Claudio Minca

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

Abstract In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agambens spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzels grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.

Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean

This article engages with the most recent spatial fantasy for the making of ‘EU’ropean space: the idea of trans-European macro-regions, currently in vogue in the policy literature. In particular, we focus on the imaginings of a Mediterranean macro-region as the latest incarnation of the macro-regional fad, but also as a useful prism for reflecting on some of the underlying conceptual as well as political and geopolitical challenges of the on-going remaking and rescaling of ‘EU’ropean space. We argue that, although there exists by now a vast literature by geographers and other scholars that engages with the production of ‘EU’ropean spaces through regionalization, the policy literature generated by EU ‘macro-regional experts’ appears to entirely ignore these debates, professing an understanding of regions that is a conceptual pastiche at best, and that entirely occludes the political and geopolitical implications of region-making within, at, and beyond ‘EU’rope’s borders

The Island: Work,Tourism and the Biopolitical

This paper reflects on the biopolitical implications for tourists and workers of enclavic tourist resorts. I contend that the concept of ‘the Island’ captures very well the metaphorical, but also the functional proximity between many tourist ‘islands’ and other past and contemporary forms of encampment and seclusion. I will thus explore the relationship between the idea of ‘the Island’ in tourism and the production and reproduction of what are supposedly docile bodies and minds. I will suggest that in the island-like resort, the docile bodies of the tourist and of the worker come into contact and interact in very particular ways, marked by the distinct nature of the context that hosts their encounter. The space of that encounter is a very interesting haptic contact zone in the production of the tourist experience, a zone where ideas about life, class, habitus, gender, sexuality, the body, etc. are negotiated and where the very concept of work is questioned and may take unpredictable expressions. This is a space that the capitalist production of leisure tries to manage, tame and possibly reduce to a minimum but, paradoxically, this is also a space without which the endless re-enactment of the tourist performance in that place (a re-enactment that constitutes the very foundation of any tourist resort) would simply be impossible.

Humboldt's compromise, or the forgotten geographies of landscape

This paper is about the strategic forgetting of the Humboldtian ‘compromise’. The analysis looks to the ways in which the concept of landscape entered geography as a device uniquely able to match the Romantic imaginary of the emergent European bourgeoisie and this latters need for a scientific (and a-political) theory of knowledge. Humboldts geographical idea of landscape was precisely the ‘compromise’ that would provide the bourgeoisie with a new spatial theory. What I claim in this paper, following Franco Farinellis critical rewriting of the history of European geography, is that the nature of Humboldts attempt has been essentially cancelled from canonical disciplinary accounts, for a number of historical-political reasons. This accounts for why, even today, despite the achievements of the new cultural geography and the influence of nonrepresentational theories, landscapes all too often continue to be read either as texts or, worse still, as ‘real’ spaces and/or built environments.

The ‘Border Within’: Inhabiting the Border in Trieste:

In this paper we look to the Italian border city of Trieste—at various points in its past, a cosmopolitan port, Austrias urbs europeissima, but also a battleground for competing understandings of territoriality, identity, and belonging and a paragon of the violent application of an ethnoterritorial logic to a plurinational, plurilingual urban context; a paragon of the violence of modern borders. At the same time—and precisely by virtue of its border condition—Trieste has often found itself within the cracks of European modernity, rendering it a unique site for the rearticulation and reappropriation of that which Walter Mignolo terms “global designs”. In our analysis, we ask what lessons the experience of a city like Trieste in ‘inhabiting the border’ can hold for Mignolos notion of “border thinking” and for the elaboration of alternative geopolitical imaginaries.

Italian cultural geography, or the history of a prolific absence

Perhaps there is no such thing as an ‘Italian cultural geography’. Although it would be more correct to say that within Italian academic geography, there is no clearly identifiable sub-discipline that could possibly correspond to this label. There is nothing in the Italian geographical tradition that matches, for instance, the body of reflection that emerged in British geography in the 1980s and 1990s, following the pioneering work of scholars such as Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels and Peter Jackson. There are no Chairs in Cultural Geography, and few university courses of that name. Several years ago, Venetian geographer Fabio Lando (1995: 495) would remark, indeed, on the invisibility of cultural geography in the various disciplinary histories produced in recent times (e.g. Corna Pellegrini 1987; Corna Pellegrini and Brusa 1990). Apart from a few ‘exceptional exceptions’— to which I will return shortly—the great bulk of writings focusing (explicitly or implicitly) on the relationship between culture and geography has been marked by a series of characteristics that, unfortunately, are also proper to a large part of recent Italian geographical production more broadly: they often tend to ignore each other, thus precluding the possibility of any open disciplinary debate; they have a very limited impact outside of the discipline of geography; and, above all, they are the result of a sort of ‘splendid isolation’ from current international debates. Many of the works that I will identify in the paragraphs to follow as part of a hypothetical Italian cultural geography pay little heed, in fact, to developments in what is commonly considered (perhaps debatably) ‘international cultural geography’. This ‘double absence’—of the great majority of Italian ‘cultural’ geographers from international debates, and of ‘cultural geography’ from the official histories of the (national) discipline—is, undoubtedly, the result of a complex series of historical developments that I cannot comment upon in depth in the space available (see Guarrasi 1989; Lando 1995), but that have played a determining role in shaping the destiny of the body of work which I will examine here. I would like to argue, however, that although Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 2005

‘Trieste Nazione’ and its geographies of absence

The aim of this introductory essay is to offer a broad overview of the histories and geographies of Trieste stressing, in particular, the ways in which interpretations of Triestes past have been structured by a distinct set of tropes; a distinct set of geographical imaginations. I will argue that it is only by engaging with these recurrent tropes, with these recurrent geographical imaginations, that we can begin to understand the ways in which the city represents its past—and its present. In this sense, the aim of this essay is to provide some necessary historical—but also ‘ideal’—context for the more empirical investigations of the citys contemporary and historical geographies that make up this special issue.

Carl Schmitt and the concept of the border

The paper investigates the promise of Carl Schmitts concept of ‘nomos’ for developing new spatial imaginaries apposite to the study of ‘the border’ in contemporary political life, as per the aims of the ‘Lines in the Sand’ research agenda. Schmitt introduced the idea of a ‘nomos of the earth’ to refer to the fundamental relation between space and political order. There have been various historical expressions of the nomos, from the Respublica Christiana, to the jus publicum Europaeum, to a post–World War II (dis)order yet to be adequately theorised. We aim to explore the relatively overlooked spatial ontology of Schmitts work and suggest ways in which it might prompt alternative ways of thinking about borders and bordering practices as representative of broader dynamics in the relation between space and political order.

Nazi biopolitics and the dark geographies of the selva

This article examines the spatialities of Nazi genocidial practices. It does so by engaging with the concepts of selva and città, as inspired by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and drawing upon a broader tradition in human geography. Although the historical events that we recall have been extensively discussed elsewhere, we revisit them here through the lens of two geographical metaphors, the selva and the città, in order to gain new insight into the spatial and philosophical dimensions of Nazi geopolitics and biopolitics. We also comment on how these latter have contributed to the merging of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘factual’ realms of the Nazi geopolitical project for the creation of new vital space for the German people. We suggest that much can be learned from an examination of the ways in which particular understandings of (imagined and material) space marked the genocidial plans and practices of the Nazi perpetrators, producing a specific geography of genocide, where (spatial) theory and the implementation of extermination came together.

Not a geography of what doesn’t exist, but a counter-geography of what does Rereading Giuseppe Dematteis’ Le Metafore della Terra

The shaping of geography as a discipline has been the result of a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, good lessons that got lost. This paper suggests that using a counterfactual approach to draw attention to specific geographies that remained unfulfilled and poorly known helps to think beyond linear genealogies. By discussing a particular book called Le Metafore della Terra by Giuseppe Dematteis, published in Italian in 1985 but largely unknown in English-language geography, we reflect on what happened when it was published – and also specifically what did not happen and, cautiously, what might have happened. In his book, Dematteis took issue with geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes, suggesting that the depoliticization of geographical knowledge had served merely powerful interests, rendering the imagining of alternative worlds impossible. He picked apart sacred tenets of the geographical tradition: escapist fantasies of exploration and conquest, the poorly problematized use of scale, the faith in the power of cartographic reason, the metaphysics of organicism, and the magical belief in the power of the market. Here, by extending the idea of counterfactual histories to look inwards to the discipline of geography itself, we choose to engage with what might have happened if this particular critical approach to geography had become better known, exploring why this radical project for the discipline was cast aside, including by the author himself. In so doing, we consider how scholars are located in so-called ‘peripheral’ places of production of geographical knowledge, discussing how this helps to understand the circulation and non-circulation of certain ideas. We use these alternatively rewritten geographies to show how dominant linear narratives of the emerging of critical thinking in the 1980s tell us an incomplete story, suggesting instead a tangled, multiple history of the discipline. We are interested in how scientific knowledge is communicated and received, how this exposes both the multi-sited nature of knowledge production and circulation, and cultural and national differences in the reception of science, and what this says about the possibility of critical thinking and progressive ideas having real impact.