline, as well as vis-à-vis the evolutionof geopolitical thought in the century that followed,marked by more or less faithful interpretations ofthe geographer’s opus. Ratzel’s work, in fact, neverjustified a racial determinism – for the Leipzig geo-grapher it was space (and the struggle for space),not race or nationality, that was the driving force ininternational relations (see Parker, 2001).

Farinelli (1992, p. 131), in particular, has re-marked how Ratzel was perfectly conscious of theimpossibility of any social subject to claim knowl-edge without first affirming his (sic) legitimacy asa knowing subject. Ratzel, according to Farinelli,was well aware of the necessity of a ‘theory of



knowledge’ able to reconcile science and ideology,and that this would form the basis of any theory ofgeographical space. For Ratzel, as for Humboldtand Ritter before him, ‘discourse precedes writingand commands it, because knowing signifies, firstof all, establishing relations between objects basedon hypotheses that precede any map/text – and thatno map/text is able to represent’ (1992, pp. 134–135). In this sense, Ratzel’s conception of spacedistinguishes him profoundly from positivist geog-raphy, despite his often being presented as one of itsmost influential advocates. For Ratzel, space re-mains, in fact, a form of intuition:

[For Ratzel], the initial task of the geographeris that of “understanding the conditions”(which may, indeed, be “objective”) underwhose “influence space becomes a subjectiveform of intuition for us”; the conditions whichproduce our individual conceptions of space.Conditions which, if conceived … specificallywith respect to geographical space … refer to amuch broader and general vision of the worldand the role of the science of geography withinit – to Ratzel’s mind, … coterminous with theattempt to rationalize the sphere of the politi-cal’.

(Farinelli, 1992, p. 135)

For Ratzel, geographical space becomes somethingessentially supra-local, something abstract, seen asthe product not of an unchanging (and thus meas-urable) relationship between immobile physicalobjects, but rather the result of a web of relationsbetween dynamic (albeit physically determined)political entities (Farinelli, 1992, p. 136). For thisreason, Ratzel bemoans the dependence of geo-graphical representations on cartographical ones,and contests the reduction of material, historicallyproduced, lived spaces to the pure geometries of themap: ‘it is indeed the polemic against “geome-trism” as an overtly reductive and schematic inter-pretative model of geographical space that bestcharacterizes the Ratzelian oeuvre’ (Farinelli,1992, p. 137).

Ratzel, Farinelli (2003, p. 125) sustains, is quiteconscious of the fact that the ‘geometrical’ grammaris but a rhetorical tool – as effective as such a toolmay be. He is aware of the fact that the world is notorderly, and that scientific knowledge is simply anorderly/ordering way of knowing. This is why hedares to propose an organic theory of the state – anda scientific theory of geographical space to sustain it:

with Ratzel, for the first time ever, bourgeoisgeography would serve not as society’s critiqueof the State but, rather, it would be the State,conceived as “the greatest of man’s works uponthe Earth”, the culmination “of all phenomenaof the diffusion of life”, that would, as supremesubject, claim all of geography … Ratzel tries,in fact, to legitimize the existence [of the State]in scientific terms; he does not deny the politi-cal function of geographical knowledge, but heseeks to adapt this role to the requisites of thenew bourgeois order, requisites that now coin-cide, tout court, with those of the State itself.


The complex history of the Ratzelian conceptualuniverse reflects, indeed, a formidable tension. It isa tension between the efforts of twentieth-centuryacademic geography’s implicit paradigm to affirmits epistemologies as coinciding with the ‘deepstructure’ of geographical space, on the one hand,and its concurrent attempts to mask (to the point offorgetting) the political impetus of such an opera-tion. The translation of Ratzel’s thought into ‘nor-mal’ geography (and, more specifically, into ‘po-litical geography’) rendered possible the isolationof a geography entrusted with ‘the political’ (polit-ical geography, that is) and the remainder of geo-graphy, conceived of from that moment on as neu-tral, scientific, ‘a-political’.

‘Ratzel is geography’s last individual’, Farinelli(1992, p. 140; emphasis added) insists, ‘an individ-ual, nonetheless, who is the first to claim a role notonly vis a vis society but also the State; [but] anysuch individual is, constitutively, in crisis’. Ratzelis marked by this crisis, and it is perhaps for thisreason that his legacy passes down to us in the formthat it does. Vidal de la Blache – a state geographerpar excellence – is the first to aliment the myth ofRatzel the determinist, a myth that will simply bereproduced across the paradigms which travelledthroughout twentieth-century geography. It is with-in the shadow of this myth that ‘geometrical’ geo-graphical space has colonized our ways of conceiv-ing the political – and even the critiques to this formof knowledge. However, as Farinelli (1992, p. 147)reminds us, the experience of the Nazi Geopolitiktragically demonstrates that ‘a high price is paid forthe expulsion from geographical memory of theproblematic nature of the nexus between scienceand ideology; the price of the reduction of geo-graphy to an immediate and declared ideology’.And of the reduction of geopolitics to biopolitics.

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The ghost of GeopolitikEven though Cavalletti is careful to note that Rat-zel’s Politische Geographie should not be conflatedwith Nazi biogeography or simply reduced to thoseRatzelian passages adopted by ‘Hitler’s geogra-pher’ Karl Haushofer, he none the less maintainsthat accusing Ratzel of determinism and national-ism because he links a people to a given territory ismuch too simplistic an interpretation. Ratzel, ac-cording to Cavalletti (2005, p. 208), ‘did not writePolitische Geographie in order to translate geo-graphical concepts into a national(ist) project be-cause his biogeography was already political: thenotion of the state as living organism was alreadypresent in [Ratzel’s conception of] the oecumene’.If this is true, what relation can we envision be-tween such a contested inheritance, and the affir-mation of the modern state – a state lacking a geo-graphical nomos and intent on taking to its extremeconsequences the constitutive ambiguity of itsoriginary spatialization?

The Geopolitik experiment is illustrative here(Haushofer, 1925). According to Farinelli, Haush-ofer is the direct heir to – and most faithful inter-preter of – the positivist geography that becomesconsolidated in the final decades of the nineteenthcentury. Haushofer is, indeed, ‘the first to reveal itsforgotten and hidden nature. All the while, howev-er, without being aware of doing so, for awarenessnecessitates memory; a memory of which geo-graphical knowledge had been stripped by the pos-itivist Geographie’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 241). This isa key passage in understanding the relationship be-tween the dissolution of the geographical nomosidentified by Schmitt, and the emergence of thespatial architecture of exception theorized by Ag-amben. Reading Haushofer as heir to the bourgeoisgeographical tradition signifies, indeed, locatinghis confused geographical theorizing firmly withinthe womb of the political culture that produced thedefinitive indistinction between geopolitics and bi-opolitics, nomos and physis, zoé and bios. Perhapsthe most scathing critique of Geopolitik dates backto 1929, writes Farinelli (1992, p. 235), and it is thatof Sigfried Passarge:

who defined it as “the circus of linguistic ac-robatics”. In this definition we can see thescorn of an academic geographer … for theamateur that is Karl Haushofer. Although Pas-sarge’s judgement may have been correct, itwas founded upon a mistaken assumption:

that [his] academic geography was a scientificenterprise, while Geopolitik was an ideo-logical activity – as a motivated and thus false-ly objective knowledge. [And] it is preciselythe separation between Geographie and Geo-politik that is the result (and, in analyticalterms, the reflection) of the definitive aban-donment, in inter-war Germany, of all of geo-graphical knowledge to the realm of ideology.

And it is when geography definitively affirms itselfas a political practice that it lays open the doors tothe camp, allowing Geopolitik to enter and the mostviolent and decisive subject of geography (and thepolitical) to emerge.

If we agree with Farinelli’s interpretation,Haushofer’s geography no longer appears as anideological and pseudo-scientific degeneration thatmarks a break with the evolutionary progress ofmodern bourgeois geography. Quite the contrary:Haushofer’s Geopolitik becomes simply anotherproduct of the dissolution of the European territo-rial nomos; an attempt – albeit doomed to failure –to grant a theoretical-geographical veneer to thetragic revelation of the rift between nascita and na-zione, between physis and nomos, that the Nazi bi-opolitical machine would quickly take to its ex-treme consequences. The grand project of the Geo-politik was nothing other, therefore, than the ex-treme (and thus tragically banal) expression ofbourgeois spatial ideology that here lays bare its in-escapably political nature – but that in doing so,comes to coincide with the political tout court,spawning a monster that still today we struggle torecognize as our own. Haushofer’s geopolitics,Farinelli (1992, p. 237) insists, was above all a re-search agenda (as fallacious as it may have been).While for Rudolf Kjellén geopolitics was nothingother than ‘the doctrine of the State as a geograph-ical organism or spatial phenomenon’ (in otherwords, that which Ratzel prescribed as the task ofpolitical geography), for Haushofer, Geopolitikwas something entirely different: it was to become‘the science of the forms of political life existingwithin vital natural spaces; a science seeking to un-derstand such forms in their relation of dependencewith terrestrial manifestations … and historicaltransformations’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 237; on Kjel-len see also Holdar, 1992).

Not by accident is the word ‘Politik’ precededby that little prefix ‘geo’. This prefix meansmuch and demands much. It relates politics to



the soil. It rids politics of arid theories andsenseless phrases which might trap our politi-cal leaders into hopeless utopias. It puts themback on solid ground. Geopolitik demon-strates the dependence of all political deve–lopments on the permanent reality of the soil.

(Haushofer, 1925,p. 33; emphasis added)

Combining the Social Darwinist ideas of his intel-lectual forefathers Friedrich Ratzel (an influencethat was, as I have argued above, far from direct)and Rudolf Kjellen, together with the theorizationsof Mackinder (whom he greatly admired), Haush-ofer argued that in order to ‘survive’, the Germanstate would necessarily need to achieve its leben-sraum. More importantly, Haushofer himself neverpromoted the racial determinism that distinguishedNazi ‘science’ (on this question see especiallyBassin, 1987a, 1987b; Heske, 1987, 1988, 1994).In Haushofer’s Ratzelian understanding, it wasspace, not race, that was the ultimate determinantof the destiny of the nation, and throughout the1930s and 1940s the Munich geographer publishedmany articles that were critical of Nazi racial re-search. Indeed, within the original vision of Haush-ofer’s Geopolitik, ‘it was not ideology … that de-termined our ways of thinking space but, quite onthe contrary, spatial realities that shaped our ideo-logies’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 238). Here lay the theo-retical innovativeness of the Geopolitik project; it isthus that it attempted to legitimize its distinct formof scientificity.

Farinelli does not deny the influence of Ratzel’spolitical geography on Haushofer’s thought; an in-fluence without which the spatial theory that lay atthe heart of Geopolitik would have simply not beenpossible. None the less, he notes that the ways inwhich Haushofer adopts the organic theory of thestate, as well as Ratzel’s scientific understanding ofspace, do not represent an evolution or elaborationof the Leipzig geographer’s thought but, rather, itsfalsification if not degeneration. For Ratzel, thestruggle for space and position are the ‘essence’ ofthe state, not the object of its dominion, as they willbecome for Haushofer and the expansionist geog-raphies of the Reich. Haushofer’s spatial theory isnot only antithetical to Ratzel’s conception but alsomuch more ingenious and simplistic; and despiteits professed dynamism, essentially static in itsconceptions (Farinelli, 1992, p. 244).

Haushofer may be Ratzel’s illegitimate heir, buthe is also – if not above all – the offspring of nine-

teenth-century bourgeois geography, a rebelliousoffspring who chose to overturn the established or-der between politics and knowledge that hadbrought about the triumph of cartographic reason.Haushofer’s Geopolitik is born at the moment inwhich ‘the scienticism of [academic] Geographie… shows itself utterly incapable of furnishing pop-ular opinion with the necessary ideological refer-ence points that would allow for the mobilization of[national] meaning exacted by [state] power’(Farinelli, 1992, p. 248). Geopolitik becomes justthat: the first form of bourgeois geography ‘de-claredly and exclusively dedicated to providing ide-ological support to political power’ (Farinelli,1992, p. 249; emphasis in the original).

In this optic, it becomes impossible to reduce theGeopolitik experiment to simply an episode, thefruit of anomalous historical-political conditions. Itis Haushofer’s geography, Farinelli insists, that re-establishes the relation (abandoned by nineteenth-century state geography) between physical, mate-rial space and the geometries of geographicalspace, spaces made to coincide in order to sustainthe political and ideological needs of the nation-state. The Geopolitik experiment, in its arrogancereflecting the power of the Reich, actually ends upre-establishing the primacy of the subject of knowl-edge over its objects: ‘having disappeared from theGeographie, submerged by the weight of the ob-ject, all that remained to the subject was to force-fully re-affirm itself (in ideological fashion)through the Geopolitik, a veritable “revenge of thesubject”, [whose] geopolitical virulence was di-rectly proportional to its geographical silence’(1992, pp. 243–244).

Haushofer’s Geopolitik overturns, indeed, eventhe bourgeois common sense that preceded Ratzel:the assumption of the essential futility of officialgeographical knowledge for political power. ForHaushofer (1945), rather, geopolitics is driven bythe need to produce images of the world that can beuseful to – and used by – leaders called to shape thepolitical destiny of their people. It is this shift inperspective that, following on the heels of Ratze-lian organicism, produces a cognitive monster: aform of geographical knowledge that, on the onehand, justifies itself by appeals to the ‘objective ev-idence’ of scientific discourse, a discourse which,as we well know, reduces everything to the samemeasure, that is, to the horizontal geometries ofgeographical space; on the other hand, a geograph-ical knowledge that marries such pretences to sci-entificity with the celebration of a people and its in-

CLAUDIO MINCA


exorable destiny, translating Ratzel’s theorizationof living space into a cultural and political state-ment affirming the superiority and right to exist-ence (as a world power) of the German nation. It ishere, indeed, that Geopolitik’s crucial contradic-tion lies:

having affirmed the respect of the natural andhistorical attributes of certain spaces (callingfor the re-unification of a greater Deutschlandas a morphological, cultural-linguistic and ra-cial whole) in order to sustain the expansion-ary aims of the state, [while this latter] as animperialist state necessitated instead the totalannulment of such attributes within an ab-stract and absolute space – the RatzelianRaum.


Haushofer may speak of space, but he thinks ofplaces, Farinelli concludes, and it is within this la-tent contradiction that the root of his failure lies, aswell as the violently biopolitical root that opens thedoors to the camp, to let in the normalization of ex-ception. The violent return of the subject in Haush-oferian geography – precisely because of its con-tradictory and hidden bourgeois matrix, because ofits pretences to scientificity – vanishes into the Nazitanatopolitical vortex, into the macabre triumph ofthe spatialization of the structure of the ban, ren-dering itself, at the end, essentially futile. The mo-bile caesura that cuts through the German nationcan thus later be explained, justified as a degener-ation – and not as the rotten fruit of a structure ofexception inaugurated already by the modern bour-geois state which, at a certain point in its history,abandons its role in granting meaning to the world;that is, its very spatial ontology.

Towards a new Nomos?The day after the revelation of the tortures inflictedon the detainees of Abu Ghraib, Massimo Cacciari(2004), Venetian philosopher and current Mayor ofthe city, writes a brief editorial on the Italian dailyla Repubblica entitled ‘Il male radicale’ (‘AbsoluteEvil’). In his piece, Cacciari comments on the banalnature of the ‘evil’ that is being revealed in thosedays to the eyes of all in such a scandalous fashionand urges not to consider the Abu Ghraib episodeas something unthinkable, as something somehowremoved from us. The exception has become thenorm – this is my reading of his argument – and in-

habits our houses and our streets, insofar as the per-manent state of exception that the War on Terror isattempting to enact corresponds to a multi-scalargeography of national and individual bodies. Thewhere of the tortures thus becomes a key factor inunderstanding the biopolitical regime of exception(Gregory, 2004a, 2004b).

We should therefore ask ourselves whether thetanatopolitical machine put into motion by the newstrategies of pre-emptive war of the current Amer-ican administration – and by the explicit biopoliti-cal transgression of the norm – marks the emer-gence of a new sovereign subject, set on imposinga new Geopolitik, a geopolitics of ‘facts’ and ‘de-cisions’, free of the bourgeois hesitations thatbrought about the failure of Haushofer’s grandproject. Is what we are witnessing today, as Agam-ben appears to argue, the affirmation of a new bio-political nomos, made possible simply by the ex-istence of sufficient force to impose it and, moreo-ver, a political subject willing to adopt it, willing toproduce a permanent zone of indistinction betweenthe spaces of the norm and the spaces of its suspen-sion, of its (dis)application? Reflecting uponAmerican geo-biopolitical exceptionalism todaycan perhaps provide us with the opportunity to fi-nally come to terms with our disturbing proximityto the Nazi project, to find the courage to confrontit once and for all and, especially, to ask, togetherwith Giorgio Agamben, ‘how can we avoid the cat-astrophic results of this proximity’?

In La potenza del pensiero, Agamben urges us toread Kafka’s short story Der Bau, in which the writ-er describes the obsession of an animal occupiedwith the construction of an unbreachable den; a denthat, as time passes, reveals itself to be a trap with-out escape. ‘But is this not precisely what happenedto the political space of Western nation-states’, Ag-amben (2005, p. 327) asks himself, within which‘the homes (the patrie) that these latter have strug-gled to build have become, at the end, for the “peo-ple” that were to inhabit them, simply deadlytraps?’ For the Italian philosopher, the triumph ofthe biopolitical dimension of this ‘trap’ marks thedemise of Western political space. In the modernera, Agamben (2005, p. 371) argues, Western pol-itics conceived of itself as the enactment of a col-lective historical mission or task (an opera) on thepart of a people or a nation. Such a political task,such an opera, coincided with a metaphysical task;that is, with the fulfilment of man’s (sic) purpose asa rational being. But the problems intrinsic in thedetermination/identification of this task emerge



with increasing force with the end of the FirstWorld War, when the nomos of the Earth which hadguided the political enters into a fatal crisis, and theEuropean nation-state begins to realize the empti-ness of its historical mission. In the impossibility ofdefining a new purpose, the nation-state ends upclaiming the reproduction and control of biologicallife itself as its ultimate and decisive historical task.

For this reason, it is a fundamental misunder-standing to conceive of the grand totalitarian exper-iments of the past century as simply putting into ac-tion, albeit in extreme form, the declared missionsof the nineteenth-century nation-state: namely, na-tionalism and imperialism (Agamben, 2005, p.328). As I have tried to argue throughout this paper,the dissolution of the nomos of the Earth has cor-responded not only to a political crisis but also toa crisis of the nation-state project tout court. In thissense, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth centuryconstitute truly the other facet of the Hegelian–Ko-jevian notion of the ‘end of history’: ‘Western’ so-ciety appears to have reached its historical telos andall that remains is an inevitable depoliticization ofthe social, enacted by the unstoppable forces of theeconomy – but also by the reconfiguration of bio-logical life itself as the supreme political task (Ag-amben, 2005, p. 329).

In such an understanding, modern totalitarian-isms may be conceived of as the instauration, bymeans of the state of exception, of a legal and per-manent state of civil war; a civil war that permitsthe physical elimination not only of political ene-mies but also of whole categories of citizens who,for one reason or another, cannot be integrated intothe political system. It is thus that ‘the voluntarycreation of a permanent state of exception … hasbecome one of the essential practices of contempo-rary states, even those popularly perceived as“democratic”’ (Agamben, 2004, p. 11). The state ofexception thus tends to increasingly present itselfas the dominant paradigm of governance in con-temporary politics, as a fundamental and ever-fluidthreshold of indeterminacy between democracyand absolutism.

At this threshold, the sovereign does not only de-cide the exception: ‘he (sic) now, de facto, producesthe situation as a consequence of his decision on theexception’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 190; 1998, p. 170;see also 2004, p. 49). The permanent state of excep-tion is thus not a dictatorship but simply a ‘space freeof law’ (2004, p. 68), and it is for this reason that CarlSchmitt, already in the 1950s, warned against therisks of the exception becoming the norm – and ex-

plicitly accused American foreign policy of havingalways treaded the ambiguous line of exceptionalityand exception, thus contributing to the progressivedismemberment of the European nomos without, atthe same time, proposing/imposing another, pre-cisely with the intention of maintaining a global spa-tial order based within ‘force without significance’,an order without territory.

What we witness today is not a new ius publicumAmericanum, based within a new American nomos,because the aim of the permanent state of exceptionis precisely that of not defining a stable relation be-tween political-juridical order and territory but,rather, of always keeping open the possibility ofplaying at the threshold of indistinction betweenthe norm and its (dis)application. The ‘localizeddislocation’ that marks the political paradigm ofmodernity of which Agamben speaks is thus in-scribing a geography with a void at its centre, a geo-graphy lacking any spatial theory; a geography thatcontinually produces and dismembers spaces with-in which everything is, literally, possible. In thesespaces, not only is everything allowed, but the re-lation between norm and exception is based uponthe event, not the order – as on London’s Under-ground that warm July day – thus leaving an enor-mous, previously unthinkable space to sovereigndecision, a decision able to move, at will, within theconfines of the (dis)application of the norm.

Notes1. My adoption here of the concept of ‘bourgeois geography’

echoes Franco Farinelli’s use of the term to refer to the Erd-kunde tradition (see Farinelli, 1992) and, more specifically,to its critical rendering of modern spatial theory.

2. Usually (problematically) translated as ‘potentiality’ – onthis question see Minca, 2005.

3. The claim that Ratzel’s ‘geography of the State’ provided analternative spatial theory to that advanced by (positivist)‘state geographies’ that dominated the discipline during alarge part of the XX century is one of Franco Farinelli’scentral claims in his critical re-reading of the history of thediscipline. This is not to say, nonetheless, that the Ratzelianvision was the only such ‘alternative’ understanding – thoseyears also saw the emergence of other understandings thatfundamentally challenged the orthodoxy of the discipline,most notably those of Elisee Reclus (1894, 1905–08).

Claudio Minca,Department of Geography,Royal Holloway,University of London,Egham, Surrey,UKE-mail: [email protected]

CLAUDIO MINCA


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Minca, Giorgio Agamben and the New Biopolitical Nomos