#barelife

“ law in general materializes in Agamben’s discussion of incarceration. Contra Foucault, Agamben excludes the prison from the state of exception, and thus the production of bare life, because it forms a part of penal law and not martial law (the state of exception) and is therefore legally within “the normal order.”The camp, on the other hand, represents the absolute space of exception, which is “topologically different from a simple space of confinement” (Homo Sacer, 20).38 But as Angela Davis and Colin Dayan, among others, have shown, the violent practices in U.S. prisons neither deviate significantly from Agamben’s description of bare life vis-à-vis the suspension of law nor are mere spaces of detention.39 Dayan explicitly addresses the continuities between slavery, imprisonment, and the torture in the Abu Ghraib prison through an excavation of the various interpretations of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, especially the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” which has been evacuated of its meaning by locating its significance solely in relation to the intent of the perpetrator.40″