The later incarnations of the nomos of the camp proposed by Agamben have done nothing but “cultivate” all the imaginable aspects with which the bare life can manifest itself. But here perhaps it is convenient not to focus on the nomos or topos of the issue but on one of the figures that populate the current political scenario: the refugee. This figure, who according to Arendt and Agamben is the “only imaginable [...] of the people in our day,”¹ can also be seen as the one that most strongly embodies alterity in today’s world, a person who has been left outside the protection of any nation-state and, consequently, has been stripped of any trace of civil rights.

The refugee crisis that has brought waves of thousands of people across the Mediterranean to the European continent since the beginning of the Syrian civil war (2011-2024) marks a new peak in the situation of forcibly displaced people. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people seeking asylum worldwide is estimated to have reach 60 million by the end of 2014, the highest figure recorded since the World War II. This massive migration is a direct result of the disastrous colonial policies that the European powers forced on the Middle East and Africa since the early 19th century and which have led to a permanent state of civil war in many of these territories. (7.12). 

The figure of the refugee, of the stateless or territory-less individual, is that of alterity in its rawest form, the manifestation of all that has been relegated from the polis and its representations, political or otherwise. It is the representation of a theological-political limbo similar to that to which the Jews of the ghetto of Rome were subjected and from which they could only escape through baptism (7.8), or the legal limbo to which a stateless person is subjected until being repatriated by his old nation or naturalized by a new one. This polarity between repatriation and naturalization tests the very limits of the nation-state. According to Agamben the fact

that there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure man in himself [zoē] is evident at least in the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always considered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A permanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state.²

From this it follows that the refugee is one of the clearest manifestations of the failure and collapse of the concept of the nation-state. But here it is important to bear in mind that the refugee not only lives in a legal and physical threshold (the absence of civil status and his internment in all sorts of camps), it is, in fact, that very threshold because his or her mere presence, according to Agamben, breaks the identity between man and citizen (0.19), between zoē and bios (0.10), between birth and nationality, and in doing so throws the modern notion of sovereignty into crisis. This rupture reveals another crucial matter: namely, that if a large portion of humanity can no longer be represented within the nation-state, most of us will end up becoming, slowly and irrevocably, the other, the pure alterity proposed by Agamben’s concept of bare life. This transformation is taking place in most unexpected ways, as we will see in the last chapter.

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1. Agamben, “We Refugees”. Available at: https://eutopiainstitute.org/2020/08/giorgio-agamben-we-refugees/  ↩︎
2. Ibíd. ↩︎