From Athens to Auschwitz

               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

             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 animalization 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

               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 its 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.

       -------