“The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all the more useful, to investigate carefully how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human being could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible).”

- Giorgio Agamben, What is a Camp?

It is only when something is at its end, when it comes to an end, that we can grasp conceptually, not only its beginning but its significance. The “end” does not only or simply mean a terminus, the place where something comes to a halt – “the end of the line” – but the place of its fulfilment or completion. The end does not only gesture towards what comes after – the post-modern so to speak – but towards its beginning. The end of modernity, in this sense, cannot be thought without conceptualizing its beginning. The end of modernity poses the problem of its origin. In the end, the origin does not belong to the distant past but becomes present and perhaps for the first time. Only when something is at its end, when its limit is reached, can we conceive the condition of its possibility. It is this conceptualization of the “end” that is the condition of true critique. To conceptualize the end of modernity is a condition of its critique, of bringing it to an end.

What then is the end of modernity? And where can we locate it? Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is a provocative attempt to answer these questions. The most extreme possibility of the modern, he argues, is to be located in the emergence of what he terms the “biopolitical paradigm” of the camp: “a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life.” The camp (the concentration camp and the refugee camp) is not an exception to the liberal order with its discourse on human rights, democracy, and freedom, but a fatal manifestation of the logic of its political and ontological foundation. It is this logic that Homo Sacer conceptualizes and that we will investigate in this seminar.