"No to Bio-Political Tattooing"

Giorgio Agamben, Le Monde, 10 January 2004

The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to
the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have
to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country.
Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such
procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I
was supposed to teach at New York University in March.I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that
is, why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my
American colleagues and their students for many years, I consider
that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and
would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals
and teachers.

It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure
that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants.
If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to
share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many
human beings are subjected.

The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits
of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the
juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say
bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states
where we live.

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to
accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence,
practices of control that had always been properly considered
inhumane and exceptional.

Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state
through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or
cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.

All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds
in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new
bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel
Foucault called the progressive animalisation of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques.

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous
tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are
elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The
security reasons that are invoked to justify these measures
should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History
teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find
themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal"
bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This
relation no longer has anything to do with free and active
participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment
and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect
of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.

These technological devices that register and identify naked life
correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate
public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words
and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called
politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for
the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as
such, states, which should constitute the precise space of
political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the
point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous
class.

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm
was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and
that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a
philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could
not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to
distinguish.

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz
undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate
the enrolment and registration of deported persons into
concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United
States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the
precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal
identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and
mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

[Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and professor at the University
of Venice and New York University. Translation is
here.]