Camps, Gallows, Ghettos, Gulags, and Prisons

Abstract

States’ engines of social control are the most fearsome: camps (Lagers), gallows, ghettos, gulags, and prisons. The state uses them to control domestic, but not always internal, enemies. Against foreign enemies, it employs war. These engines of domestic control depend on popular compliance—that is, the state could not long maintain them unless the bulk of the population accepted them, if only tacitly. Outside of war, they show the most terrible visage of state power. They are secular societies’ divine violence before which citizenry are supposed to stand in “fear and trembling” Unlike Søren Kierkegaard’s (1843) exploration of faith by that title, there is nothing holy in the state’s divine violence. Also, unlike Kierkegaard’s explication and meditation on the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–24), the victims of the state’s divine violence are not sacrifices. The state means to show that those upon whom it inflicts its power are not worthy of sacrifice. They are bare life (Agamben 1995). Domestically, the state imposes its divine violence in a different way from when it is at war. Once the war concludes, “Where frontiers are decided the adversary is not simply annihilated; indeed he is accorded rights even when the victor’s superiority in power is complete” (Benjamin 1921:295). The state’s divine violence against its domestic enemies has to be impersonal, dispassionate, and implacable, because those qualities are essential to the rationale for the secular state, since the state has displaced the gods.