I stand for 8-10 hours a day - why is standing limited to 4 hours?

June 19, 2007 10:10 AM

The Interrogation Documents - a collection of available records relating to U.S. interrogation policies. (via) (previously)
posted by puddleglum (9 comments total)

Now imagine the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant. Primo Levi has described the person who in camp jargon was called "the Muslim," der Muselmann--a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic (hence the ironical name given to him). He was not only, like his companions, excluded from the political and social context to which he once belonged; he was not only, as Jewish life that does not deserve to live, destined to a future more or less close to death. He no longer belongs to the world of men in any way; he does not even belong tot he threatened and precarious world of the camp inhabitants who have forgotten him from the very beginning. Mute and absolutely alone, he has passed into another world without memory and without grief. For him, Hölderlin's statement that "at the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the conditions of time and space" holds to the letter.

posted by nervousfritz at 11:36 AM on June 19, 2007

there are no words in me that I can find to respond to this.
posted by infini at 11:44 AM on June 19, 2007

Like the fence of the camp, the interval between death sentence and execution delimits an extratemporal and extraterritorial threshold in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes. In such a space of exception, subjection to experimentation can, like an expiation rite, either return the human body to life (pardon and the remission of a penalty are, it is worth remembering, manifestations of the sovereign power over life and death) or definitively consign it to the death to which it already belongs. What concerns us most of all here, however, is that in the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move in the no-man's-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate.

posted by nervousfritz at 1:39 PM on June 19, 2007

This is why in the camp the quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable.

Hannah Arendt once observed that in the camps, the principle that supports totalitarian rule and that common sense obstinately refuses to admit comes fully to light: this is the principle according to which "everything is possible." Only because the camps constitute a space of exception in the sense we have examined--in which not only is law completely suspended but fact and law are completely confused--is everything in the camps truly possible. If this particular juridico-political structure of the camps--the task of which is precisely to create a stable exception--is not understood, the incredible things that happened there remain completely unintelligible. Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense. What is more, if the person entering the camp was a Jew, he had already been deprived of his rights as a citizen by the Nuremberg laws and was subsequently completely denationalized at the time of the Final Solution. Insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. . . . The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime.

posted by nervousfritz at 2:24 PM on June 19, 2007

If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. . . . In all these cases, an apparently innocuous space . . . actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign . . .

posted by nervousfritz at 2:46 PM on June 19, 2007

what's worse is that we're still doing this stuff, probably, and we've sent prisoners all over the world to God only knows where. And Scalia--a Supreme Court Justice!!!--thinks it's all ok. ...
posted by amberglow at 5:11 PM on June 19, 2007

"not with a bang, but a whimper" -- and it's the whimper of someone we're torturing.
posted by amberglow at 5:14 PM on June 19, 2007

Today in Congress: CIA General Counsel Nominee Stands By Torture
posted by amberglow at 6:56 PM on June 19, 2007

and related: ...the Constitution simply does not provide the President the power to exercise military authority over civilians within the United States. ...
posted by amberglow at 4:07 PM on June 20, 2007