State power was measured by the size of its territory and supposed to grow
(or diminish) in parallel with territorial acquisitions (or losses). As Roberto
Toscano aptly puts it
1
– ‘territory means resources, population, and strategic
control. Territory constitutes the very body of the state, so that every loss is
perceived as a mutilation, every gain as vital growth (or, more often, recovery
of previously detached limbs).’ Given the way the integrity of state-owned
territory is seen and felt – ‘the insignificant paring of a fingernail’ tends to be
represented as ‘the painful mutilation of an arm’.
The extent of territory was coeval with the extent of sovereignty. ‘Sover-
eignty’ (according to Carl Schmitt’s synthesis of modern practice, as recently
re-examined by Giorgio Agamben
2
) was all about the power to include or
exempt. The sovereign is he
who decides on the state of exception
. But let us
note that it is precisely the
territoriality
of power that makes of the capacity
of exemption such an awesome weapon of the sovereign authority – indeed
the constitutive factor of its ‘materiality’. The sovereign is a sovereign in as
far as he or she controls the admission to the House of Law. Whoever happens
to be bodily present inside the territorial boundaries of the sovereign state,
falls under that control. Inside a territory in which every subject is allocated
its rightful place, an entity exempted from allocation and so denied a place of
its own is stripped of rights – carries no rights that other subjects have the
obligation (state-imposed and state-policed) to respect. Among the subjects
all dressed in uniforms sewn of legal categories, it is
la vita nuda
, a ‘bare’,
purely corporeal life denied all legally woven significance. A ‘sovereign terri-
tory’ is the artefact of its own map: an impression left on the physical space
filled with human bodies by the tightly woven canvas of legal categories.
As long as it is armed with the ultimate sanction of exemption, sovereign
power makes its law into a cage, the exit from the cage into a fate feared,
shunned and far too horrifying to be contemplated as an acceptable price of
freedom, and the entry to the cage into a privilege that needs to be earned
and, once earned, cherished. The captives have every reason to view the cage
as (uncomfortable maybe, yet secure) shelter. This is a cage to which most
would-be internees clamour to be admitted and of which those refused entry
dream as the ultimate redemption. ‘The Rights of Man’, as Hannah Arendt
observed, ‘supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable . . . whenever
people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state.’
3
A
social, all-too-social,
puissance
,
potenza
or
Macht
4
was obviously needed to
endorse the humanity of humans. And throughout the modern era, such
‘potency’ happened to be, invariably, the potency: to draw a boundary
between human and inhuman, in modern times disguised as the boundary
between citizens and foreigners.
It was inside the cage of law that the sovereign’s subjects’ life was to flow;
the whole of it, from the cradle to the grave. Having left no alternative, except
a life imposed for the stateless asylum-seekers but fit solely (as Aristotle