Bare Life’s Bare Essentials: When All You’ve Got is Hope – The State of Exception in The Road,District 9 and Blindness

I. Introduction

This article is a discussion of three films, The Road, ¹ District 9 ² and Blindness ³ – all undeniably addictive viewing. They resonate long after the credits have finished rolling. Drawing upon the work of Giorgio Agamben, tying these three diverse yet absorbing stories together is the state of exception within each. Materialized on screen by the existence of the camp, the hidden matrix of modernity, ultimately, this work is an attempt to operationalize Agamben’s chilling contention, through the lens of popular culture and filmic studies. For popular culture can not only analogize philosophy, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer ⁴ or The Simpsons, ⁵ but it can also provide a source of critique. In this present case, popular culture allows us to take Agamben elsewhere and confront the very foundations of his work, exposing some of his limitations. By the end of this article, Agamben’s assertion that the exception has truly become the rule and that “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” ⁶ will be put to the litmus test.

This article’s argument is in five parts. Part II will outline the thoughts of Giorgio Agamben and introduce the state of exception, the theory that links my analysis in the following three sections. In framing the remainder of the article, each film has been positioned along a spectrum of governmentality. As Foucault understood it, governmentality is realized through an obsession with the policing of “security, territory, population” ⁷ and represents the “rationalisation of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty.” ⁸ Consequently, this article is best conceptualized as a journey – one in which the reader allows the voyage along this broad ranging spectrum to take hold. Part III discusses The Road and its portrayal of the breaking down of all governmentality in a post-apocalyptic world. Part IV will then analyse District 9 and its depiction of post-apartheid South African government. Part V deals with Blindness, where typical modern day government is cast for all to see. Along the way, the argument will draw on other jurisprudential thought, as diverse as Allison Young, Hommi Bhabha, Thomas Hobbes and Michel Foucault, to inform the discussion.

Moreover, within these three sections, I highlight, to borrow a line from Allison Young, the “scene of violence” ⁹ or act of transgression central to each film. Building upon the spectrum of governmentality, this journey is also one in which I identify acts of human depravity. From the ultimate act of transgression, the feasting on human flesh, in The Road, to the Nazi-style experiments and heartless extermination of embryonic prawns in District 9, to the scene of violation and rape in Blindness, the confrontation with this intense violence is met head-on. As Young points out,

The cinematic scene of violence deals in suffering and makes fragility apparent – the fragility of social structures, of ethical relations and of the very tissues of the body. The crime-image in the scene of violence offers us a representation of events on the border of sense: in looking at the violent crime-image, then, we offer ourselves up to an encounter with extremity and uncertainty. ¹⁰

Part VI will build on that encounter, briefly tying all the overlapping themes and motifs together, in an attempt to provoke a deeper reflection on where we stand today with the very fundamentals of our civilization – that is our ethical, moral and political standards. Ultimately, these films represent a riposte to Agamben and his sensational conclusions.

II. It’s the State of Exception … It’s the Camp

There is no doubting that Giorgio Agamben is the flavor of the 21st century; move over Žižek, a new philosophical juggernaut is in town. Agamben’s name appears to pop up in a wide variety of disciplines, as his work is critiqued and interpreted by numerous scholars. ¹¹ Moreover, jurisprudence’s love affair and fascination with him is no one night stand, for his work heralds a sensational conclusion, namely that “the state of exception … has become the rule.” ¹² Further, he offers the concentration camp up as the “hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity,” ¹³ drawing upon the Schmittean exception and reformulating the concept of biopolitics, to arrive at this catastrophic endpoint.

In 1922, Carl Schmitt famously defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.” ¹⁴ In eight simple words Schmitt established the essential contiguity between sovereign power and the state of exception. Thus, the question becomes what exactly is the state of exception? Originally understood as something extraordinary, Schmitt referred to it as the “suspension of the entire existing juridical order.” ¹⁵ By its very logic, it refers to a measure that should only have validity for a limited period of time. Schmitt envisaged the decision “remaining within the framework of the juristic,” with the sovereign acting within yet beyond the legal system. As Blanchot asserts, the law is “obsessed with exteriority” ¹⁶ and exists “only in regard to its transgression-infraction” which “institutes it as form.” ¹⁷ Agamben picks up on this theme and runs with it:

The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. The particular “force” of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. ¹⁸

According to Agamben, the state of exception has reached its full development in western contemporary society, becoming the paradigm of governance today. For him, the state of exception is “neither external nor internal to the juridical order”; it is rather a “zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.” ¹⁹ Further, the law “employs the exception … as its original means of referring to and encompassing life” so as to “bind and, at the same time, abandon the living being to law.” ²⁰ Within the state of exception, every limit of life and every possible transgression comes to be included within the purview of “a new juridico-political paradigm.” ²¹ Agamben sees the law as a supremely creative force, as it makes “everything … truly … possible.” ²²

Agamben’s reconstruction of the relationship between sovereign rule and biopolitics leads to a disturbing conclusion – the concentration camp is the nomos of modernity. ²³ From the outset, the camp is recognized as the place in which the most absolute “conditio inhumana” that ever existed on earth was realized. ²⁴ However, technically, what is the camp? It is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is not simply an external space. ²⁵ Rather, the camp is the “structure in which the state of exception – the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realized normally.” ²⁶ The sovereign no longer has limitations. Further to this, questions about the legality of what happens within the camp are futile and, in fact, meaningless. ²⁷ This is because the “camp is a hybrid of law and fact, in which the two terms have become indistinguishable.” ²⁸ For those who entered the camp were venturing into a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, where the liberal notions of rights and protection no longer carried any meaning.

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. ²⁹

The camp wholly encompasses the paradigm where politics becomes biopolitics and bare life is confused with the citizen.

More of Agamben’s analysis will be integrated throughout the article, but for now it is time to begin this journey – a journey in which the polar extremes of governmentality are realized, from the breaking down of all state structures to the incarnation of a government that could be easily mistaken for ours today. First stop, The Road.

III. The Road

Directed by John Hillcoat and based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road chronicles the desperate fight for survival of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic America. Devoid of any light or sunshine the entire story, one could be forgiven for dismissing this film as a dark and bleak affair that will simply leave the viewer slumped in his chair, in a state of depression. However, nothing could be further from the truth, as the journey we witness provokes and inspires an absorbing dialogue about morality, evil and humanity in general. Set after a cataclysmic event that is never fully explained (think nuclear holocaust, alien invasion, climate change …), time has stopped at 1:17 and the world is slowly dying. As each day becomes colder and greyer than the last, most living organisms have perished – no animals have survived and the crops are long gone. The roads are peopled by refugees pulling carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food but, ultimately, doing what they need to survive. At one point, the father finds what could well be the last remaining can of Coke on Earth and offers it to his son who asks, wide-eyed, “What is it?” ³⁰ The two main characters in this film remain nameless throughout the entire journey – they are simply a man and a boy, a father and his son, travelling across a barren landscape. Reflecting this is the no frills style in which the story unfolds, relying on neither a big budget special effects bonanza, like the recent blockbuster 2012, ³¹ nor the tongue-in-cheek humor of the zombie fest kill-a-thon, Zombieland. ³² Without mushroom clouds, meteors or aliens to steal the show, the father and son’s quest to stay alive, while attempting to retain their humanity, takes center stage. This film bypasses the big event itself and explores the human dimension, managing to salvage, out of what appears hopeless despair, a courage and optimism of survival.

In the two films to follow, District 9 and Blindness, the state is rampant, with sovereign power wielded and muscle flexed. The Road rather depicts the breaking down of all governmentality. The pure anarchist in the Proudhon tradition might cherish this situation, for as the often quoted passage suggests:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. ³³

However, the Hobbesian-style state of nature to which the world has reverted is perhaps not the Garden of Eden envisaged in a territory devoid of state institutions. The father and son exist in a perpetual state of “continuall feare, and danger of violent death,” ³⁴ an existence that could best be epitomized in the overused but utterly effective descriptor of Hobbes – “nasty, brutish and short.” ³⁵ In the state of nature, it is universally accepted that each person has a right to defend themself against attack, with each being their own judge of how and when to achieve this. Radical instability ensues, as the state of nature becomes a state of war, savagery and degradation.

And because the condition of Man, is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which case everyone is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to everything; even to one another’s body. ³⁶

We are informed via flashback that the boy’s mother wished to end their lives, including her son’s, rather than confront the savagery that had descended upon the streets – an option that the father just would not contemplate, let alone enact, at that time. Eventually, the mother abandons her family, giving up all hope. It is the boy’s spirit and hope that generate the light into the film that the setting and surroundings do their best to dampen.

However, the void left by the absence of sovereign power and state institutions does not go completely unfilled. Rather, asserting a semblance of control are embryonic versions of what Nozick might call dominant protective associations. ³⁷ These are groups of individuals who band together to better their chances of protection, or in this case, survival. Even in such desperate times, in unity there is strength. An association is better equipped to handle both the terrain and the bandits who roam the streets, offering a modicum of order in a largely lawless world. However, these groups have developed a sinister edge, coming across as a demonic parody rather than the manifestation of what Nozick envisaged. The father and son come across a few of these associations along their journey. In their first such encounter, it is clear that the association has a monopoly over whatever resources are left. It has fuel, a functioning vehicle and, most importantly, weapons. At a later juncture in the film they witness another association, one whose members are hunting their human prey like a pack, as if participating in some form of sport.

There is one scene of violence in The Road which provides the viewer with the film’s paradigmatic scene, a scene that testifies to the darkest depths of the human condition. Starving, the father and son stumble upon a mansion, sparking a faint hope that there might be food inside. The pair investigates the premises and, in the floor of a room, discover a hatch, locked with a large padlock. The father remarks, “There’s a reason this is locked.” Engineering a way to pry the hatch open, they descend the wooden steps. He flicks his lighter on and swings the flame out over the darkness, to bring illumination into a place that is so cold and damp. The first thing that strikes them, as they survey the area, is the ungodly stench. The father faintly makes out a part of a stone wall, the clay floor and an old mattress, darkly stained. He continues his search and finds, huddled against the back wall and on the floor, naked emaciated bodies, male and female, all trying to hide, using their hands to shield their faces from the unaccustomed light. On the mattress lay a man with missing limbs, while others had their legs gone to the hip, the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. “Jesus” the father exclaimed as, one by one, they turned and blinked in the pitiful light, whispering “Help us, please help us.” ³⁸ The father grabs the boy but, before they can scramble out of the basement, a body clutches the father’s leg, pleading with him. “They’re taking us to the smokehouse.” ³⁹ The father kicks free of the feeble grasp and slams the hatch shut. Eventually father and son flee into the woods, realizing that the dominant protective association of the territory had returned to their headquarters. Hiding in the leaves and ash provided in the lower ground nearby, the boy is paralysed by fear. Remaining there for the rest of the night, hideous shrieks and loud thuds filled the night air. The greatest fear for the father had been cannibalism, a fear that had come to fruition, for they had stumbled across a plantation that was harvesting humans for survival.

These events represent the realization of the exception, once again actualized through the camp. In this depiction of the camp, The Road has surpassed the realm of homo sacer and entered terrain that defies this author’s written prose. For, the “quintessential result of the organisation of camps is the stripping away from the human of any significant intentional relation to the world whilst nonetheless remaining alive.” ⁴⁰ The story of the Muselmanner exemplifies this so well:

All the Muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story… Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, or non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death, death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen. ⁴¹

The bodies awaiting harvest in the cellar epitomize the journey of the Muselmanner so vividly. Although only on screen for a fleeting moment, the image of those bodies is an unforgettable one – so lifeless, so expressionless and without animation that to prolong their torture any further would be the crueller and more inhumane act. Of all the violent acts to be identified throughout this article, it is The Road that provides the ultimate act of moral transgression – the feasting on the flesh of another human being.

However, in this story of desperation, who are the Muselmann? Is everyone occupying this world exhibiting varying degrees of this plight? Agamben deploys the Muselmann in his argument as a limit figure of the human and inhuman. Returning to his fundamental obsession with zones of indistinction, the Muselmann operates within a space in which it is impossible to definitively separate one from the other. The key question thus becomes whether there is, in fact, any “humanity to the human,” beyond biologically belonging to the species. Ultimately, for Agamben the exceptional situation of Auschwitz marked

the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm … The Muselmann … the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life where dignity ends. ⁴²

Moreover, “the Muselmann in some sense marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man,” designated “a point at which human beings, while apparently remaining human beings, ceased to be human.” ⁴³ At first glance, The Road appears to be devoid of any morality, as the only named character, Ely, passes judgment on his society:

If there is a God up there he would have turned it back on us by now. Whoever made humanity will find no humanity here. No sir, no sir! ⁴⁴

The question thus looms: does The Road present us with a society where all dignity has been lost? It is not just the emaciated bodies within the plantation cellar that incarnate the Muselmann, but all the road warrior cannibals that roam the street. The father and the boy encounter one such warrior in their travels, one whose face tells the story. The way his eyes are fixated on the boy, the slow licking of his lips in anticipation of a new meal, all point to a figure that has been stripped of or, at least, reduced in human qualities. In another scene, a world is portrayed where cannibals no longer sense the error (or put more bluntly, the stench) of their ways. In an interchange between members of one of the dominant protective associations, the depths of humanity’s plight are revealed for all to see.

However, it is the son and his father who retain their dignity, by clinging to some form of moral code. For example, would the father and his son ever resort to cannibalism? For them, there is the line in the sand that they would not cross:

This invocation of the “good guys” and “carrying the fire” are referred to several times throughout the story’s duration. It’s what keeps the son going and gives him strength. ⁴⁷

However, the most heartening aspect of the film is that the son, in particular, not only talks the talk but walks the walk. Throughout the struggle for survival, the father must make tough choices, choices that have significant ramifications for not only the life and death of his son, but others as well. Consequently, with a nod to Robert Cover, he is engaging in interpretation that takes place in a “field of pain and death.” ⁴⁸ Although the father is not the judge at whom Cover was launching much of his critique, that apt descriptor literally conveys the true setting with which the father is confronted. Unable to open his heart to anyone else, his sole purpose is to prepare his son for his eventual death. On their journey, the pair meets an elderly innocent-minded man named Ely. The boy must plead with his father to even engage with the newcomer, eventually persuading him to share their dinner with him. The next day the father demands they part ways, much to the boy’s dismay.

You always say watch out for the bad guys, that old man wasn’t a bad guy, you can’t even tell anymore. ⁴⁹

While the father’s intentions were clear in not allowing the boy to become attached, he had become so jaded by the dark side of humanity that his survival techniques were set to overdrive.

Agamben’s “fascination for the cadaveric figure of the Muselmann occults the complexity of life, survival and death inside or outside the concentration camp.” ⁵⁰ Ultimately, The Road meets Agamben head-on and asks the question: Is it possible to survive the camp? His obsession with positioning the Muselmann as a limit point leads to calls of oversimplification. Perhaps falling into the trap of the “screen victim” syndrome, Agamben compresses and distorts the complexity of the camp to a rhetorical figure. ⁵¹ Furthermore, the role of death as telos in Agamben’s argument is undeniable, generating a strikingly persuasive strength to his work, while also providing a limiting weakness. Muselmann are the living dead. For Agamben, the camp is dedicated and fixated on death, for the exception – “the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” ⁵² – exposes the arbitrary visitation of death. It has to be conceded that the camp is a tremendously affective focal point or paradigm that invests Agamben’s words with a deep resonance. However, it also fosters in Agamben a perceived masochistic desire or jouissance in the realization of his disturbing conclusion. His corpus of work at times appears to be celebrating the thing he is decrying. Of Agamben’s contemporaries, Žižek suggests that he is not so much pessimistic but engaging in a “negative teleology in which the entire Western tradition is approaching its own disastrous end.” ⁵³ Yet, The Road with its bleak undertones suggests that, in spite of the apocalypse that had hit, a return to the golden age is possible – this story can have a happy ending. The conclusion of the film injects the story with an optimism that holds out the prospect for the affirmative – survival is not only possible, but indeed the fate of the young boy. After the passing of his father, an unnamed character (played by Australian Guy Pearce) saves the day, taking the boy in – a proposal the boy accepts because his new guardian is one of the “good guys.” For even after nuclear war (remember the cataclysmic event is all in the eye of the beholder), the nuclear family survives. Thus, The Road faithfully plays out a classic trope of American disaster films, as the family unit reunifies stronger than ever.

IV. District 9

In 2009, District 9 was released, becoming a box office smash in many countries, culminating in an Oscar nomination for Best Film. Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, aliens from outer space have landed. As one journalist observed:

To everyone’s surprise the ship didn’t come to a stop over Manhattan or Washington or Chicago but instead coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg. ⁵⁴

We learn that the aliens cannot leave our planet, due to a technical fault on the mothership – a command module had detached itself and mysteriously disappeared. Upon first contact, as if they were “expecting music from heaven and bright shining lights,” ⁵⁵ the government was shocked to discover unhealthy and aimless creatures. International pressure was at fever pitch, as the whole world was watching South Africa’s next move – the government had to do the “right” thing. Activist groups gave immediate attention to securing the aliens proper status and rights. As a result, the government established an aid group that ferried the aliens to a temporary camp that had been set up. However, that camp soon became fenced and militarized and, consequently, a massive slum formed. This part of the storyline, depicting the 1980s, represents one of three layers that are tied to the overall plot. It is from this introductory section, which informs the viewer of the landing and subsequent ghettoization and relocation of the alien community, that the drama unfolds.

The remainder of the plot line, occurring in present time, is centered on a narrative that discloses, in retrospect, the secret behind the disappearance of Wikus van de Merwe. Wikus is a proper middle class Afrikaner who becomes a fugitive soon after he returns from an operation in which he took part as an employee of Multi-National United (MNU). Governmentality and state structures have been given a 21st century makeover. MNU is a private corporation authorized by the South African government to execute the removal of more than 1.8 million aliens from their current location, D9, to the newly created District 10. Initially presenting Wikus’ disappearance in the form of interviews with colleagues and family members, documented by a TV camera, this device serves a greater purpose – providing the socio-political setting of the film. On the surface, District 9 represents a South African liberal post-apartheid society – the CEO of MNU is black, as are some of Wikus’ colleagues who assist in the execution of the relocation. However, beneath the surface creeps the survival of a norm that has supposedly retreated into the background of contemporary South Africa – a white, heterosexual, Christian middle-class. Shifting gear into classical Hollywood narrative, the rest of the film plays out Wikus’ quest for answers and redemption.

On a broad level, the measures initiated by the South African government to deal with the aliens are best understood as processes of “othering.” Fundamentally, the aliens possess an agency that does not dissolve into habits of cooperation, compromise or assimilation – they possess true uniqueness. Modernity’s fetishism with the liberal self struggles to comprehend that, before one’s identity is shaped by rights – in fact, before that right itself – comes one’s obligation. That obligation, to put it another way, is the radical turn towards the demand to respect the existential integrity of the other. ⁵⁶ The citizens of Johannesburg deploy as many strategies as they can to deny or drown out this ethical obligation. First and foremost, this is evident in the dubbing of the aliens as “prawns.” Inspired by the aliens’ resemblance to the South African Parktown prawn, a police officer bluntly explains its origins: “You can’t say they don’t look like that. They look like bloody prawns.” ⁵⁷ In essence, it is a prejudiced and derogatory term that implies that the aliens are bottom feeders who scavenge for left-overs. Clearly, the term is not one of affection or endearment, but rather reflects the xenophobic turn of the polity. As one citizen puts it:

[The government] is spending so much money to keep them here when they could be spending them on other things. At least they keep them separate from us. ⁵⁸

Another even demands: “They must go. I don’t know where, but they must just go!” ⁵⁹ Or, as a more sinister citizen suggests, there is a solution: “A virus, a selective virus. Release it near the aliens.” ⁶⁰ Similarities can be drawn here between this proposition and the outbreak of smallpox amongst the American Indians.

The true indictment on our unwillingness to deal with the “other” is the fact that all of the interview statements which do not explicitly mention aliens were drawn from authentic interviews, conducted by Blomkamp in his 2005 short film Alive in Joburg. ⁶¹ In that instance, he had simply asked some South Africans for their opinion of Zimbabwean and Nigerian refugees; they were not actors speaking their lines, but real people giving real answers. In fact, the aliens’ situation shares many characteristics with that of the precarious position of refugees. For, as Douzinas elaborates,

the refugee is the absolute other. She represents in an extreme way the trauma that marks the genesis of state and self and puts to the test the claims of universalisation of human rights. ⁶²

Similarly, the strategies of rejection initiated by the legal community, for both the refugee and the prawn, offer pertinent examples of the “consequences of identifying someone as the terrifying absolute, total Other, the symbol of contamination that otherness may bring upon community and identity.” ⁶³ The rhetoric of “unwashed, unwanted aliens with a very different and foreign religion … incapable of assimilation and as part of a world-wide creed bent on the destruction of our way of life” ⁶⁴ could easily be applied to the prawn or refugee. Thus, if a political undercurrent or message is to be drawn from this film, it is one that dreams of a time that embraces a rights-based system that respects the uniqueness of the other and the ethical imperative of alterity, in the true sense of the Levinasian or Douzinasian call to arms.

Dominating the first half of the film are aesthetic strategies which authenticate the events with an edgy realism. Almost every image sequence seems to be transmitted through TV cameras – the arrival of the aliens that the viewer bears witness to through live news recordings; the documentary-style questioning of Johannesburg residents, who express their resentment towards the aliens; the MNU cameras that document the massive operation Wikus is in charge of. In particular, that final device conjures up parallels to the embedded journalism most recently seen in Iraq. By sheer overload and bombardment, the extent of surveillance is realized and the 24/7 Foucauldian surveillance state is operationalized. ⁶⁵ Expanding on the work of Jeremy Bentham and his 19th century blueprint of the panopticon, Foucault articulated “a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” ⁶⁶ The panopticon was an architectural design put forth by Bentham for prisons, schools, hospitals and factories. The effect of such a design was to act as a control mechanism, ensuring that a consciousness of constant surveillance is internalized. For Foucault, panopticism

is the general principle of a new political anatomy … The celebrated, transparent circular cage with its high tower, powerful and knowing, may have been … a perfect disciplinary institution; but … one may unlock the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. ⁶⁷

The panopticon acts as a metaphor for a regime of discipline and punishment, with its concomitant strategies of governmentality. The aliens themselves suffer the full disciplining force, evident in their containment in the militarized structure of D9 and their documentation in the course of their relocation to D10. Every household and its occupants are registered through fingerprints. The aliens are assigned English names, thereby assigning them new identities and making their bodies more easily processed. This is crystallized in the particular moment when subtitles are introduced – the viewer can now understand the alien. Thus, these devices demonstrate a system of civil society that imposes on individuals the most meticulous subjection of their bodies, through impersonal technologies of surveillance and normalization.

At this stage, the society appears to conform to Foucault’s understanding of modern government, in particular his theory of biopolitics. Although it is conceded that biopolitics is not one of Foucault’s most meticulously grounded notions, he understood the term to designate what “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.” ⁶⁸ Ultimately, biopolitics marks the threshold of political modernity, as it places life at the center of the political order, a domain where life is put “in question” and it can be both protected and eliminated. ⁶⁹ Foucault viewed this questioning as a “way of living and not a way of killing,” concluding that political power is not analogous to the sovereign power of putting a life to death. ⁷⁰ Rather, it is understood more as a power intending to police and secure the life of entire populations. ⁷¹ Foucault did not deny that a pervasive sovereignty had “ceased to play a role,” but that the “technology of biopower” or the power of “keeping alive” had exceeded sovereignty and its “putting to death.” ⁷²

Agamben claims that his work is an attempt to correct or, at least, complete a Foucauldian thesis. ⁷³ In formulating his own version of biopolitics, he makes some important distinctions. He sees an inextricable link between biopolitics and sovereignty, in fact declaring that “it can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.” ⁷⁴ In diverting from Foucault, Agamben questions how the founder of biopolitics fails to account for how the control over life could so quickly degenerate into a power of extermination of biological life, or what Agamben refers to as a “thanatopolitics.” ⁷⁵ Moreover, sovereignty, for the purposes of Agamben, is a function that undoes the distinction between keeping alive and putting to death, just as it blurs the distinction between right and violence, value and fact. ⁷⁶ As Vatter surmises:

The novelty of Agamben’s treatment of biopolitics consists in the fact that he understands the political domination of biological life to occur through law, and law is in turn reinterpreted, by means of the concepts of the sacred and of sovereignty. ⁷⁷

These allow Agamben to reconnect the idea of biopolitics, which is intended to be a “power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimise and multiply it,” ⁷⁸ to a formidable power of death.

This aspect of Agamben’s work once again exposes his obsession with death. Yet, we have barely scratched the surface, as the lexicon of terms Agamben utilizes further entrenches this fixation. First and foremost, he draws a distinction between zoë and bios. The former refers to “the simple fact of living” ⁷⁹ common to all beings (animals, men, gods), while the latter refers to political existence, a “qualified life” or “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group.” ⁸⁰ Essentially, this is the difference between natural existence, devoid of any human quality, and the legal status of a human being, who enjoys the rights of a citizen. Agamben adds to this premise the notion of “bare life,” which subsists between these two, neither zoë nor bios, but rather “the zone of indistinction in which bios and zoë constitute each in including and excluding each other.” ⁸¹ Bare life provides the very starting point for who is to be included in a political community, as this can only be deduced by the simultaneous exclusion of those who are not allowed to become full legal subjects. This structure of the inclusive exclusion of bare life is constitutive of the political sovereign and the decisive event of modernity. This setup allows Agamben to claim that, at the beginning of all politics, we find the establishment of a borderline and the inauguration of a space that is deprived of the protection of the law: “The original political relation is the ban.” ⁸² Agamben, again obsessed with indistinction, concludes:

The realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoë, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. ⁸³

Bare life is perhaps encapsulated best by homo sacer, a figure District 9 incarnates and literalizes. Described as the main “protagonist” ⁸⁴ of his work, Agamben justifies his re-understanding of biopolitics by invoking an archaic Roman law concerning the homo sacer. ⁸⁵ Homo sacer designates an individual that may be killed, but not sacrificed, without the executer being condemned for homicide. ⁸⁶ This “sacred man” is reduced to mere physical existence and becomes some kind of “living dead.” The obscure figure of homo sacer in a way defines sovereign logic because, although appearing at the very margin of politics, it in fact turns out to be the very foundation of a political body. ⁸⁷ It not only legitimizes decisions that are made about life and death, but what constitutes a rights-bearing citizen at all. From Agamben’s perspective, politics indeed has been entirely transformed into biopolitics. ⁸⁸ The internal coherence of Agamben’s work is again evident here as he not only utilizes the same intellectual matrix of the “in-between,” but also the repeated use of a series of signifiers. Agamben peppers the reader with continued references to zoë, bare life and homo sacer. Thus Lacan’s term, the “floating signifier,” ⁸⁹ could be applied to Agamben’s lexicon of terms. Furthermore, a figure like homo sacer, who has a proper and generic name, can be recognized as what Deleuze and Guattari call “conceptual personae.” ⁹⁰ This refers to imaginary constructs which have enabled a lot of philosophers to develop their thought. This thought is crystallized most obviously in the prawns, who vividly illustrate the journey of homo sacer. They inhabit a space where they are treated with impunity and never afforded any of the protections we, as citizens, take for granted.

However, it is not only the aliens themselves who are living in an in-between world. The South African authorities who deal with the prawns have become a kind of counterpart to homo sacer – acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law. Moreover, Agamben’s supposed factory of death – the camp – is a character itself in this film. On the surface, it seems that the government appear less concerned with mass extermination than with mass relocation. At the conclusion of the film, we are informed that the relocation was successful and D10 is now home to 2.6 million prawns. Segregation appears complete. District 9 was a dilapidated slum but, more importantly, too visible a structure within the precinct of the city. District 10, the location of the new residence, is conveniently located 200 km outside of Johannesburg city – out of sight, out of mind. At the beginning of the operation, Wikus sums up the mood:

We’ve built a nice, new facility where the prawn can go. He can be comfortable. He can stay there. The people of Johannesburg and of South Africa are going to live happily and safely, knowing that the prawn is very far away. ⁹¹

This can be read as another strategy for drowning out the obligation to the “other,” by removing their very face. By sending the alien away, the South Africans ensure that they and the law will no longer have to come face to face with the trauma and will, thereby, resist ever experiencing the epiphany of alterity. ⁹²

Dominating the human-alien interaction in this film is the blatant disregard and lack of respect for the “other,” demonstrated in the scenes of transgression and violence which abound. These exemplify the prawn’s bare life status. First, Wikus is the ring leader in a coldly calculating act of homicide. In the eviction mission, he comes across a shack harbouring the breeding ground of baby prawns – a home to approximately 40–50 eggs which are gaining sustenance from the carcass of a cow. Wikus calmly pulls out the nutrition tube to one of the little guys who, deprived of his life’s essentials, perishes. However, to abort each egg one at a time would take too long. Efficiency demanded the use of “the snake.” This device torches the shack, producing sounds similar to that of popcorn in a microwave, as each egg is destroyed. Continuing the mission throughout the district, Wikus notes the lack of responsibility or care taken for the young prawns that are trawling the streets, declaring to his colleagues, “That’s why we abort.” However, the scenes of violence do not end there, instead becoming more disturbing. MNU is conducting genetic research that draws parallels to the era of the Nazis and their experiments on Jews. In this instance, the experiments are all in the name of mastering alien weaponry and creating biotechnology. MNU is the second largest manufacturer of weapons in the world and would do anything to outdo their competition. After his exposure to alien DNA, Wikus, unaware of his employer’s true activities, is taken to the basement where the experiments take place. He is greeted by the image of scientists disposing of alien guts and entrails. His astonishment and disgust are evident and further reinforced when Wikus is forced to kill a defenseless prawn with an alien weapon.

However, Wikus himself has transformed into a prawn – What does his existence mean for the society and, more importantly, what would be his fate? Key to the film is Wikus’ visceral transformation after exposure to an unknown alien substance. He becomes a passenger in an uncontrollable metamorphosis into a prawn. Signs of the change are noticeable almost immediately, as a black substance starts coming out of his nose, his fingernails start falling off and he begins to bring up black vomit. Soon he had grown alien tentacles and his DNA was in perfect balance between alien and human. Most importantly, he could operate alien weaponry, making him the “most valuable business artefact on Earth” and prime for harvesting, to study and replicate his genetic makeup. A stranger to and outcast from his own society, Wikus represents an interstitialization of the human, confusing the boundaries of what is non-human. At the heart of his metamorphosis is a bleeding of the public and the private. Thus, the film is not only hybrid by its very nature, evidenced in its unwillingness to be defined by any one genre, but also has at its core a hybrid creature. As the post-colonialist scholar Bhabha asserts, hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In an attempt to assert colonial power, “[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different – a mutation, a hybrid.” ⁹³ This hybrid contradicts both the attempt to fix and control indigenous cultures and the illusion of cultural isolation. Alien Christopher Johnson and his son (CJ) notice the difference in their new ally:

By his very existence and nature, Wikus challenges the purist ideal of a South African citizen. By the film’s conclusion the transformation is complete, yet Wikus still mourns for his former human life with his wife, for whom he handcrafts a macramé flower. The final image zooms in on Wikus, who thus becomes identifiable amongst two million non-identifiable aliens – his spirit lives on. Although he is “completely” alien in body, Wikus will never descend into indecipherability.

Much like The Road, District 9 also challenges what is seen as Agamben’s inherent pessimism. Does District 9 offer a ray of hope in the avalanche of death and despair? Homo sacer exists, only to be killed. The prawns are prone to slaughter at anytime, in the name of dastardly experiments, and appear to serve as a standing reserve for MNU’s weaponry research. They serve as clear parallels to the refugee, “a significant part of humanity today” ⁹⁵ who experience the barest of lives, as rights now attach only to citizens of the nation-state. However, sentimentality creeps in as Wikus stands, alive – the heroic survivor of the camp. Assuming the mantle of Primo Levi, he demonstrates that, at the core of his very being, his true self remains intact and unchanged, despite the horrors of the camp.

V. Blindness

The final stage of our spectrum of governmentality, Blindness, is a film that packs a powerful punch about human frailty and the terrifying extent of sovereign power. Based on the Nobel Prize winning Jose Saramago’s novel, the film, set in an unidentified metropolis, tells the story of an epidemic of blindness that sweeps the population. Known as the “white sickness,” no organic cause can be found for this condition which manifests itself, not as a descent into darkness, but as a whiteout – as if the world has become a blank page, an empty screen or a puddle of milk. Within the first 24 hours there are hundreds of cases reported, all the same – no pain, just a sea of white. Similar to the device utilized in The Road, we never learn the names of any of the characters, ⁹⁶ with the contagion afflicting an eye doctor, who examined patient zero, as well as all the patients in his office at the time. This includes a prostitute who momentarily mistook her sudden blindness while with a client as the weirdest but possibly best sex she’s ever had.

Not surprisingly, panic ensues. The government’s response is decisive, as they establish makeshift quarantines, with those that are infected rounded up and shipped off. Weeks pass and cities return to their daily routine, oblivious to the tragedy around them, as everyday people are being dragged away in the back of vans and delivered to the camps. Eventually, what started as an arrival in dribs and drabs of a few infected victims, magnified to busloads. For, as one of the new arrivals put it, “Either the panic spread the blindness or the blindness spread the panic,” and the fragility of civilization had crumbled. However, this is only part of the story as we, as viewers, bear witness to the vicious and degrading struggle among physically and psychologically blinded humans, within the microcosmic confines of the concentration camp. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances, as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads, travelling by touch from building to building in search of food.

On the surface, the events of Blindness quintessentially represent the archetypal state of exception. A turn of events unfolds that is foreign or alien to government, causing it to act swiftly in the face of uncertainty. Within hours, sovereign power has flexed its muscles, camps are formed and those carrying the white sickness are identified and processed. The unfamiliarity and novelty of this disease which cannot be explained, despite the endless conferences, seminars and roundtables of specialists in the medical profession, further adds to the unusual nature of the situation. When those that are infected arrive at the camp, they are greeted by a pronouncement from the government, a message that is broadcast on continuous loop:

Attention! Attention! Attention! The government regrets having been forced to exercise with all urgency, what it considers to be its rightful duty to protect the population by all possible means. We are in a state of crisis. An epidemic of blindness has broken out, provisionally known as the White Sickness. And we are relying on the public spirit and cooperation of all citizens to stem any future contagion. The decision to temporarily quarantine all those infected was not taken without careful consideration. Be assured that the isolation in which you find yourselves represents, above any personal considerations, an act of solidarity with the rest of the nation. ⁹⁷

This message attempts to convey a government that has taken responsibility and acted with authority to deliver a considered response, to overshadow its haphazard and ad hoc reality. As the eye doctor points out, “What kind of idiot would play a video in a quarantine for the blind?” ⁹⁸ What is plain for all to see is that the threat to the state and, consequently, the state’s need to be protected are the justifications for the government’s response – a response that clearly invokes the state of exception, materialized in the establishment of the camp. The camp itself is a derelict building and its population is forced to live in inexpressible filth – you know times are tough when humans live in their own excrement. Divided into different wards, each with their own leader, there appears to be a semblance of order somehow maintained in all the chaos. Beneath the surface, tensions quickly build and a survival of the fittest sets in. The perimeters are under 24/7 surveillance by armed guards, who have the discretion to fire upon anyone. They treat those carrying the white sickness with utter disdain, as the motto appears to be “Make do and if you die we don’t care.” The film, perhaps passing judgment on the ease with which the exception is realized, finds modern sovereign power wanting. As a new arrival, updating the group of inmates hungry for any tangible news of the outside world, put it, “The disease was immune to bureaucracy.” ⁹⁹

However, Blindness provides a much more nuanced reading and reflection on sovereign power. This is achieved through a parody of sorts, as the sovereign is demonized by the introduction of an internal sovereign within the camp, to play against the traditional mold or expectations. As discussed earlier, the external sovereign is the one who declares the exception or state of emergency. The sovereign within the camp portrays a different politics – a politics of consumption. This thirst for more is brutally realized in the form of sexual consumption. Female subjects are reified into objects, losing their intrinsic worth and becoming things that serve an entirely different purpose.

Ultimately, what we are confronted with inside the confines of the camp is an inhabitant who declares his ward to be a monarchy and himself King. The King of Ward 3 addresses his subjects over the microphone, declaring he’s “taking over this shithole!” So how does a blind man exert such control over his fellow sufferers? It’s not a mutual acceptance by the camp’s inhabitants of a supposed benevolent act of guidance and leadership by the sovereign. Rather it’s force, or the threat of it in the form of a gun, that establishes the inherent power and jurisdiction of the King. He may be blind, but he can keep shooting until he hits. This image of command and control conjures up parallels to Hart’s characterization of the Austinian sovereign. ¹⁰⁰ Austin defined law as a species of command, containing three elements:

Hart analogized this type of rule to a man with a gun pointed to the back of the subject’s head, forcing compliance with his command, or face the obvious repercussions of punishment.

Invoking Lon Fuller’s tale of King Rex ¹⁰² and his law-making escapades, what are the dictates of the King of Ward 3 and do they satisfy the test of inner morality? ¹⁰³ Although the camp is home to a human existence that has degenerated substantially, the King sets forth his simple primordial rule, his golden rule: If you want to eat, you’ll have to pay for it. ¹⁰⁴ Delivering his rules over the microphone, they are promulgated for all to hear. The clarity of the rule is there for all to see. Compliance on behalf of the subjects is not only possible, but necessary for their survival. Exerting control over the meagre food supply that is delivered to the camp, the King establishes an exchange operation akin to a store. He first demands the valuables or personal possessions of inhabitants (jewellery, watches, etc…) to be given up in return for food. However, after a week passes the rest of the camp have nothing left to offer. A new form of exchange is declared, as the King demands women be bartered to himself and his royal companions from Ward 3 in exchange for food. Although it appears that there exists an inner morality within the King’s law, this is purely a morality of form. How can we ignore the substance? The depravity of the human spirit is allowed to fester if we make no judgment on the content of the law. A law that meets such pernicious ends could hardly be declared moral. The King is effectively attempting to legitimize the rape of the female inhabitants of the camp, for to deny his request would result in starvation. Those within the eye doctor’s ward looked to him for deliberation: “Do what you feel is right according to your own morality.” ¹⁰⁵ To which one of the male characters responds, “Dignity has no price.” ¹⁰⁶ All of this begs the question: Is it possible to maintain adherence to a higher law in such desperate times?

Apart from staging a positivism versus morality debate, Blindness further probes Agamben’s contradictions. In particular, it suggests that his oblique celebration of modernity fails to account for what the camp truly represents. As was discussed with regards to The Road, Agamben’s fixation with the potential for the transformation of the exceptional – the sublime terror of law – to the normal leads to an obsession. This is realized in his work’s fetishism of death. Agamben sees the law as a supremely destructive force that destroys any sense of “subjective right and juridical protection.” ¹⁰⁷ His verdict that the resources of modern politics are, at best, impotent in challenging the growing indistinction of life sees his work embracing “the diabolical romance … of Gothic sensationalist jurisprudence.” ¹⁰⁸ However, has Agamben simply got it wrong? Has his Gothicism perhaps blinded him to the true nature of the paradigm he describes? As Agamben warns, the camp is always ready to assume new forms, so “we must learn to recognise [it] in all its metamorphoses.” ¹⁰⁹ Blindness suggests that the camp is not so much about extermination but, rather, exploitation. Therefore, isn’t the camp just our world?

Blindness, whilst dealing in despair, is not about death and sensationalizing the exception itself with figures that pull at the heart strings. Rather, it depicts a situation where the camp has shifted into a site that, somewhat cynically, values human worth. This is not to be confused with a cock-eyed, idealistic, rights-based perspective, but a society where the ultimate maxim appears to be: Why exterminate someone if they are useful in some way. Thus, the camp becomes a reflection of the all-pervasive exploitative nature of modern capitalist society. Moreover, there is no singling out of one minority group as the target, but exploitation that recognizes other signifiers of difference, in this particular case, gender. For the worth of an individual may be measured in terms of one’s material possessions, but more importantly, what sexual acts one may be forced to perform. It is this scene of transgression or, more specifically, sexual exploitation that left many critics and viewers uncomfortable because of its confronting nature – Blindness does not hold back.

The principal rape scene depicts the submission of the eye doctor’s wife and other women in her ward to the sex acts of their masters. The King feels up all the “merchandise” and takes the eye doctor’s wife for himself. However, the focus is not on any one victim. Rather, the rape takes place almost in darkness and is comprised of a series of mostly elliptical shots. The disturbing mood of the scene is drawn from the dialogue, the misogyny and the abuse of power the viewer knows is happening behind the pitch black picture. These devices are drawn out by two contrasting points worthy of note. First, the role of the King’s main accomplice, an accountant who was actually blind at birth and wound up in the quarantine by mistake, is striking. The eye doctor suggests that he, of all people, should exhibit human decency and a degree of empathy to the plight of those in the camp; instead, he is complicit in the organization of the gang rape. He clouds his act of transgression in a veneer of gallantry, cloaking his sexual interaction as an act of appreciation. He calls them “ladies” and, throughout the rape scene, while other women are screaming, you hear the accountant politely asking, “May I touch your nipples please?” ¹¹⁰ He does what he needs to do to rationalize his inhuman behavior. Second, another of Ward 3’s “bad men” is unhappy with his woman’s performance, demanding more of this “dead fish.” The act of violence escalates, as the viewer hears the repeated thud of skull against bed post. It is soon revealed that this woman has been killed. Exploitation has been exceeded in this exceptional case and turned into something more sinister.

As Young identifies, what normally follows this moral transgression is the act of revenge or retribution on the victim’s behalf. ¹¹¹ Invoking the lex talionis, “the notion that once rape takes place, the world is out of kilter until vengeance is carried out by the victim,” ¹¹² it is expected that the victim will become as violent as her attackers. The eye doctor’s wife seeks retribution on behalf of her fellow women, sneaking up on the King (who is receiving oral sex from a woman from another ward), fatally stabbing him in the neck with a pair of scissors. Does this act of punishment or legitimized violence of vengeance return the camp to its equilibrium, or does it simply remove any semblance of morality from the equation of any already devolved human interaction? Put bluntly, does morality or a higher law still exist?

Ultimately, Blindness critiques the intrinsic link Agamben makes between the camp and death. It recasts the paradigm he so twistedly pays homage to throughout his work as a centre of societal and human exploitation, clearly echoing Marx’s critique of capital. Despite Agamben neglecting what appears to be the true functionality of the camp, is this new configuration of the exception any less deserving of condemnation because humans are no longer being rounded up into ovens? The focal point may have shifted, but no semblance of morality remains. Not unlike The Road, Blindness concludes on an optimistic tone, through a scenario that would seem to equate to “the age old promise of a sudden epiphany, the emergence of the solution when it seems at its most remote.” ¹¹³ This is achieved when patient zero miraculously regains his sight, giving hope to the others. The obvious question to be answered loomed: had humanity learnt its lesson from the dark depths to which they had succumbed? The narrator declares, “They would see again. This time, they would really see!” ¹¹⁴

VI. Conclusion

In essence, the common thread of this article, the main character if you like, has been the camp. Utilized by Agamben as an institutional metaphor, it marked the transformation by which “the state of exception … is realized normally.” ¹¹⁵ For him, the camp has moved beyond the aberration that the Nazis occupy in our history, instead signalling “the decisive political space of modernity itself,” ¹¹⁶ a fixture that is truly endemic to our political system. As has been argued throughout this article, this oblique celebration provides a Gothic edge to Agamben’s work, that has at its core a fascination with the in-between and the indeterminate and a teleology of death. Yet, it is Agamben who accuses Schmitt of being “unwittingly Kafkaesque.” ¹¹⁷ Perhaps, as Moran argues, it is Agamben who plays that card better than anyone else, by realizing in his corpus of work a nightmare vision of humanity and modernity in general. ¹¹⁸ However, the man himself does not acknowledge this, responding to that charge in a 2004 interview:

I’ve often been reproached for (or at least attributed with) this pessimism that I am perhaps unaware of. But I don’t see it like that. There is a phrase from Marx that I like a lot: “the desperate situation of society in which I live fills me with hope.” I share this vision: hope is given to the hopeless. ¹¹⁹

However difficult a pill this is for some to swallow, all of the legal fictions that I have used to operationalize Agamben’s work are imbued with this message of salvaging hope in desperate situations. Whether in a post apocalyptic America, a South Africa unreconciled with its alien refugees or a society that learns the hard way the depths of human exploitation, all suggest that it is possible to survive the camp. The figures of the Muselmann and homo sacer, so central to Agamben’s work, are incarnated on screen. However, these pieces of pop culture are elevated beyond the level of analogy, speaking to the heart of Agamben’s thought by exposing his silences and contradictions. Despite its setting, The Road is the most optimistic of all the films, as in the clutches of despair, in a world of Muselmann, survival is possible. Moreover, District 9 strikes a sentimental chord, as its main protagonist, the hybrid, survives the shady in-between world homo sacer inhabits. Blindness demonstrates that Agamben misinterprets the functionality of the camp altogether – it is not so much a site of extermination, but rather exploitation – reflecting modern day capitalist society.

Undoubtedly, Giorgio Agamben has reached the level of cult status, with his seminal work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life attaining the aura of a true classic. Love him or loathe him, the paradigm Agamben has formulated is at the same time sensational, diabolical and disturbing. There probably will not be any groupies rejoicing in Agamben’s conclusions any time soon, but his premise is provocative and absorbing. This author began this journey with a reverence for Agamben’s bold work and his ability to tell it like it is. The Road, District 9 and Blindness have provided the prism for a more balanced and coherent response. These films have played out a compelling dialogue about this juggernaut’s thoughts, within the broader framework of the trajectory of our moral and political standards. Humanity is unquestionably flawed, in fact, at times, severely deficient. The camp, its functionality and purpose pushed aside, is a fixture too easily realized in our modern day world. If the exception has truly become the rule, the very fundamentals of our civilization have been corrupted when we needed them the most. One of humankind’s greatest achievements is our moral sensitivity and we should never lose sight of that, no matter how dark the times. Despite the chinks in Agamben’s philosophical armoury developed throughout this article, the three films ultimately reflect the man himself: sometimes all you’ve got is hope.