know from anthropology that the social experience of threshold crossing is an experience of change. This change does not have to be collectively created, as in an uprising or any other qualitative leap in terms of social relations. It can be a change affecting specific groups of people in specific periods of their social life. Anthropologists have provided us with many examples of spaces that periodically host ritualized transitions from one social position or condition to another. Famously, Arnold van Gennep has described “rites of passage” (van Gennep 1960) as those ritual acts connected with spaces that symbolize transitions. For example, from childhood to adolescence, from single to married life, from the status of the adolescent to that of the citizen, warrior or hunter). Ritual acts supervise the passage from one social identity to another, thus ensuring the overall stability of society and the corresponding social relations. In Agamben’s threshold, however, there seems to be a kind of circular movement. The state of exception equates “before” and “after,” to ensure that after this in-between period order is restored as before. The state of exception renders before and after indistinguishable.
In terms of a logico-mathematic analysis, the period of a state of exception presents itself as a logical paradox: opposing terms such as inside and outside, terms that are logically mutually exclusive as in set theory, have to be described as possibly indistinguishable. Agamben attempts to use a “complex topological figure” as the Moebius strip to represent this state “in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Agamben 1998, 37). In this image there is a slight shift towards a different understanding of this zone of indistinction. As with a Moebius strip, where one has to move (literally or speculatively) along the strip to discover that opposites “pass through one another,” so in the state of exception a movement between law and lawlessness creates the dynamic situation of a temporary suspension of law. In other words, the logico-mathematical analysis of this threshold period gives to Agamben’s use of the threshold image-concept a dynamic component that is closer to the actual social experience of crossing thresholds. As we will see throughout this book, it is in the performed or virtual act of crossing that the threshold is constituted as a space of potentiality.
In Agamben’s conceptualization of the state of exception this element should have been crucial, since it radically influences the understanding of a further antinomy inherent in the history of the state of exception: the exception becoming the rule. How can a temporary state, a state characterized by a temporary condition and legitimated as a critical part of the necessary rights of sovereign power, become permanent? And, since in terms of history nothing can be described as immune to change, what does it mean exactly to characterize a condition, a state, as permanent?
What Agamben probably has in mind is that in the temporary character of the state of exception, law and lawlessness must be equally present in the process of passing through one another. The zone of indistinction he describes should be understood as a mechanism rather than a state. Law and anomie are constantly compared during this period. Because the force of law is necessary for the state of exception to be imposed, the mechanism of exception has to remain at work, endlessly performing the law’s suspension. In a way, law is continuously present while power suspends it. The zone of indistinction therefore is an active zone of blurring the differences. Because differences exist, differences are socially perceived and posited in order to be suspended. This mechanism’s fuel, so to speak, is the legitimating temporariness. The mechanism works only because it constantly withdraws law from a situation where law is still regarded as the necessary force for ensuring social order.
Exception versus thresholds
When the state of exception becomes the rule, the mechanism turns into a “killing machine” (Agamben 2005, 86). We could say that in this case the mechanism is immobilized. The constant passing through opposing elements (spatial as well as juridical) comes to a halt. Instead of being an area of active comparisons, the zone of indistinction becomes an area where opposing elements coincide.
What Agamben wants to describe is exactly this “permanent” coincidence of law and anomie: suspension no longer needs to offer any justification. What the camp represents is the final obliteration of a crucial distinction: the distinction between exception and rule. Exception becomes normal. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule … a permanent spatial arrangement which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (Agamben 1998, 169).
That the camp is a “permanent spatial arrangement” essentially means that it is no longer a zone of indistinction, given that the comparison between outside and inside (spatially as well as juridically) is no longer possible. “The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable” (ibid., 170). There is a slight difference in expression that actually reveals a qualitative leap. If the two terms “have become indistinguishable” then the zone of indistinction as a zone where opposites pass through one another is stiffened in a state where the opposites cannot be differentiated any more. “Have become” describes a state rather than a process.
The camp is not a threshold state. Following Agamben’s symbolism, the camp should not be characterized as a space of exception (as Agamben himself explicitly states) but rather as a space of normalized exception. The paradox of the camp is different from the paradox of the state of exception. The camp remains “outside normal order” (ibid., 169), but at the same time it constitutes and contains a localized “normality”; it is an exceptional law that holds only inside this gigantic enclave.
What is so terrible about the Nazi camps is that they were functionally organized as lethal machines. Administrative reason in its terrifying efficiency defined the logic of this enclave of mass murder. The Nazi camps were neither the first nor the cruelest machines of mass murder involved in civil wars, genocides or imperialist expeditions, but they can nevertheless help us to understand a specific urban-administrative mechanism through which “exception becomes normal.”
When exception loses its threshold character, and becomes the rule, it also becomes a secluded enclave. For those spatiotemporally contained in the enclave, the law “outside” simply does not exist. For those outside this enclave, the enclave can be either fatal trap (if this enclave takes the form of camp) or a zone of protection (if this enclave takes the form of a secluded area of privilege).
The camp can be taken to represent the limit towards which the city evolves only if we accept as a crucial characteristic of contemporary urban life the inhabiting of disconnected and enclosed enclaves. Otherwise, the camp—considered as a model arrangement for defining and confining people without rights (“bare life”)—has a concrete history that can indeed include today’s detention centers for “illegal” immigrants (those treated as non-citizens). What we can gain from understanding the camp as a model is necessarily connected to our ability to distinguish between these two levels in the use of such an analytical model.
An urban enclave is a clearly defined area where general law is partially suspended and a distinct set of administrative rules apply. The force of the law is present in an enclave as a protocol of use. Experienced from the outside, i.e., experienced as an outside, every urban enclave appears as an exception. Exception is made apparent in all the forms by which access to the enclave is regulated: general rules or common rights do not apply; upon entrance one must accept specific conditions of use, specific obligations, and forms of behavior. It is as if the city, considered as the uniform locus of sovereign law, is replaced by an urban archipelago comprised of enclaves where exceptional measures define different forms of suspension of law.
Experienced from the inside, i.e., experienced as an inside, the urban enclave is a secluded world. It is defined by rules created especially for its inhabitants. Exception, to continue the comparison with the camp, is thus normalized.
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